So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded.
Ha ha ha. Yes, that was literally my very short pitch to Steven about Tim Jenkin's story!
The actual DM: "I think this has the makings of a hell of a story: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o... If you want I can connect you with Tim Jenkin. One time pads! 8-bit computers! Flights attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!"
No, I did not. I threw quite a lot of compute power at it using bkcrack (CPU) and hashcat (GPU) but never found out what it was. It was definitely not TIMBOBIMBO, sadly!
In which case it’s definitely a 16 bit computer; it was just a cheap 8086 (the cheapness achieved through the memory bus), and it was part of the start of the 16 bit era. From the _user’s_ point of view it was basically a 16 bit computer.
This was a great read, thank you for inspiring it! I also did not realize it was you who led the petition for the UK to apologize to Turing, what an achievement.
You're quoted at the end as saying, "The code itself is a historical document". That sort of electrified me as I began thinking about what other historical code is out there in need of preservation. I'm fascinated with stuff like this, toolkits meant to be used in the field with little room for incremental development. Tracking this kind of stuff down seems like a fun hobby.
The jewish people have a 2000 year old history and presence in the region, if that's consider colonialism then might as well just declare earth a settler-colonialist project and get it over with.
That's a rather odd argument, don't you think? Romans have been in my country even before that, Greeks have been in present-day Turkey, Egypt, etc. Normans have invaded and colonised England 1000 years ago. Should the corollary be that these peoples are somehow entitled to expel the current dwellers of those lands because of some sort of historical right?
So did the Italians, and I'm not sure if I would like Meloni ruling either Madrid or Barcelona... or the whole Mediterranean Europe and a chunk of Asia.
user fldsk means to say 6000 year history, of course. But I'm willing to come down on that, since Genesis is a bit of a chronological hand-wave.
I'm relying on whatever Synod counted the ages of people in the talks and arrived at a creation date of 4004 BC, of course
If we grant that Italy is Rome, which is a separate conversation, then we're still left with Roman conquest, which we don't consider legitimate today, and a long period of documented Jewish inhabitation.
I don't take a position on the legitimacy or otherwise of Israel, because there are already plenty of indignant westerners with insufficient information. But I will say: that written history is weighty evidence.
It's perfectly valid. The word you're looking for is "reliable".
If we were discussing the virgin birth, I wouldn't put any stock in the Bible. The gospels were written after the fact, by people who weren't there and had a strong motivation to make shit up. We conclude that it is _unreliable_ on the topic of the Virgin birth. (It's a reliable source on the topic of Christian beliefs in Nicaea in 300AD, however.)
But the Talmud describes Jews living in Judea at _great length_, which, I'll remind you, implies many hours spent reciting oral history or copying text by hand. It's supported by the existence of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The conspiracy that you suppose is of a flat-earth scale.
I won't discuss the middle east any further. Cunningham's Law got me. if you do want to learn more, try books.
There's a saying "God doesn't exist but he gave us the land" which refers to the hypocrisy behind Zionism's biblical claims to the land of Palestine given that its founding fathers were all atheists.
I remember the activist campaigns and the movie Cry Freedom about Steve Biko, another SA activist, had a significant impact on my worldview growing up. As revolutions and coups go it was clearly a success. I'd wonder how much of a role their electronic opsec played in it.
I think it was the ANC and its activists organizing the coalition of other countries to sanction and isolate the government that ultimately caused it to yield power, which is the necessary condition for any revolution- it requires allies to be in place to support it for when it succeeds. On the ground, you only really need a few dozen people to seize some buildings and bank accounts, it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult. The opsec for that ground force just has to get most of them to their X day, where they're going to take casulties anyway.
In the case of SA, it seemed like a matter of convincing other countries to do nothing, by persuading the world the govt were just racist villains, and convincing the National Party in government that nobody would intervene to save them if there were a civil revolt. That part was organized in plain view. Opsec is interesting and mysterious, but often less important than the stories we tell about it afterwards.
I remember traveling to the US from South Africa when I was 14 in 1990 and my dad renting Cry Freedom on VHS so we could watch it, since it was banned in South Africa. The long roll of peoples' names and how they died "accidentally" or "falling from window" in prison at the end was haunting and the experience of watching it has stayed vividly with me ever since.
It's hard to stress how normal _anything_ can seem when you grow up with it. I often wonder whether, if we'd stayed (we moved to the US permanently in 1992) and if apartheid had continued, whether I'd have woken up to the reality of what was going on and become more politically active in my college years. I have no confidence my sense of right and wrong would have been strong enough to escape the stifling blanket feeling of "Well, yes, it's not right, but let's not go tooooo crazy" that pervaded political feeling in those days.
Thanks for doing this, JGC. (And now that I think of it, you might enjoy the historical spelunking in the "Georg Nees" entries on my blog at zellyn.com. Code archeology is tremendously satisfying, and getting an email from one of his sons out of the blue was a delight!)
I watched the movie shortly before going to Lesotho (the enclave country Donald Woods and his family escaped to) and crossing the border into "Transkei" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantustan) at the same bridge he entered Lesotho.
To be honest, I was prepared to see all white South Africans as evil oppressors, and it took me a while to see that there was a spectrum -- many of whom I met -- from oppressors to opportunists to passive enablers to freedom/justice fighters.
One of my distant relatives in South Africa was decidedly racist, but mourned how his son had gone from playing with the children of black farmworkers to, after a stint in the South African Defence Forces, being a vicious white supremacist.
> it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult.
That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy, and patted themselves on the based on their apparent competence in building one.
> That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy
Erm.... Whut? China was (and is) _the_ example of a country held together by a civil bureaucracy. Ditto for Russia.
the view of coups as one faction replacing another is quite a rabbit hole, but it's a political analysis that has some experimental and predictive power.
there has to be guarantor or benefactor on the other side of it. in this view, leaders are figureheads accountable to the small essential coalition who keeps them there. the idea of secret cabals orchestrating these things is usually backwards, where a revolutionary (or politician) is really just an entrepreneurial dealmaker between elite factions.
Interesting how the PKZIP password-protected compressed file is now easily decrypted in <5 minutes, but the original one-time pad is still as mathematically robust as ever.
We could have had a very different history if they'd used DES or RC2 for encryption!
One time pads used properly are theoretically perfectly unbreakable. The problem is making sure no one ever uses the same 'pad'/keystream twice, that your pad generation is actually random, and that the pads never fall into the hands of your adversaries. (or if they do you've been diligent about completely destroying the used pads and the other end of your communications doesn't use the captured set of pads) They're just not very good at anything other than point to point secret passing and require a real world connection to distribute.
So much of symmetric key cryptography is just trying to find creative ways of creating and recreating 'one time pads' so we can distribute the key material instead of the pads themselves.
The one thing that stood out to me with the original blog post and a quick glance at the code was that it appeared as if the pad was certainly not actually random.
Could anyone that has actually understood it a bit more confirm or reject this?
Edit: It seems that the random generation can be found starting here https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/d6a1a1d694b22e6a115b...
With three methods, one (RAND2) seems to use the basic interpreter rng more or less directly and the other two seem to be fairly simple prngs seeded from the basic interpreter's rng.
I don't actually know what the state of basic interpreter rngs was in the early '80s but I would be fairly surprised if they're anything that is secure.
At the time PRNG was probably good enough. I wouldn't want to go up against the NSA today using the same entropy source but against South Africa decades ago it was probably good enough. Even knowing what PRNG source the original noise came from it'd take a hell of a lot of guess and check with cribs to come close to guessing the seed for the PRNG. That would be my first crack at breaking a OTP I knew was generated with a particular PRNG at least as a casual student of the craft. Generate huge amount of noise for the possible seeds and see if any names like "Mandela" or other known leaders suddenly pops out of intercepted messages starting at different points in the noise stream (and see if the rest of the message makes any sense when that does happen).
If the PRNG is good enough then shipping floppies full of PRNG output is very much unnecessary. Simply send the seeds used to initialize the PRNG thereby fitting many (~180k of them on a 720kb floppy) seeds on one floppy and save your couriers a lot of risk.
The problem is that, if you do this, you're not using a one time pad anymore. You're using a stream cipher.
The difference is in the nature of the security guarantees. Almost every cryptographic primitive is "computationally secure", which means the best-known attack is to try every key, and that would take beyond the heat death of the universe. One-time pads have "information-theoretical security", which is that even if you try every possible key, you don't learn the contents of the message, because every possible message has a corresponding decryption key that will produce it from the ciphertext you are trying to break.
The reason why this is the case is because the size of the message space is equal to the size of the key space. In every other cryptosystem, you have a key space that is much smaller than the message space - say, 256 bit AES keys, or 512 bit SHA-2 hashes, for messages that can have many billions of bits in them. It's unlikely for something that wasn't the key to happen to decrypt to a valid-looking message under this scenario. But with a one-time pad, you are actually brute-forcing the message space by brute-forcing the key space. Even if you knew the hash of the plaintext, it wouldn't help. You'd just be brute-forcing whatever hash you used to find collisions.
This property goes away if you start repeating key stream bits by any deterministic process. Hence why just sending a PRNG seed is a bad one-time pad. This is also the difference between /dev/random and /dev/urandom. Linux generates randomness from a PRNG, but it's seeded by unpredictable hardware events and other sources of entropy, and there's a bunch of logic to estimate how much entropy is available. /dev/random specifically blocks until that estimate is positive, so that one-time pads and the like don't repeat bits. (In fact, this is basically the only time you should be using /dev/random! /dev/urandom is perfectly acceptable for all other cryptographic use cases!)
If you generate your OTP beforehand with a PRNG, it's also a stream cipher with extra steps. The real key space is the PRNG seed space, not the size of the key you shipped. Expanding a small key into a big one doesn't make it an OTP - an OTP needs to be actually random.
The Linux random devices no longer work the way you describe, either. random blocks until there's enough entropy to consider the PRNG output fully random, then never blocks. urandom simply never blocks, even if there's absolutely no entropy yet and every copy of your device produces the same random stream.
The card deck can be the key and the encryption mechanism too with Solitare. It's not secure for longer messages but it should be sufficient for short messages. It's a delicate method though because if you mess up it can be difficult to impossible to recover the proper state of the deck.
You can already fit huge amounts of text onto a single floppy. Uncompressed it's around 1.4 million characters.
That is a method though and it's basically what stream ciphers are doing, translating a key into a random stream that's then applies to the plaintext. One benefit of the true OTP though is you don't have to transfer the software and ensure it's generating the same key stream on both ends.
> Could anyone that has actually understood it a bit more confirm or reject this?
