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Adam Back
Personal blog · cypherspace.orgsecurityhistory
Adam Back writes cypherspace, a personal blog at cypherspace.org about security and history. Since 2010, 50 different Hacker News readers have linked it 54 times, most often “NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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54mentions?
50HN people?
2010–2026first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)13 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2013-04-04
- /rsa/8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2012-12-30
- /adam/uk-shirt.html5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-07-14
- /rsa/spook.html4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-12-05
- Adam Back's Iconic Perl RSA Munitions T-Shirt: A Slice of Cypherpunk History4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-09-27
- /adam/rsa/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-09-18
- The quest for the most diminutive munitions program2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-01-26
- /adam/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-05-25
- /adam/timeline/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-29
- /adam/shirt/uk-shirt.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-08-02
What Hacker News says?
Oh, I definitely wore my Perl RSA "This shirt is a munition" T-shirt. http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/ DeCSS was also available in DNS txt records for a while circa 2000. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6283084
Comment linking /adam/shirt/
on “How I bypassed Amazon's Kindle web DRM”Submitted NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002) as a story · 564 points
HN discussionWould be cool to plug M-x spook ( http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/spook.html ) into text to speech and play it for good old Alexa more or less not stop...
Comment linking /rsa/spook.html
on “Amazon Echo”Submitted NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes as a story · 442 points
HN discussionThis page is still up and running and I always thought this hack was pretty awesome: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/rsa/
Comment linking /adam/rsa/
on “21 years after the request OpenPGP support gets added to Thunderbird”Submitted NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes as a story · 281 points
HN discussionI'm reminded of the US RSA export fiasco of the 90s. I unfortunately can't find the cool email signature I learned about the whole thing from, but its home on the internet now seems to be http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/ . Perhaps someone should come up with a small <5-line snippet that explains some portion of how to defeat Widevine, and then everyone in Israel should, I don't know, configure every mail server they…
Comment linking /rsa/
on “DRM’s Dead Canary: How We Lost the Web, What We Learned, and What to Do Next”Submitted NSA’s Backdoor Key as a story · 15 points
HN discussionPicture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munitions_T-shirt_(f... The code: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/design/
Comment linking /adam/shirt/design/
on “A brief history of the U.S. trying to add backdoors into encrypted data (2016)”Submitted Adam Back's Iconic Perl RSA Munitions T-Shirt: A Slice of Cypherpunk History as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHe knew he'd be targeted (and he was), legal or not. It's probably why whoever wrote Bitcoin used a nom de chiffere. http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/timeline/
Comment linking /adam/timeline/
on “OpenBazaar 2.0, powered by IPFS”Submitted The quest for the most diminutive munitions program as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI know this is paranoid, but I keep coming back to this post that hit HN a few days ago: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html When you combine that with the beam splitter logo, things get a bit scary.
Comment linking /adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
on “PRISM fears give private search engine DuckDuckGo its best week ever”Submitted An Eternity Service Built on Usenet News (1997) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThey could always print it on a T-Shirt, sing it (70's folk protest song style), or print it out in book form, then mail it overseas to be OCR'ed. Those strategies worked for RSA. Anyone have a link to the RSA song? Here's a link to the T-Shirt design: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/
Comment linking /adam/shirt/
on “Where has the passive radar code gone?”Submitted The quest for the most diminutive munitions program as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf they can have a backdoor in Lotus Notes, what else can't they have a backdoor into? Do a search for "ibm lotus backdoor" or start from http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
Comment linking /adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
on “Evidence points to another leaker at the NSA”Submitted The quest for the most diminutive munitions program as a story · 1 points
HN discussionEmacs' M-x spook command will paste some suitable words into the current buffer: Croatian nuclear FBI colonel plutonium Ortega Waco, Texas Panama CIA DES jihad fissionable quiche terrorist World Trade Center assassination DES NORAD Delta Force Waco, Texas SDI explosion Serbian Panama Uzi Ft. Meade SEAL Team 6 Honduras PLO NSA terrorist Ft. Meade strategic supercomputer $400 million in gold bullion quiche Honduras BA…
Comment linking /rsa/spook.html
on “'Everyone in US under virtual surveillance' - NSA whistleblower”Maybe custom response header would be the ideal place to insert output from something like Emacs spook: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/spook.html
Comment linking /adam/shirt/spook.html
on “Next dream job can be in an HTTP header”Also take the "can't see your messages" statement with a grain of salt. Like the famous Lotus Notes backdoor [1] they might have given the government an easy(ier) way to decrypt those messages. The backdoor in Lotus Notes (differential cryptography) wasn't a secret. It was public information. Ray Ozzie used it as a way to circumvent US encryption export laws. Today companies have to be more discrete. [1] http://www.…
Comment linking /adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
on “Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices”Well, I would think so as well, but we have at least some anecdata (N=1) in the other direction [0]: > In doing this I discovered that the NSA public key had an organizational name of "MiniTruth", and a common name of "Big Brother". Specifically what I saw in my debugger late one night, which was spooky for a short moment was: O=MiniTruth CN=Big Brother [0]: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
Comment linking /adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
on “_NSAKEY”Reminds me of when someone saw that the NSA's public key ( http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html ) to be included in Lotus Notes had an organizational name of "MiniTruth", and a common name of "Big Brother". Moloch isn't the good guy in Howl. Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the p…
Comment linking /adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
on “AOL Moloch: open-source, large scale, packet-capturing, indexing database system”Secure end to end encryption doesn't mean government agencies can't snoop on the coms. First of all, the CIA owns own one of the largest, if not the largest supercomputer. Also, the encryption could be using CIA's own root key. Example: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
Comment linking /adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
on “Apple's iMessage encryption trips up feds' surveillance”Here's a page with the relevant images: http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/
Comment linking /rsa/
on “PGP released its source code as a book to get around US export law”There were websites where people could transfer a short program from inside the US to outside the US, and then sign a petition to say they had done so. ( http://online.offshore.com.ai/arms-trafficker/ ) ( http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/ )
Comment linking /rsa/
on “Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991”Well, there is another angle here from the Defense sector. Lotus Notes had a big ole backdoor in it: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html The same problems keep being solved, and then nation-states get involved, and eventually the technology shifts to something else because the game has played out as far as it can in terms of those nation-states. It is not really so much as a steady march of tech…
Comment linking /adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
on “Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch”More illegal crypto T-Shirts: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/uk-shirt.html This was one of my favorite shirts, but it finally gave up the ghost a few years ago.
Comment linking /adam/uk-shirt.html
on “Intel In Bed with NSA?”There was the RSA t-shirt which supposedly could be classified as a munition because the source code on the shirt would provide a high enough level of encryption: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/uk-shirt.html PGP released a really nicely bound version of their source code typeset in an OCR font that they exported because a book would theoretically fall under the First Amendment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr…
Comment linking /adam/shirt/uk-shirt.html
on “The Internet Is Being Protected By Two Guys Named Steve”Interestingly, Adam Back has a cache of a Satoshi Nakamoto bio, and related stuff on his home page, advertising a conspicuous interest. http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/ As long as we're speculating wildly, I have a theory... (Bear with me now) It is possible, if not probable, that Ted Nelson is himself Satoshi and was only trying to throw everyone off the trail (or it's Adam Back, I can't be sure, but it's definitel…
Comment linking /adam/
on “BitMessage - Bitcoin Inspired Peer to Peer Encrypted Messaging”