In BASIC, the word "RANDOMIZE" sets the seed for the RND function, and you'll find it's initially dependant on time (including the typing speed of the user):
It then is reinitialised periodically by mixing in run time (which is highly variable due to microprocessor limitations) and checksums of previous parts of the stream:
The RAND[123] appears to be Bennett Fox's Algorithm 647, which was designed for simulation purposes (statistical randomness), and is based on Lewis-Goodman-Miller's construction from 1969, so it had a great deal of scrutiny.
I think this would have been state of the art in the late 1980s.
Traditionally, encode meant to use one word/symbol to represent another, while encipher meant to transform one (usually mathematically) into another.
For example, "Tora, Tora, Tora" was a code that had no intrinsic meaning, but was the signal to proceed with the Pearl Harbor attack. No way to reverse that.
Meanwhile, "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG" can be transformed with a Caesar cipher to "QEB NRFZH YOLTK CLU GRJMP LSBO QEB IXWV ALD". It can easily be reversed.
Funny but also thought-provoking! When did the verb "encipher" give way to "encrypt," and why? I might enjoy reading a well-researched piece on that subject.
So basically encipher was never used in the context of the web. And the web is what made encrypt popular separate from encipher. It does look like maybe encipher was possibly going to take off but encrypt stepped on its head.
Interestingly, the basis of web encryption does use the term "encipherment" -- the `KeyUsage` field of X.509 certificates has `keyEncipherment` and `dataEncipherment` flags.
An interesting data point is that Kahn's The codebreakers, from 1967, uses "encipher" everywhere except for various US goverment agency quotes, which use "encrypt."
I remember reading in Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography that in some cultures "encrypt" refers to the process of entombing bodies for burial and that "encipher" did not have that baggage.
Similar connotation to "decrypt" which would be exhumation.
For example in Spanish, there's been always a fight between using "cifrar" instead of "encriptar". I like "cifrar" a bit more, but it's true that we've always had the prefix "cripto-" for hidden or mysterious things. Anyway, the difference is "cifra" is the Latin root for "digit", and "kryptos" is the Greek root for "hidden".
And then encrypted? Not sure, the known structure of tar (or zip) can help with decryption.
[edit] ...
This is addressed in the article. In fact the zip contained a zip and this helped!
> He realized the zip file contained another zip file, and that since all he needed was the right original text for a specific part of the scrambled text, his best chance was using the first file name mentioned in the zip within the zip.
The tech side of this is really cool but I'd also like to read more about the non-tech stuff. I wonder if the sympathetic Dutch flight attendant is still alive or the guys who actually carried the Trojan horse books to Mandela.
about the “London Recruits” in the 70s and 80s who smuggled books, leaflets, etc into apartheid SA on behalf of the ANC, doing so in such secrecy they didn’t know each others identity until 29 years after the apartheid regime fell.
Joy Leman, one of the recruits, was my late father-in-law’s colleague.
She is alive and hearing her recollections is super cool. If you follow the link to the short documentary I mentioned in the column you will see her then and now.
That is a hopelessly optimistic statement. Wait until the Israelis write the history, they will have your grandchildren worshipping at their feet for surviving the Hamas onslaught.
You’re presupposing they actually survive the current events and come out victorious in order to “write history”. I’m not sure of that at all if things kick off in earnest there.
All it would take is for the US to stop giving them weapons. That's literally it.
Their military, the IDF, is in extremely poor state. This isn't the same military that made history in the six day war. Under the same sort of conditions today the IDF would have their asses handed to them.
When I say "extremely poor state" I am referring to their discipline, precision, and ability to move under fire. The current IDF operates more like the Russian army who are absolutely having their asses handed to them by a vastly inferior force. These are just my personal opinions from my own 27 years of military experience.
History is already written, this is the age of everyone recording and sharing things. There's no meaningful rewriting it.
They don't get to directly and intentionally kill and/or cause death, injury and illness to high hundreds of thousands of people very publicly and proudly, while writing "death to Arabs", "good Arab = dead Arab", "Nakba 2023", and other vile shit on the walls of their destroyed cities.
Easy to see this is not Israel+USA trying to eliminate Hamas, but some holy war to eliminate Palestinians as a whole, in the most underhanded way possible, as to not get blowback from the non-USA countries.
They'll destroy themselves, continuing doing this, provoking neighbors and inciting Palestinians for a massive revenge wave in the future. It doesn't matter when this happens, but Israel is done after this. They're not a superpower and USA backing under Trump, once he wins, will only serve to make their crimes more obvious, and self-destructive behavior more bold.
While writing "death to Arabs", "good Arab = dead Arab", "Nakba 2023", and other vile shit on the walls of their destroyed cities.
Can you provide incident details, please? I'm not doubting that stuff like this has happened, but specific (at least theoretically reliable) attestations are always helpful.
Just Iran alone is capable of defeating Israel if it wishes. Israel is only 8M people. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims living in Middle East. They aren’t united right now, but Israel, ironically, could unite them.
Not only does Iran not wish to destroy Israel, it is also unwilling to allow Hezbollah to successfully do so either. If it wanted to destroy Israel, Israel wouldn’t have any AD after the last strike.
You are delusional. Iran lost most of its deterrence, its proxies have been decimated and its ICBM capabilities, although not nothing haven't really managed to cause any significant damage and have shown that they lack sufficient accuracy.
Will the balance of power change a few decades from now? Maybe, who knows, but for now Iran is in a tough spot.
Uh-uh. The country which has just tested a nuke a couple of weeks ago and easily defeated the Iron Dome with its cheaper rocket stock is “totally decimated”. Sure buddy.
Enjoy your speculative theories. Lots of minor earthquakes don't have aftershocks, not to mention that Iran is one of the most seismically active countries in the world.
But please feel free to provide a trustworthy news source backing your claim.
What is a “trustworthy news source” these days. I saw the seismograph charts on Twitter. If you expect any “trustworthy” news in an environment where US MIC could get another trillion dollars in (borrowed) taxpayer money, I have a bridge I’d like to sell.
A news source that has confirmed with at least one seismology expert who has conducted a thorough (preferably peer reviewed) analysis showing that the charts are abnormal for an earthquake and are more inline with those of an explosion.
It seems to me like it's should be extremely easy to distinguish the two, there's more than enough earthquake data - and that fact that there is no such report says it all. For starters i'd even take an amateur analysis, but just some dude on twitter saying "there was seismic activity - must be a nuclear test" - nah.
And to sprinkle some "whataboutism" - just a reminder that most of the muslim world is an apartheid based on gender, and even men who don't suffer from it usually have way less human rights than arab israelis.
Nelson Mandela was on the US terrorist watch list until 2008.
Also the fact that so many in the US claim they remember he died in prison should say something about the media landscape.
From the European perspective I recall the concerts that were held to free him and then also the concert that was held after he was free. Simple Minds even made a famous song for it [1]. I don't know if those concets were a big show in the US, we only had a few TV stations and this was always a big thing.
As far as the European vs. US on the current situation - Euro countries are denying entry to journalists and doctors who are EU citizens just because they are speaking about the atrocities they have seen on the ground.
While Euro countries tend to be a tiny bit better than the US on the issues, they are generally much more restrictive in terms of protected speech.
For example, a former Greek finance minister was banned from the Schengen area (which includes Greece) by Germany, and not because the Greek economy is terrible.
You say "Euro countries" but let's be clear - it's only Germany.
> Protests and petitions are completely ineffective
They have been effective for millenia, even before democracy. The only thing ineffective now is people saying so. With all the evidence in the world that protest works, people bizarrely disarm themselves.
The targets of the protests take great pains to convince you of it; that should tell you something. They'll bluff until they lose.
I think this greatly depends on rhe type of protest, specifically whether it threatens the ruling class's ability to make a profit or to govern. In recent centuries liberal governments have gotten better at channeling discontent into forms of protest that are less consequential and more performative.
The world would be better off if all the defeatists followed their own advice and did something else with their lives, and left the political activities to a new generation with fight and committment and passion in them, people with leadership and agency.
If people are going to quit, then quit! Stop coming to the meeting and talking about you've quit!
I remember the massive protests against the Itaq war, and how they were effectively managed in the US. In NYC for example, the train service into the cott was interrupted, delaying many protesters.
Millions protested the Vietnam war. Many millions more protested the Iraq war. Millions upon millions have protested against Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people for an entire year. Now those same people also protest against Israel's invasion of Lebanon.
It has been ineffective. We've seen peaceful protestors smeared, and beaten and harassed by the police. We've seen counter terror laws abused to smear and arrest leaders. We've seen clampdowns on what protests are allowed to go ahead, and at least on the UK they are pushing and pushing for "tougher" laws to crush protests.
We're also entering our third generation of peaceful protest against climate change with no effects whatsoever.
Protest movements are only effective when they present a viable alternative to a more radical movement with a will to violence at their flank. We saw this clearly in the indian independence & american civil rights movements, and the fall of apartheid. Iraq war and climate movement are what you get without the credible threat of violence behind or beside your peaceful protests.
One important lesson of the iraq war protests now that we can see with hindsight: we were right, and we were justified in using much more radical tactics than we actually did. Those horrors lay partially at our coward feet so let's not allow ourselves to be convinced to repeat it with palestine.
What's incredible is not only the vast disinformation on other issues, but their ability to get into the heads of even the protestors and have them parroting obvious nonsense (if you think or look at the evidence). The right doesn't have to lift a finger, make an argument, face any political struggle, because their opponents all lay down their (peaceful, political) arms and quit on their own!
You are your opponents' dream. They couldn't write a better script for you - quitting and self-defeating, at the same time!
You've given up on peaceful protest and are embracing radicalized, violent protest, which is self-defeating. Again, your enemies love you - you're doing exactly what they hope.
No I'm pointing out that some peaceful protest movements are missing a key component of successful protest movements. You calling this self defeating doesn't make it so. hth
Peaceful protest does work and has worked; that's quitting on it. Adopting violence is self-defeating. What basis do you have for your theories, other than the passing fashion of despairing and quitting.
First, that is cherry-picking. We can find lots of examples of protest being effective. [0] And as I pointed out elsewhere, the right wing - while teaching their enemies to quit - embraces activism fully and has been incredibly successful.
It's only ineffective if your measure is immediate, complete victory. You don't win everything, you face defeat, and you quit? Then I agree, your protest is useless. You think you are somehow entitled to results? Yes, your protest is worthless, a pantomime. Protest isn't a ritual you perform - a raindance that you do - and then the gods respond with whatever it is you asked for. Protest compels results - it's embracing that you are the agent, you are the power, you make it happen; the enemy will give you nothing. If you don't understand that, if you aren't planning for it, if you have no strategy that will compel victory, then you're just entitled. (I think the latter is the problem with most of the protests now - they're doing raindances.)
And you go around telling people how hopeless it is? Have you ever accomplished anything? Has anyone who has ever said those things? People saying those things are the first problem - if they were on my team, I'd tell them to never say that again or simply don't come back.
Regardless, the protests have altered behavior, including by European leaders and by the most powerful person in the world (POTUS) and a candidate for that office (Harris). They may cost Harris the election by denying her enough votes in Michigan. And though nobody can say for sure, they arguably have altered the Israeli government's behavior, though the protestors will certainly and understandably say, not nearly enough.
Finally, to evaluate protest, compare it to the alternative: silence. Imagine horrors went on and society responded with silence. Imagine how demoralizing that would be to the ordinary person, who does have a moral conscience. Imagine how crushing to public morality if nobody said anything. Protestors are essential.
[0] There was some research, I think from 10-20 years ago, that showed that it succeeds at a high rate. But I don't recall what kind of protest, etc., so I hope someone else knows about it.
No - you'll need to motivate yourself, drive yourself. Otherwise, you can't participate anyway. That's why this defeatest rhetoric is spread - to keep you from even trying.
You haven't achieved more because you and all these other people quit. Of course you're not achieving anything.
I think mass refusal to work and spend money to the point where it starts inflicting enough pain on the government to take the desired action, would also significantly affect people who have nothing to do with the conflict, and it would have a greater effect on the poor than the rich as recessions tend to do.
I’m not sure if that would be an ethical course of action outside the country where the oppression is actually happening.
I mean bombing government buildings (which is what landed Mandela in prison) is definitely what most people would consider terrorism, or treason, or similar things. Now you can argue that Mandela's actions were justified because Apartheid was evil (and I agree that it was evil) but that's entirely different than arguing that he was just a poor victim of the racist SA government who was imprisoned because he wanted to end Apartheid.
The problem is that people feel morally uncomfortable arguing that it's ok to bomb government buildings (and similar actions) when your cause is just, because that raises all sorts of other moral quandaries that most people don't want to (or refuse to) face. So they pretend like Mandela and his party were perfect angels practicing non-violent resistance like MLK so they can avoid the moral quandaries raised by suggesting that terrorism is ok for a just cause.
The poster seems to be arguing that what we consider "terrorism" can be justified sometimes, but people have a need to whitewash their heroes rather than perform these justifications, so I think he is on your side
That's not how collateral damage works. The moral and legal responsibility is on the one dropping the bombs. As horrible as the US wars were, when we decided to kill Bin Laden, we sent a special operations team at night instead of flattening entire villages in Pakistan.
The indiscriminate killing that Israel is doing in Gaza and Lebanon is unprecedented since the second World War. Justifying it will normalize civilian casualties in future wars that with be disastrous for everyone.
Otherwise protected targets like hospitals lose their protected status if they're used as a base of military operations or for other similar purposes.
And the US didn't send a spec ops team to get Bin Laden because they were worried about the Geneva Conventions. They sent one because they wanted to make absolutely certain that they got their target (see Bin Laden's escape at Tora Bora in 2001 for an example of this) and because they were operating in Pakistan so showing up with a whole brigade or carpet bombing the compound wouldn't have gone over well with the Pakistani government. It already didn't go over well with just a surgical strike by spec ops, it would have been much worse if it was done by a larger show of force.
Okay, well then if government buildings house any members of the IDF or apartheid South Africa's military, then certainly they are also legitimate targets and it is not "terrorism" to destroy them with bombs? Or, conversely, the label must also be applied to IDF sorties?
>Okay, well then if government buildings house any members of the IDF or apartheid South Africa's military, then certainly they are also legitimate targets and it is not "terrorism" to destroy them with bombs?
Only if you ignore the distinctions between what was essentially a civil war fought by insurgents (like in Apartheid South Africa) and a war between two sovereign powers.
What percentage of Gaza, would you say, has to be leveled and carpet bombed before you would no longer characterize the Israelis as "limiting collateral damage"?
The decisions about which buildings to bomb are made by AI in order to select targets faster than humans can generate and review them manually. When you say making individual decisions, you mean through AI automation. This info comes from primary sources.
Showing restraint with atomic weapons is hardly a pass for lesser violence
> The problem is that people feel morally uncomfortable arguing that it's ok to bomb government buildings (and similar actions) when your cause is just, because that raises all sorts of other moral quandaries that most people don't want to (or refuse to) face
I mean, what you are describing is just war theory, and pretty much every government in the world subscribes to it.
>The problem is that people feel morally uncomfortable arguing that it's ok to bomb government buildings (and similar actions) when your cause is just
I don't think anybody has any moral quandaries about it when it is THEIR cause. Only when it is someone else's cause. Name one freedom fighter/revolutionary (even a perfectly non-violent one) who is not a 'terrorist' to the regime theyre trying to overthrow. I don't think anyone 'pretends' Mandela was a 'perfect angel' anymore than anyone pretends the founding fathers were beacons of unblemished moral rectitude.
>So they pretend like Mandela and his party were perfect angels practicing non-violent resistance like MLK
They were far from it, then again, the ANC campaign killed less than 100 people (excluding their sorta-civil-war with Zulu which isn't what people think about) and ultimately played no role in their victory.
As I said, I don't want this to become a flame war, and to that end would have preferred not to name the apartheid state in question.
But since you insist, nobody is just 'making it so by saying it' - indeed, saying it's not happening, in spite of the abundance of evidence, does not mean it's not!
I've Norwegian friends who have seen it first hand and we're aghast, but of course that's just a personal anecdote that just happens to agree with the ICJ, Human Rights Watch, and even Israel's own B’Tselem[0].
And no - I absolutely will not try to see "both sides" of apartheid. That's a really heinous thing to say.
> Because my personal operating definition is where you have one single country that has a different set of laws for different groups of people living in that country based on their ethnicity or skin colour.
“ Walk around Hebron, look at the streets. Streets where Arabs are no longer allowed to go on, only Jews.” - says
Amiram Levin, former head of the Israeli army’s Northern Command.
That’s within the internationally recognized boundaries of Israel. A separate issue is that Israel enjoys full control over 60% of the West Bank (Area C), which is ever expanding, and various degrees of defects control over the rest of it. Within the West Bank Israeli settlers have more freedom of movement and less restrictions on their day to day lives. So any characterization of the West Bank as an independent country or polity is completely missing the point.
Also, and I don't want to take a position here, my advocacy is for learning as much about the history and current state of affairs as possible in order to form an informed position, because not only is there fog of war going on right now, but there is a decades long conflict with lots of narratives and propaganda.
I say that to offer a counter narrative in pursuit of objectivity: if you ask an Israeli, there are many areas in the West Bank that are deemed "no go zones" for for Jews, but there are none that apply to non-Jews.
And as for the security and the "check points", those are applied equally to everyone who is there, regardless of citizenship or ethnicity or any other considerations. So even if it's a shitty situation, it's not targeted at any specific ethnic group.
So given that a) Israel does not govern Hebron and b) the security check points are not specific to any ethnic group, how is Hebron a data point that supports the "apartheid" charge?
Oh to the contrary - It would be the privileged who would be fine chasing some ideal in the name of justice while sacrificing all the unprivileged people who are actually suffering day to day.
While the situation in Israel differs from that in the West Bank, there are still significant elements of systemic discrimination against Arab citizens. The 2018 Nation-State Law is a prime example, as it:
1. Removedd Arabic as an offical language
2. Defined Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people exclusively
3. Declared Jewish settlements a national value
This law effectively codified the second-class status of Arab citizens, who make up about 20% of Israel's population. Additionally, Arab Israelis face ongoing disparities in areas such as education, employment, and housing. They are underrepresented in government and leadership positions.
While Arab citizens have legal rights on paper, the reality is a system of de facto segregation and institutional discrimination. The Nation-State Law and other policies create a two-tiered system that privileges Jewish citizens over Arab citizens, meeting key criteria of apartheid even within Israel proper.
Show me a country that doesn't have systemic discrimination of minority groups.
At the end of the day it's quite clear why jewish people want a jewish country, so yes, some discrimination around immigration will always be "built-in" into israel.
Now do I think israel is trending in the wrong direction? 100% yes. Do I wish for a two state solution and achieving as equal rights as possible while maintaining the status of israel as a jewish state? also 100% yes.
Do I think that calling israel proper an apartheid is just leading to people on both sides to become even more extreme? also yes.
Could a one state solution work sometime deep into the future? Perhaps, but the only way to achieve a stable and prosperous one state solution is by first having a two state solution with decades of peace, rebuilding of trust and a return to a more secular direction from both sides.
If you'd try to force a one state solution in the near/medium term you'd just end up with another divided failed state similar to lebanon (and probably much worse), the population would just be too divided on basically every subject, with militant/religious extremists on both sides making the keg especially explosive.
So ask yourself what is better for the people, trying to achieve some ideal for the sake of that ideal or actually trying to achieve something that could work? If this were an engineering project, would you do a full refactor with an extremely high chance of failure or go through an intermediate step that would bring a lot of the benefits with a much higher chance of success?
Your comment is complicated in and of itself, even without the enormous historical, legal-theoretic and political context surrounding that law and its enactment.
Constantly framing it as „complicated“ does not make it so. It was populated land, home to muslims, Christians, jews. One state for all. Until Zionism started colonising Palestine. And expelled Christians and muslims. First Zionists called their conferences „Colonising Palestine“. Nothing complicated.
Constantly claiming it is not complicated does not make it so. It was populated land - before Greeks, Romans, Christians and Muslims conquered it and ethnically cleansed the Jews from the area. There wasn't one state - in what is Israel/Palestine today, until 1948, was at least Jordan, Egypt, British Palestine and Syria.
Ahh, here we go again: „Thousands of years ago jewish people populated the area.“ And that’s how nations define their borders in modern days? Who said it was one state? I said it was populated land. People lived there for centuries. Mostly Christian and muslim arabs. Some jewish arabs. And then came a settler colonial ideology in 19th century, way before Holocaust, polish jews, created the idea for a jewish majority homeland in an area that was populated, so they expelled many people from their homes in Palestine. And that led to first Nakba. Today we witness the second Nakba. The most detailed documentation of a Genocide.
Btw: „God‘s chosen people, God‘s promised land, nation state law, jewish majority“. Sounds very racist to me. - If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, it is propably a duck?
Here we go again with genocide and nakba and settler colonialism.
Here's the thing about settler colonialism: it's when you're sent by an empire to settle on land you're not native to. Jews are native to Israel. Dig in the ground, you'll find coins and pots and tablets in Hebrew.
"Thousands of years ago" is not OK, but "for centuries" is. Sorry, you don't get to choose.
As for the second Nakba, October 7th really was as close to a second holocaust as the Jews experienced, one in a long line of pogroms. To do that and then hide behind and below women, children and innocent civilians you're using as human shields, that's beyond a war crime, it's a crime against humanity.
As for the idea of a Jewish majority homeland, go check the bible. It predates "polish jews in the 19th century" by a few centuries.
With barbarism you mean breaking of any rule of engagement? Shooting civilians, children, innocents? Or fighting for the right to rape detainees on TV? Or starving 2.5 mil civilians?
The whole world sees who the barbarians are. You keep believing in fairy tales in your echo chamber.
You need to understand as long as Citizens United stand it's practically impossible to make a change like this in the United States. People don't care enough and political issues are bought.
IMHO, you need to understand that your messaging is the only problem. For example, people on the right have made revolutionary changes - unthinkable changes as of 10 years ago.
I think it was the fishing trip with Mandela and then-Prime Minister F.W. de Klerk in 1990 that ended apartheid. Specifically when one of de Klerk's people got a hook in his hand, and a Mandela person cleaned and bandaged it. After that trip Apartheid was finally broken.
What actually ended apartheid was international pressure and the white government's fear of a civil war. Economically isolated and vastly outnumbered, the apartheid government would have been completely removed from the country and had their property seized.
My understanding is Mandela was a respected leader who was willing to play ball and facilitate a peaceful transition where the white leadership got to keep all their property. That's why there's still massive economic inequality in SA today. Not to say Mandela wasn't admirable or that he didn't suffer, but it was a conscious choice to avoid outright military conflict at the cost of preserving an implicit racial hierarchy.
While it certainly involved a lot of people doing the right thing, that peaceful transition was absolutely incredible and I really do think that's why non-South Africans look on Mandela so fondly. If you'd told me everything about the Apartheid right up until its collapse and then said "Ok, the ANC basically win, gain power, what do you think happens?", I'd struggle to think of any scenario where there wasn't incredible bloodshed or upheaval to the point of ruining lives beyond measure. There was so much bad blood. You'd assume that at least the people who were in charge, the people who ran the show, surely would've saw a grim end. Not even property seizures? . Somehow, Mandela led an effort that just rose above that. He probably prevented a lot of pain just by not giving into such things.
To me, the peaceful transition is the achievement. It is the amazing part of it.
There is a lot of inaccuracies here (not only in your post but I am replying to stuff above):
First, there was significant pressure on de Klerk from Western governments. Thatcher told him to release Mandela, for example. The reason she did not support sanctions is because they would likely harm South Africans for no reason...this was justified by later events. As pressure on de Klerk would have made it a lot harder to negotiate with Mandela freely.
Two, de Klerk became leader and his first action was to try to form a path to reconciliation. Mandela played his part by abandoning terrorism (I am not sure why this is disputed...this is what Mandela said about himself). de Klerk's position was, however, not particularly easy because whilst everyone acknowledged that the system had to change, it wasn't clear how to get to that point.
Three, the article implies all white South Africans were racist...this is not true. This assumption is not why apartheid happened either. de Klerk was not Botha. The US experience dominates the world, the assumption that everyone in the NP was racist is not accurate...let alone saying everyone of a certain race must have been racist.
Four, there has been massive upheaval. The economy of South Africa has collapsed, and the ANC did seize property under the auspices of BEE. Large companies were told they had to hand shares to ANC members or they would be shut down, these companies then took out loans to buy back their shares. The current President was a friend of Mandela, union leader, he was then gifted hundreds of millions in shares...that is how he became wealthy (and, if you can believe it, he is the "anti-corruption" guy).
Five, the reason there wasn't bloodshed because there was a transitional period. This was agreed by both parties, this is why Mandela wins plaudits for recognizing that NP had legitimate concerns that had to be taken into account to move forward. But...this still hasn't stopped the country collapsing.
Six, the argument that there must still be racism because of economic inequality is a uniquely US take. The ANC expropriated wealth en masse, the majority went to party insiders, and there has been almost no interest in serious economic policy-making because...the country is majority black, and the ANC are the black party. The reason people are poor is because there is no education and so they have no skills, crime is also out of control...this doesn't have anything to do with someone else not being poor (and btw, almost everyone in South Africa is now poor, the currency has collapsed, everything has collapsed, there is so much corruption that electricity cuts frequently...yes, those white people again though...this is why Malema is popular).
Seven, it was reasonable for de Klerk to be wary. What happened to Rhodesia? Everyone has this idea that everything would be fine, just trust Mandela...okay, there is a country next door where you saw whites being slaughtered en masse when Zanu-PF took power. The country has still been ruined, but that didn't happen at least.
He essentially preserved the economic/racial balance of apartheid, while he and the people around him became the new insiders. He started hanging out with the Clintons and giving diamonds to Naomi Campbell.
> To me, the peaceful transition is the achievement. It is the amazing part of it.
Apartheid was "peaceful" enough. The problem is the lack of "transition." The same people are still living in the shacks their parents lived in.
> that's why non-South Africans look on Mandela so fondly.
Non-South Africans had a lot of cognitive dissonance because they did business with South Africa and they didn't like what that said about themselves morally. The end of Apartheid gave them the license to continue that business guilt-free. It's like how sharecropping debt peonage to the same plantations that people were enslaved in and the leasing of convicts who had been sentenced to decade-long sentences for the crime of vagrancy let Americans feel better about how much they benefited from slavery.
Does poverty not also ruin lives? There's room for people to disagree about the specifics but the lack of widespread wealth redistribution has certainly killed a lot of people as well, it's just easier to ignore than a war.
South Africa does have wealth distribution policies in the form of requiring all companies that do business with the state or which need licences (like mines or telecoms) to have a minimum number of black ownership and black employees.
South Africa also has affirmative action.
In fact, there are more race based laws in South Africa currently than during Apartheid.
The current President also benefitted heavily from BEE as he was a close personal friend of Mandela. Made hundreds of millions.
If you say that you are going to take large amounts of other people's assets, there is no way to run that process and not have huge amounts of corruption.
The problem has been: very high crime, heavily mismanaged infrastructure (Eskom is collapsing due to corruption, ANC politicians were taking tons of money from contracts), no investment in education, and so a population with no skills. I am not sure what wealth redistribution fixes...it has been tried repeatedly. It is like people thinking that a $1m loan from your father turns you into a different person...no, most people will end up wasting that money too.
The existence of a viable ANC was arguably pretty important to the international pressure, though. Absent a viable opposition, you probably do not _want_ to exert _too_ much pressure on a rogue state, however nasty, because its only response is to either go full autarky, or collapse into complete chaos.
Take North Korea, say, another extremely nasty rogue nuclear-armed state. Even if there was a level of pressure that the international community could put on North Korea that would collapse it (it's already pretty far down the 'autarky' route), you can see that countries would be unwilling to go quite _that_ far, because there's no viable opposition and it would likely collapse in a very dangerous and ugly way.
> What actually ended apartheid was international pressure
There wasn't any international pressure. There was a withdrawal of the continual and embarrassing support from Britain and the US, the only people other than Israel who hadn't been overly troubled by Apartheid. First from Britain, because as bad as she was, Thatcher was nauseated by Apartheid, then from the US who would have had to actively intervene (as they are right now in a similar context) in order to preserve Apartheid. This was only 25 years after the US had ended its own legal Apartheid.
The US political class was largely indifferent to Apartheid (aside from periodic expressions of mild disapproval of both sides and condemnation of Communist-backed terrorism), so when they saw how the wind was blowing within SA ("fear of a civil war"), and that individual domestic politicians could be damaged or gain politically through their actions towards SA, the US supported the "coup" (as always) so they could keep doing business without interruption.
So I'd instead say popular pressure among citizens of the US and Britain against their own politicians, and the resulting withdrawal of Anglo-American support. Everything else but "international pressure" I agree with totally.
There's no similar context because the Apartheid system that existed in South Africa has no resemblance to today's Israel.
In particular:
- There's no racial segregation laws; an Arab-Israeli can travel anywhere a Jewish-Israeli can. In fact, Arabic is an officially recognized language by the state of Israel, and throughout the country, every public service has signs in Arabic alongside Hebrew.
- Jews are not a minority in Israel, they comprise 78% of the population.
> There's no similar context because the Apartheid system that existed in South Africa has no resemblance to today's Israel.
According to Human Rights Watch[1], Amnesty International[2], and many other human rights organizations, the regime in Israel today is in fact recognized as a system of apartheid. Mandela himself shown a lot of solidarity to the palestinian cause[3].
> If the alternative offered by the Palestinian Authority is ethnically cleansing all the Jews out of Hebron, it seems reasonable for the soldiers to be there to keep the peace?
So demanding that settlers who illegally occupied land is “ethnic cleansing”?
And you seem to be ceding my point and agreeing that it is apartheid, but justified.
> The Israeli government is obviously not perfect, but Arab citizens of Israel are generally treated way better than Jewish citizens of Muslim countries.
Whataboutism and irrelevant.
One comment ago you were saying it’s “”Palestinian apartheid”, now you are saying that it may be apartheid but it’s justified and so what, other countries are worse. I’m sorry but this I’m not going to engage any further with this type of discourse.
in your opinion these are settlers illegally occupying land, in their opinion they came back after they were ethnically cleansed from Hebron in the 1929 and 1936 massacres
I disagree with how this post was downvoted so heavily – this in an illustrative moment of rapprochement near the end of apartheid; saying it ended apartheid was a figure of speech, of course it didn't end apartheid in and of itself. It's as reasonable as saying that the fall of the Berlin Wall ended the Cold War.
https://archive.is/yK8Jb
So when he DM’d me to say that he had “a hell of a story”—promising “one-time pads! 8-bit computers! Flight attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!”—I responded.
Ha ha ha. Yes, that was literally my very short pitch to Steven about Tim Jenkin's story!
The actual DM: "I think this has the makings of a hell of a story: https://blog.jgc.org/2024/09/cracking-old-zip-file-to-help-o... If you want I can connect you with Tim Jenkin. One time pads! 8-bit computers! Flights attendants smuggling floppies full of random numbers into South Africa!"
Did you end up discovering the original password to the zip file? (was it, as I'd hope, `TIMBOBIMBO` ?)
No, I did not. I threw quite a lot of compute power at it using bkcrack (CPU) and hashcat (GPU) but never found out what it was. It was definitely not TIMBOBIMBO, sadly!
I also ended up sponsoring the bkcrack project because the maintainer added a new option for me: https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/pull/126
How much was "quite a lot"?
I did a pass with bkcrack. The password is over 13 char.
bkcrack.exe -k 98e0f009 48a0b11a c70f8499 -r 1..18 ?p bkcrack 1.7.0 - 2024-05-26 [11:07:33] Recovering password length 0-6... length 7... length 8... length 9... length 10... length 11... length 12... length 13...
I can tell you it's over 14 ?p, and over 16 ?u?d, and over 17 ?u.
where's the original encrypted zip for this?
If you want to try to crack the password you don't need the ZIP file. Just the key (which you can see in the bkcrack command above).
Though, you could argue it was a 16 bit computer, of course :)
(It was an 8088, essentially an 8086 with an 8 bit data bus, but 16bit registers and 20bit address bus).
At this point in time (meaning 2024) bits for computers are a word to indicate a culture rather than the technical merits of a computer.
In which case it’s definitely a 16 bit computer; it was just a cheap 8086 (the cheapness achieved through the memory bus), and it was part of the start of the 16 bit era. From the _user’s_ point of view it was basically a 16 bit computer.
This was a great read, thank you for inspiring it! I also did not realize it was you who led the petition for the UK to apologize to Turing, what an achievement.
You're quoted at the end as saying, "The code itself is a historical document". That sort of electrified me as I began thinking about what other historical code is out there in need of preservation. I'm fascinated with stuff like this, toolkits meant to be used in the field with little room for incremental development. Tracking this kind of stuff down seems like a fun hobby.
This is such a fabulous story!! Thank you, good Sir, for bringing it to light!! <3
The story reads like _The Cuckoo's Egg_ in a way. Spies, intrigue, covert comms, action, revolution!
I loved that the code is still around, and works.
Kudos!!
I didn't know it was you who led the charge for the apology to Turing. Thank you!
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The jewish people have a 2000 year old history and presence in the region, if that's consider colonialism then might as well just declare earth a settler-colonialist project and get it over with.
That's a rather odd argument, don't you think? Romans have been in my country even before that, Greeks have been in present-day Turkey, Egypt, etc. Normans have invaded and colonised England 1000 years ago. Should the corollary be that these peoples are somehow entitled to expel the current dwellers of those lands because of some sort of historical right?
It's a pretty simple argument - how can one colonize a region in which they are native to?
You could argue there's unfairness in the events, but saying israel is a colony is just odd, jews have come from the region.
So did the Italians, and I'm not sure if I would like Meloni ruling either Madrid or Barcelona... or the whole Mediterranean Europe and a chunk of Asia.
user fldsk means to say 6000 year history, of course. But I'm willing to come down on that, since Genesis is a bit of a chronological hand-wave.
I'm relying on whatever Synod counted the ages of people in the talks and arrived at a creation date of 4004 BC, of course
If we grant that Italy is Rome, which is a separate conversation, then we're still left with Roman conquest, which we don't consider legitimate today, and a long period of documented Jewish inhabitation.
I don't take a position on the legitimacy or otherwise of Israel, because there are already plenty of indignant westerners with insufficient information. But I will say: that written history is weighty evidence.
The Bible is not a valid source, neither is the Talmud. I would trust the Egyptians far more as they wrote down everything.
It's perfectly valid. The word you're looking for is "reliable".
If we were discussing the virgin birth, I wouldn't put any stock in the Bible. The gospels were written after the fact, by people who weren't there and had a strong motivation to make shit up. We conclude that it is _unreliable_ on the topic of the Virgin birth. (It's a reliable source on the topic of Christian beliefs in Nicaea in 300AD, however.)
But the Talmud describes Jews living in Judea at _great length_, which, I'll remind you, implies many hours spent reciting oral history or copying text by hand. It's supported by the existence of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The conspiracy that you suppose is of a flat-earth scale.
I won't discuss the middle east any further. Cunningham's Law got me. if you do want to learn more, try books.
> Genesis is a bit of a chronological hand-wave
What do you mean? Genesis is not remotely a historically accurate narrative at all
Irony. Consensus today is that the earth is 4 billion years old.
There's a saying "God doesn't exist but he gave us the land" which refers to the hypocrisy behind Zionism's biblical claims to the land of Palestine given that its founding fathers were all atheists.
Feel free to educate yourself on the history of jews in the region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_Judais...
"God gave us the land" has nothing to do with the jewish connection to the land.
My point stands. An atheist claiming God gave him exclusive rights to anything is rank hypocrisy.
I think you missed the point. The claim is based on being native to the lands, has nothing to do with god.
Ask any settler out in the Negev and I think you'll hear a different view.
That's assuming you can prove direct lineage over 2000 years. The Kazar theory of 8th century Ashkenazi conversion hasn't been completely debunked.
agree 100% , that would be great!
I remember the activist campaigns and the movie Cry Freedom about Steve Biko, another SA activist, had a significant impact on my worldview growing up. As revolutions and coups go it was clearly a success. I'd wonder how much of a role their electronic opsec played in it.
I think it was the ANC and its activists organizing the coalition of other countries to sanction and isolate the government that ultimately caused it to yield power, which is the necessary condition for any revolution- it requires allies to be in place to support it for when it succeeds. On the ground, you only really need a few dozen people to seize some buildings and bank accounts, it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult. The opsec for that ground force just has to get most of them to their X day, where they're going to take casulties anyway.
In the case of SA, it seemed like a matter of convincing other countries to do nothing, by persuading the world the govt were just racist villains, and convincing the National Party in government that nobody would intervene to save them if there were a civil revolt. That part was organized in plain view. Opsec is interesting and mysterious, but often less important than the stories we tell about it afterwards.
I remember traveling to the US from South Africa when I was 14 in 1990 and my dad renting Cry Freedom on VHS so we could watch it, since it was banned in South Africa. The long roll of peoples' names and how they died "accidentally" or "falling from window" in prison at the end was haunting and the experience of watching it has stayed vividly with me ever since.
It's hard to stress how normal _anything_ can seem when you grow up with it. I often wonder whether, if we'd stayed (we moved to the US permanently in 1992) and if apartheid had continued, whether I'd have woken up to the reality of what was going on and become more politically active in my college years. I have no confidence my sense of right and wrong would have been strong enough to escape the stifling blanket feeling of "Well, yes, it's not right, but let's not go tooooo crazy" that pervaded political feeling in those days.
Thanks for doing this, JGC. (And now that I think of it, you might enjoy the historical spelunking in the "Georg Nees" entries on my blog at zellyn.com. Code archeology is tremendously satisfying, and getting an email from one of his sons out of the blue was a delight!)
I watched the movie shortly before going to Lesotho (the enclave country Donald Woods and his family escaped to) and crossing the border into "Transkei" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantustan) at the same bridge he entered Lesotho.
To be honest, I was prepared to see all white South Africans as evil oppressors, and it took me a while to see that there was a spectrum -- many of whom I met -- from oppressors to opportunists to passive enablers to freedom/justice fighters.
One of my distant relatives in South Africa was decidedly racist, but mourned how his son had gone from playing with the children of black farmworkers to, after a stint in the South African Defence Forces, being a vicious white supremacist.
> it's coordinating the external trade links to keep everyone paid and in their jobs while the top of the regime changes to new hands that's difficult.
That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy, and patted themselves on the based on their apparent competence in building one.
> That's actually a really good insight. It explains why quite a few successful revolutions – e.g. Russia and China – happened in countries _without_ an established administrative bureaucracy
Erm.... Whut? China was (and is) _the_ example of a country held together by a civil bureaucracy. Ditto for Russia.
China literally invented bureaucracy 3000 years ago. It’s the cornerstone of Chinese civilization.
They invented inventing 5000 years ago
the view of coups as one faction replacing another is quite a rabbit hole, but it's a political analysis that has some experimental and predictive power. there has to be guarantor or benefactor on the other side of it. in this view, leaders are figureheads accountable to the small essential coalition who keeps them there. the idea of secret cabals orchestrating these things is usually backwards, where a revolutionary (or politician) is really just an entrepreneurial dealmaker between elite factions.
it's essentially demesquita's "logic of political survival," also distilled into the well made cartoon, "rules for rulers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
Interesting how the PKZIP password-protected compressed file is now easily decrypted in <5 minutes, but the original one-time pad is still as mathematically robust as ever.
We could have had a very different history if they'd used DES or RC2 for encryption!
One time pads used properly are theoretically perfectly unbreakable. The problem is making sure no one ever uses the same 'pad'/keystream twice, that your pad generation is actually random, and that the pads never fall into the hands of your adversaries. (or if they do you've been diligent about completely destroying the used pads and the other end of your communications doesn't use the captured set of pads) They're just not very good at anything other than point to point secret passing and require a real world connection to distribute.
So much of symmetric key cryptography is just trying to find creative ways of creating and recreating 'one time pads' so we can distribute the key material instead of the pads themselves.
> that your pad generation is actually random
The one thing that stood out to me with the original blog post and a quick glance at the code was that it appeared as if the pad was certainly not actually random.
Could anyone that has actually understood it a bit more confirm or reject this?
Edit: It seems that the random generation can be found starting here https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/d6a1a1d694b22e6a115b... With three methods, one (RAND2) seems to use the basic interpreter rng more or less directly and the other two seem to be fairly simple prngs seeded from the basic interpreter's rng.
I don't actually know what the state of basic interpreter rngs was in the early '80s but I would be fairly surprised if they're anything that is secure.
At the time PRNG was probably good enough. I wouldn't want to go up against the NSA today using the same entropy source but against South Africa decades ago it was probably good enough. Even knowing what PRNG source the original noise came from it'd take a hell of a lot of guess and check with cribs to come close to guessing the seed for the PRNG. That would be my first crack at breaking a OTP I knew was generated with a particular PRNG at least as a casual student of the craft. Generate huge amount of noise for the possible seeds and see if any names like "Mandela" or other known leaders suddenly pops out of intercepted messages starting at different points in the noise stream (and see if the rest of the message makes any sense when that does happen).
If the PRNG is good enough then shipping floppies full of PRNG output is very much unnecessary. Simply send the seeds used to initialize the PRNG thereby fitting many (~180k of them on a 720kb floppy) seeds on one floppy and save your couriers a lot of risk.
The problem is that, if you do this, you're not using a one time pad anymore. You're using a stream cipher.
The difference is in the nature of the security guarantees. Almost every cryptographic primitive is "computationally secure", which means the best-known attack is to try every key, and that would take beyond the heat death of the universe. One-time pads have "information-theoretical security", which is that even if you try every possible key, you don't learn the contents of the message, because every possible message has a corresponding decryption key that will produce it from the ciphertext you are trying to break.
The reason why this is the case is because the size of the message space is equal to the size of the key space. In every other cryptosystem, you have a key space that is much smaller than the message space - say, 256 bit AES keys, or 512 bit SHA-2 hashes, for messages that can have many billions of bits in them. It's unlikely for something that wasn't the key to happen to decrypt to a valid-looking message under this scenario. But with a one-time pad, you are actually brute-forcing the message space by brute-forcing the key space. Even if you knew the hash of the plaintext, it wouldn't help. You'd just be brute-forcing whatever hash you used to find collisions.
This property goes away if you start repeating key stream bits by any deterministic process. Hence why just sending a PRNG seed is a bad one-time pad. This is also the difference between /dev/random and /dev/urandom. Linux generates randomness from a PRNG, but it's seeded by unpredictable hardware events and other sources of entropy, and there's a bunch of logic to estimate how much entropy is available. /dev/random specifically blocks until that estimate is positive, so that one-time pads and the like don't repeat bits. (In fact, this is basically the only time you should be using /dev/random! /dev/urandom is perfectly acceptable for all other cryptographic use cases!)
If you generate your OTP beforehand with a PRNG, it's also a stream cipher with extra steps. The real key space is the PRNG seed space, not the size of the key you shipped. Expanding a small key into a big one doesn't make it an OTP - an OTP needs to be actually random.
The Linux random devices no longer work the way you describe, either. random blocks until there's enough entropy to consider the PRNG output fully random, then never blocks. urandom simply never blocks, even if there's absolutely no entropy yet and every copy of your device produces the same random stream.
Encode the seed in the arrangement of a deck of cards... shuffle to delete.
The card deck can be the key and the encryption mechanism too with Solitare. It's not secure for longer messages but it should be sufficient for short messages. It's a delicate method though because if you mess up it can be difficult to impossible to recover the proper state of the deck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_(cipher)
You can already fit huge amounts of text onto a single floppy. Uncompressed it's around 1.4 million characters.
That is a method though and it's basically what stream ciphers are doing, translating a key into a random stream that's then applies to the plaintext. One benefit of the true OTP though is you don't have to transfer the software and ensure it's generating the same key stream on both ends.
> Could anyone that has actually understood it a bit more confirm or reject this?
In BASIC, the word "RANDOMIZE" sets the seed for the RND function, and you'll find it's initially dependant on time (including the typing speed of the user):
https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/main/RANDOM.BAS#L295
It then is reinitialised periodically by mixing in run time (which is highly variable due to microprocessor limitations) and checksums of previous parts of the stream:
https://github.com/Vulacode/RANDOM/blob/main/RANDOM.BAS#L319
The RAND[123] appears to be Bennett Fox's Algorithm 647, which was designed for simulation purposes (statistical randomness), and is based on Lewis-Goodman-Miller's construction from 1969, so it had a great deal of scrutiny.
I think this would have been state of the art in the late 1980s.
South Africa did buy at least some of Crypto AGs backdoored products, not sure when though.
You know it's _proper_ vintage crypto code because it uses the now very unfashionable word 'encipher'.
Traditionally, encode meant to use one word/symbol to represent another, while encipher meant to transform one (usually mathematically) into another.
For example, "Tora, Tora, Tora" was a code that had no intrinsic meaning, but was the signal to proceed with the Pearl Harbor attack. No way to reverse that.
Meanwhile, "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG" can be transformed with a Caesar cipher to "QEB NRFZH YOLTK CLU GRJMP LSBO QEB IXWV ALD". It can easily be reversed.
Funny but also thought-provoking! When did the verb "encipher" give way to "encrypt," and why? I might enjoy reading a well-researched piece on that subject.
Interestingly enough we still say “ciphertext” to describe the encrypted “cleartext”.
I don't know why but here's when: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=encipher%2Cenc...
So basically encipher was never used in the context of the web. And the web is what made encrypt popular separate from encipher. It does look like maybe encipher was possibly going to take off but encrypt stepped on its head.
Interestingly, the basis of web encryption does use the term "encipherment" -- the `KeyUsage` field of X.509 certificates has `keyEncipherment` and `dataEncipherment` flags.
An interesting data point is that Kahn's The codebreakers, from 1967, uses "encipher" everywhere except for various US goverment agency quotes, which use "encrypt."
Wow. Apparently that's when AES and Triple DES were introduced, which can't be coincidental.
Yeah... Data Encryption Standard published in the late '70s, and given its adoption, I assume solidified the use of 'encryption' in this context.
Why is it unfashionable? I quite like it.
I remember reading in Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography that in some cultures "encrypt" refers to the process of entombing bodies for burial and that "encipher" did not have that baggage.
Similar connotation to "decrypt" which would be exhumation.
For example in Spanish, there's been always a fight between using "cifrar" instead of "encriptar". I like "cifrar" a bit more, but it's true that we've always had the prefix "cripto-" for hidden or mysterious things. Anyway, the difference is "cifra" is the Latin root for "digit", and "kryptos" is the Greek root for "hidden".
What comes to my mind is that decipher has a well established common meaning, but decrypt just means "dis-encrypt".
I've no idea why it died out, but it certainly seems to have.
A longer version is here
https://github.com/Vulacode/Articles/blob/main/Talking%20To%...
This article (and a lot of the other content on that site) goes into a lot more depth on Operation Vula:
https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445...
>Working in the woodshop, he crafted mockups of the large keys that could unlock the prison doors.
I got to here before realising this is the same guy portrayed by Daniel Radcliffe in Escape From Pretoria. Great film.
Maybe in the future we can also see the code that ended democracy. (The FB source code).
Perhaps the only successful counterxample to "don't roll your own crypto!"
Why does a password-protected zip file reveal a list of the files within lol?
If I'm understanding this right, we'd have been hosed if the files had been TARd first?
And then encrypted? Not sure, the known structure of tar (or zip) can help with decryption.
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This is addressed in the article. In fact the zip contained a zip and this helped!
> He realized the zip file contained another zip file, and that since all he needed was the right original text for a specific part of the scrambled text, his best chance was using the first file name mentioned in the zip within the zip.
We need to show this "code" to Israel...
This is paywalled; how can I read it?
https://archive.is/yK8Jb
Most paywalled articles on HN will have an archive.is link in the comments, pvg posted one here.
Thank you!
The tech side of this is really cool but I'd also like to read more about the non-tech stuff. I wonder if the sympathetic Dutch flight attendant is still alive or the guys who actually carried the Trojan horse books to Mandela.
What an amazing story!
Coincidentally I was reading this story yesterday:
https://www.londonrecruits.org.uk/index.php/items-received-s...
about the “London Recruits” in the 70s and 80s who smuggled books, leaflets, etc into apartheid SA on behalf of the ANC, doing so in such secrecy they didn’t know each others identity until 29 years after the apartheid regime fell.
Joy Leman, one of the recruits, was my late father-in-law’s colleague.
She is alive and hearing her recollections is super cool. If you follow the link to the short documentary I mentioned in the column you will see her then and now.
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https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/19/world-court-finds-israel...
Yes
One day we will be telling these stories about Palestinians
That is a hopelessly optimistic statement. Wait until the Israelis write the history, they will have your grandchildren worshipping at their feet for surviving the Hamas onslaught.
You’re presupposing they actually survive the current events and come out victorious in order to “write history”. I’m not sure of that at all if things kick off in earnest there.
Quite a bit of wishful thinking here. Who exactly would be able to defeat Israel? Iran? They are cowering in fear right now. Hamas? Hezbollah? Please.
> Who exactly would be able to defeat Israel?
All it would take is for the US to stop giving them weapons. That's literally it.
Their military, the IDF, is in extremely poor state. This isn't the same military that made history in the six day war. Under the same sort of conditions today the IDF would have their asses handed to them.
When I say "extremely poor state" I am referring to their discipline, precision, and ability to move under fire. The current IDF operates more like the Russian army who are absolutely having their asses handed to them by a vastly inferior force. These are just my personal opinions from my own 27 years of military experience.
History is already written, this is the age of everyone recording and sharing things. There's no meaningful rewriting it.
They don't get to directly and intentionally kill and/or cause death, injury and illness to high hundreds of thousands of people very publicly and proudly, while writing "death to Arabs", "good Arab = dead Arab", "Nakba 2023", and other vile shit on the walls of their destroyed cities.
Easy to see this is not Israel+USA trying to eliminate Hamas, but some holy war to eliminate Palestinians as a whole, in the most underhanded way possible, as to not get blowback from the non-USA countries.
They'll destroy themselves, continuing doing this, provoking neighbors and inciting Palestinians for a massive revenge wave in the future. It doesn't matter when this happens, but Israel is done after this. They're not a superpower and USA backing under Trump, once he wins, will only serve to make their crimes more obvious, and self-destructive behavior more bold.
While writing "death to Arabs", "good Arab = dead Arab", "Nakba 2023", and other vile shit on the walls of their destroyed cities.
Can you provide incident details, please? I'm not doubting that stuff like this has happened, but specific (at least theoretically reliable) attestations are always helpful.
These are relatively easy to google. Here's at least one of the incidents they referred to
https://imgur.com/a/UE5q2Fm
It's actually a common point of rhetoric:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-12/ty-article/is...
Just Iran alone is capable of defeating Israel if it wishes. Israel is only 8M people. There are hundreds of millions of Muslims living in Middle East. They aren’t united right now, but Israel, ironically, could unite them.
But it wishes it already. Israel however has nukes and is backed by the US. Iran wouldn't last 10 minutes.
Not only does Iran not wish to destroy Israel, it is also unwilling to allow Hezbollah to successfully do so either. If it wanted to destroy Israel, Israel wouldn’t have any AD after the last strike.
You are delusional. Iran lost most of its deterrence, its proxies have been decimated and its ICBM capabilities, although not nothing haven't really managed to cause any significant damage and have shown that they lack sufficient accuracy.
Will the balance of power change a few decades from now? Maybe, who knows, but for now Iran is in a tough spot.
Uh-uh. The country which has just tested a nuke a couple of weeks ago and easily defeated the Iron Dome with its cheaper rocket stock is “totally decimated”. Sure buddy.
What are you even talking about?
Seek different news sources. That earthquake in Iran wasn’t an earthquake. It didn’t have aftershocks and USGS couldn’t determine the depth.
Enjoy your speculative theories. Lots of minor earthquakes don't have aftershocks, not to mention that Iran is one of the most seismically active countries in the world.
But please feel free to provide a trustworthy news source backing your claim.
What is a “trustworthy news source” these days. I saw the seismograph charts on Twitter. If you expect any “trustworthy” news in an environment where US MIC could get another trillion dollars in (borrowed) taxpayer money, I have a bridge I’d like to sell.
A news source that has confirmed with at least one seismology expert who has conducted a thorough (preferably peer reviewed) analysis showing that the charts are abnormal for an earthquake and are more inline with those of an explosion.
It seems to me like it's should be extremely easy to distinguish the two, there's more than enough earthquake data - and that fact that there is no such report says it all. For starters i'd even take an amateur analysis, but just some dude on twitter saying "there was seismic activity - must be a nuclear test" - nah.
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In the west bank yes, in israel proper no.
And to sprinkle some "whataboutism" - just a reminder that most of the muslim world is an apartheid based on gender, and even men who don't suffer from it usually have way less human rights than arab israelis.
No, even within the 1948 borders too. [1]
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
That's not a verdict. The only case that was brought to court afaik was for the occupied territories
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICJ_case_on_Israel%27s_occupat...
I disagree. Won’t repeat the arguments, just point to another comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41886598
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Nelson Mandela was on the US terrorist watch list until 2008.
Also the fact that so many in the US claim they remember he died in prison should say something about the media landscape.
From the European perspective I recall the concerts that were held to free him and then also the concert that was held after he was free. Simple Minds even made a famous song for it [1]. I don't know if those concets were a big show in the US, we only had a few TV stations and this was always a big thing.
[1] https://youtu.be/xfk13uUuD8Q
As far as the European vs. US on the current situation - Euro countries are denying entry to journalists and doctors who are EU citizens just because they are speaking about the atrocities they have seen on the ground.
While Euro countries tend to be a tiny bit better than the US on the issues, they are generally much more restrictive in terms of protected speech.
For example, a former Greek finance minister was banned from the Schengen area (which includes Greece) by Germany, and not because the Greek economy is terrible.
You say "Euro countries" but let's be clear - it's only Germany.
Yes, and also the UK just denied Nelson Mandela's grandson access to the UK, because of his views on modern day apartheid.
> Protests and petitions are completely ineffective
They have been effective for millenia, even before democracy. The only thing ineffective now is people saying so. With all the evidence in the world that protest works, people bizarrely disarm themselves.
The targets of the protests take great pains to convince you of it; that should tell you something. They'll bluff until they lose.
I think this greatly depends on rhe type of protest, specifically whether it threatens the ruling class's ability to make a profit or to govern. In recent centuries liberal governments have gotten better at channeling discontent into forms of protest that are less consequential and more performative.
The world would be better off if all the defeatists followed their own advice and did something else with their lives, and left the political activities to a new generation with fight and committment and passion in them, people with leadership and agency.
If people are going to quit, then quit! Stop coming to the meeting and talking about you've quit!
I don't disagree with what you're saying but I'm confused about why it's a reply to my comment.
Yours looks (to me) like yet another person saying action by citizens is ineffective or of rather limited effectiveness.
I remember the massive protests against the Itaq war, and how they were effectively managed in the US. In NYC for example, the train service into the cott was interrupted, delaying many protesters.
Like anything worth doing, it might be hard at times; there might be challenges to overcome.
Millions protested the Vietnam war. Many millions more protested the Iraq war. Millions upon millions have protested against Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people for an entire year. Now those same people also protest against Israel's invasion of Lebanon.
It has been ineffective. We've seen peaceful protestors smeared, and beaten and harassed by the police. We've seen counter terror laws abused to smear and arrest leaders. We've seen clampdowns on what protests are allowed to go ahead, and at least on the UK they are pushing and pushing for "tougher" laws to crush protests.
We're also entering our third generation of peaceful protest against climate change with no effects whatsoever.
Protest movements are only effective when they present a viable alternative to a more radical movement with a will to violence at their flank. We saw this clearly in the indian independence & american civil rights movements, and the fall of apartheid. Iraq war and climate movement are what you get without the credible threat of violence behind or beside your peaceful protests.
One important lesson of the iraq war protests now that we can see with hindsight: we were right, and we were justified in using much more radical tactics than we actually did. Those horrors lay partially at our coward feet so let's not allow ourselves to be convinced to repeat it with palestine.
What's incredible is not only the vast disinformation on other issues, but their ability to get into the heads of even the protestors and have them parroting obvious nonsense (if you think or look at the evidence). The right doesn't have to lift a finger, make an argument, face any political struggle, because their opponents all lay down their (peaceful, political) arms and quit on their own!
You are your opponents' dream. They couldn't write a better script for you - quitting and self-defeating, at the same time!
If you read this as me giving up you might want to skim it again.
You've given up on peaceful protest and are embracing radicalized, violent protest, which is self-defeating. Again, your enemies love you - you're doing exactly what they hope.
No I'm pointing out that some peaceful protest movements are missing a key component of successful protest movements. You calling this self defeating doesn't make it so. hth
Peaceful protest does work and has worked; that's quitting on it. Adopting violence is self-defeating. What basis do you have for your theories, other than the passing fashion of despairing and quitting.
First, that is cherry-picking. We can find lots of examples of protest being effective. [0] And as I pointed out elsewhere, the right wing - while teaching their enemies to quit - embraces activism fully and has been incredibly successful.
It's only ineffective if your measure is immediate, complete victory. You don't win everything, you face defeat, and you quit? Then I agree, your protest is useless. You think you are somehow entitled to results? Yes, your protest is worthless, a pantomime. Protest isn't a ritual you perform - a raindance that you do - and then the gods respond with whatever it is you asked for. Protest compels results - it's embracing that you are the agent, you are the power, you make it happen; the enemy will give you nothing. If you don't understand that, if you aren't planning for it, if you have no strategy that will compel victory, then you're just entitled. (I think the latter is the problem with most of the protests now - they're doing raindances.)
And you go around telling people how hopeless it is? Have you ever accomplished anything? Has anyone who has ever said those things? People saying those things are the first problem - if they were on my team, I'd tell them to never say that again or simply don't come back.
Regardless, the protests have altered behavior, including by European leaders and by the most powerful person in the world (POTUS) and a candidate for that office (Harris). They may cost Harris the election by denying her enough votes in Michigan. And though nobody can say for sure, they arguably have altered the Israeli government's behavior, though the protestors will certainly and understandably say, not nearly enough.
Finally, to evaluate protest, compare it to the alternative: silence. Imagine horrors went on and society responded with silence. Imagine how demoralizing that would be to the ordinary person, who does have a moral conscience. Imagine how crushing to public morality if nobody said anything. Protestors are essential.
[0] There was some research, I think from 10-20 years ago, that showed that it succeeds at a high rate. But I don't recall what kind of protest, etc., so I hope someone else knows about it.
I can’t think of examples of them working in my lifetime. Maybe piddling little symbolic victories, but little else.
We still have no meaningful movement on climate change, an antidemocratic political system, no social safety net, Palestine, etc.
Can you give any examples?
No - you'll need to motivate yourself, drive yourself. Otherwise, you can't participate anyway. That's why this defeatest rhetoric is spread - to keep you from even trying.
You haven't achieved more because you and all these other people quit. Of course you're not achieving anything.
The same answer as to every question in leftist action the last half-century: organize locally, and scale up from there.
I think mass refusal to work and spend money to the point where it starts inflicting enough pain on the government to take the desired action, would also significantly affect people who have nothing to do with the conflict, and it would have a greater effect on the poor than the rich as recessions tend to do.
I’m not sure if that would be an ethical course of action outside the country where the oppression is actually happening.
>branding freedom fighters as terrorists
I mean bombing government buildings (which is what landed Mandela in prison) is definitely what most people would consider terrorism, or treason, or similar things. Now you can argue that Mandela's actions were justified because Apartheid was evil (and I agree that it was evil) but that's entirely different than arguing that he was just a poor victim of the racist SA government who was imprisoned because he wanted to end Apartheid.
The problem is that people feel morally uncomfortable arguing that it's ok to bomb government buildings (and similar actions) when your cause is just, because that raises all sorts of other moral quandaries that most people don't want to (or refuse to) face. So they pretend like Mandela and his party were perfect angels practicing non-violent resistance like MLK so they can avoid the moral quandaries raised by suggesting that terrorism is ok for a just cause.
Is the IDF dropping bombs on apartment buildings in Beirut "terrorism"?
The poster seems to be arguing that what we consider "terrorism" can be justified sometimes, but people have a need to whitewash their heroes rather than perform these justifications, so I think he is on your side
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That's not how collateral damage works. The moral and legal responsibility is on the one dropping the bombs. As horrible as the US wars were, when we decided to kill Bin Laden, we sent a special operations team at night instead of flattening entire villages in Pakistan.
The indiscriminate killing that Israel is doing in Gaza and Lebanon is unprecedented since the second World War. Justifying it will normalize civilian casualties in future wars that with be disastrous for everyone.
>That's not how collateral damage works.
Not according to the Red Cross:
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during...
Otherwise protected targets like hospitals lose their protected status if they're used as a base of military operations or for other similar purposes.
And the US didn't send a spec ops team to get Bin Laden because they were worried about the Geneva Conventions. They sent one because they wanted to make absolutely certain that they got their target (see Bin Laden's escape at Tora Bora in 2001 for an example of this) and because they were operating in Pakistan so showing up with a whole brigade or carpet bombing the compound wouldn't have gone over well with the Pakistani government. It already didn't go over well with just a surgical strike by spec ops, it would have been much worse if it was done by a larger show of force.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...
Wow, naming the Skynet targeting system "Gospel" puts a particularly Satanic flourish on the whole thing.
Okay, well then if government buildings house any members of the IDF or apartheid South Africa's military, then certainly they are also legitimate targets and it is not "terrorism" to destroy them with bombs? Or, conversely, the label must also be applied to IDF sorties?
>Okay, well then if government buildings house any members of the IDF or apartheid South Africa's military, then certainly they are also legitimate targets and it is not "terrorism" to destroy them with bombs?
Only if you ignore the distinctions between what was essentially a civil war fought by insurgents (like in Apartheid South Africa) and a war between two sovereign powers.
And how is that distinction relevant to whether a given act should be labeled "terrorism" or not?
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What percentage of Gaza, would you say, has to be leveled and carpet bombed before you would no longer characterize the Israelis as "limiting collateral damage"?
Total nuclear annihilation. They consider their restraint against doing the temptation laudable
> Example: They have the nuclear weapon, so they could end Gaza in one day.
Are you being serious here?
The decisions about which buildings to bomb are made by AI in order to select targets faster than humans can generate and review them manually. When you say making individual decisions, you mean through AI automation. This info comes from primary sources.
Showing restraint with atomic weapons is hardly a pass for lesser violence
> The problem is that people feel morally uncomfortable arguing that it's ok to bomb government buildings (and similar actions) when your cause is just, because that raises all sorts of other moral quandaries that most people don't want to (or refuse to) face
I mean, what you are describing is just war theory, and pretty much every government in the world subscribes to it.
>The problem is that people feel morally uncomfortable arguing that it's ok to bomb government buildings (and similar actions) when your cause is just
I don't think anybody has any moral quandaries about it when it is THEIR cause. Only when it is someone else's cause. Name one freedom fighter/revolutionary (even a perfectly non-violent one) who is not a 'terrorist' to the regime theyre trying to overthrow. I don't think anyone 'pretends' Mandela was a 'perfect angel' anymore than anyone pretends the founding fathers were beacons of unblemished moral rectitude.
>So they pretend like Mandela and his party were perfect angels practicing non-violent resistance like MLK
They were far from it, then again, the ANC campaign killed less than 100 people (excluding their sorta-civil-war with Zulu which isn't what people think about) and ultimately played no role in their victory.
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As I said, I don't want this to become a flame war, and to that end would have preferred not to name the apartheid state in question.
But since you insist, nobody is just 'making it so by saying it' - indeed, saying it's not happening, in spite of the abundance of evidence, does not mean it's not!
I've Norwegian friends who have seen it first hand and we're aghast, but of course that's just a personal anecdote that just happens to agree with the ICJ, Human Rights Watch, and even Israel's own B’Tselem[0].
And no - I absolutely will not try to see "both sides" of apartheid. That's a really heinous thing to say.
[0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/19/world-court-finds-israel...
The moment you mention Israeli crimes on this platform, you get downvoted until your post / comment is dead. Sad.
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> Because my personal operating definition is where you have one single country that has a different set of laws for different groups of people living in that country based on their ethnicity or skin colour.
“ Walk around Hebron, look at the streets. Streets where Arabs are no longer allowed to go on, only Jews.” - says Amiram Levin, former head of the Israeli army’s Northern Command.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-08-13/ty-article/ex....
That’s within the internationally recognized boundaries of Israel. A separate issue is that Israel enjoys full control over 60% of the West Bank (Area C), which is ever expanding, and various degrees of defects control over the rest of it. Within the West Bank Israeli settlers have more freedom of movement and less restrictions on their day to day lives. So any characterization of the West Bank as an independent country or polity is completely missing the point.
Hebron is not part of Israel & is not governed by Israel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebron_Governorate
Also, and I don't want to take a position here, my advocacy is for learning as much about the history and current state of affairs as possible in order to form an informed position, because not only is there fog of war going on right now, but there is a decades long conflict with lots of narratives and propaganda.
I say that to offer a counter narrative in pursuit of objectivity: if you ask an Israeli, there are many areas in the West Bank that are deemed "no go zones" for for Jews, but there are none that apply to non-Jews.
And as for the security and the "check points", those are applied equally to everyone who is there, regardless of citizenship or ethnicity or any other considerations. So even if it's a shitty situation, it's not targeted at any specific ethnic group.
So given that a) Israel does not govern Hebron and b) the security check points are not specific to any ethnic group, how is Hebron a data point that supports the "apartheid" charge?
You could spend 5 minutes and find things like this that meet your definition but you won't, because you do not want to know about or acknowledge them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaization_of_the_Galilee
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No, it‘s not complicated. It’s straight and clear. Every human rights org says so, the UN says so, HR scholars say so. It is apartheid.
South Africa’s done great since the end of apartheid
Only a privileged fool would think that prosperity justifies the continuation of injustice.
Oh to the contrary - It would be the privileged who would be fine chasing some ideal in the name of justice while sacrificing all the unprivileged people who are actually suffering day to day.
Ugh, no matter whose side you're on, if the Israel-Palestine situation is not complicated, I'm not sure what is.
I disagree.
While the situation in Israel differs from that in the West Bank, there are still significant elements of systemic discrimination against Arab citizens. The 2018 Nation-State Law is a prime example, as it:
1. Removedd Arabic as an offical language 2. Defined Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people exclusively 3. Declared Jewish settlements a national value
This law effectively codified the second-class status of Arab citizens, who make up about 20% of Israel's population. Additionally, Arab Israelis face ongoing disparities in areas such as education, employment, and housing. They are underrepresented in government and leadership positions.
While Arab citizens have legal rights on paper, the reality is a system of de facto segregation and institutional discrimination. The Nation-State Law and other policies create a two-tiered system that privileges Jewish citizens over Arab citizens, meeting key criteria of apartheid even within Israel proper.
[1] What to Know About the Arab Citizens of Israel https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-know-about-arab-citize... [2] Israel's controversial new “Jewish nation-state” law, explained | Vox https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/31/17623978/israel-jewish-n... [3] Israel: New Laws Marginalize Palestinian Arab Citizens https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/03/30/israel-new-laws-marginal... [4] The argument that Israel practices apartheid, explained https://www.vox.com/23924319/israel-palestine-apartheid-mean... [5] Israel - Minority Rights Group https://minorityrights.org/country/israel/ [6] Q&A: Israel's Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of ... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2022/02/qa-israel...
Show me a country that doesn't have systemic discrimination of minority groups.
At the end of the day it's quite clear why jewish people want a jewish country, so yes, some discrimination around immigration will always be "built-in" into israel.
Now do I think israel is trending in the wrong direction? 100% yes. Do I wish for a two state solution and achieving as equal rights as possible while maintaining the status of israel as a jewish state? also 100% yes.
Do I think that calling israel proper an apartheid is just leading to people on both sides to become even more extreme? also yes.
We could have had a one state solution. One country for all. Christians, muslims, jews. That would have been just.
Could a one state solution work sometime deep into the future? Perhaps, but the only way to achieve a stable and prosperous one state solution is by first having a two state solution with decades of peace, rebuilding of trust and a return to a more secular direction from both sides.
If you'd try to force a one state solution in the near/medium term you'd just end up with another divided failed state similar to lebanon (and probably much worse), the population would just be too divided on basically every subject, with militant/religious extremists on both sides making the keg especially explosive.
So ask yourself what is better for the people, trying to achieve some ideal for the sake of that ideal or actually trying to achieve something that could work? If this were an engineering project, would you do a full refactor with an extremely high chance of failure or go through an intermediate step that would bring a lot of the benefits with a much higher chance of success?
Your comment is complicated in and of itself, even without the enormous historical, legal-theoretic and political context surrounding that law and its enactment.
Constantly framing it as „complicated“ does not make it so. It was populated land, home to muslims, Christians, jews. One state for all. Until Zionism started colonising Palestine. And expelled Christians and muslims. First Zionists called their conferences „Colonising Palestine“. Nothing complicated.
Constantly claiming it is not complicated does not make it so. It was populated land - before Greeks, Romans, Christians and Muslims conquered it and ethnically cleansed the Jews from the area. There wasn't one state - in what is Israel/Palestine today, until 1948, was at least Jordan, Egypt, British Palestine and Syria.
You keep oversimplifying. It's just not simple.
Ahh, here we go again: „Thousands of years ago jewish people populated the area.“ And that’s how nations define their borders in modern days? Who said it was one state? I said it was populated land. People lived there for centuries. Mostly Christian and muslim arabs. Some jewish arabs. And then came a settler colonial ideology in 19th century, way before Holocaust, polish jews, created the idea for a jewish majority homeland in an area that was populated, so they expelled many people from their homes in Palestine. And that led to first Nakba. Today we witness the second Nakba. The most detailed documentation of a Genocide.
Btw: „God‘s chosen people, God‘s promised land, nation state law, jewish majority“. Sounds very racist to me. - If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, it is propably a duck?
I ain't readin' all that, mate. Free Palestine.
They sure can.
Here we go again with genocide and nakba and settler colonialism.
Here's the thing about settler colonialism: it's when you're sent by an empire to settle on land you're not native to. Jews are native to Israel. Dig in the ground, you'll find coins and pots and tablets in Hebrew.
"Thousands of years ago" is not OK, but "for centuries" is. Sorry, you don't get to choose.
As for the second Nakba, October 7th really was as close to a second holocaust as the Jews experienced, one in a long line of pogroms. To do that and then hide behind and below women, children and innocent civilians you're using as human shields, that's beyond a war crime, it's a crime against humanity.
As for the idea of a Jewish majority homeland, go check the bible. It predates "polish jews in the 19th century" by a few centuries.
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With barbarism you mean breaking of any rule of engagement? Shooting civilians, children, innocents? Or fighting for the right to rape detainees on TV? Or starving 2.5 mil civilians?
The whole world sees who the barbarians are. You keep believing in fairy tales in your echo chamber.
[1] British doctor: „IDF deliberately shoots 5-12 year old children in the head“ https://youtu.be/0jlT-NRx-u4
[2] Footage of Israeli soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian hostage at Sde Teiman published by Israel's Ch12 https://x.com/EsheruKwaku/status/1821043507152195751
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on one side: you
on the other side: every human rights org in the world
Nelson Mandela would have a good idea on what situation is apartheid.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/nelson-mandelas-support-f...
They asked how to end apartheid, not how to learn to accept and justify it
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You need to understand as long as Citizens United stand it's practically impossible to make a change like this in the United States. People don't care enough and political issues are bought.
>You need to understand as long as Citizens United stand it's practically impossible to make a change like this in the United States.
Why do you think it should be illegal to make documentaries critical of Hillary Clinton?
IMHO, you need to understand that your messaging is the only problem. For example, people on the right have made revolutionary changes - unthinkable changes as of 10 years ago.
Yes, including Citizens United itself...
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Then why does ANC keep winning elections in SA?
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I think it was the fishing trip with Mandela and then-Prime Minister F.W. de Klerk in 1990 that ended apartheid. Specifically when one of de Klerk's people got a hook in his hand, and a Mandela person cleaned and bandaged it. After that trip Apartheid was finally broken.
What actually ended apartheid was international pressure and the white government's fear of a civil war. Economically isolated and vastly outnumbered, the apartheid government would have been completely removed from the country and had their property seized.
My understanding is Mandela was a respected leader who was willing to play ball and facilitate a peaceful transition where the white leadership got to keep all their property. That's why there's still massive economic inequality in SA today. Not to say Mandela wasn't admirable or that he didn't suffer, but it was a conscious choice to avoid outright military conflict at the cost of preserving an implicit racial hierarchy.
While it certainly involved a lot of people doing the right thing, that peaceful transition was absolutely incredible and I really do think that's why non-South Africans look on Mandela so fondly. If you'd told me everything about the Apartheid right up until its collapse and then said "Ok, the ANC basically win, gain power, what do you think happens?", I'd struggle to think of any scenario where there wasn't incredible bloodshed or upheaval to the point of ruining lives beyond measure. There was so much bad blood. You'd assume that at least the people who were in charge, the people who ran the show, surely would've saw a grim end. Not even property seizures? . Somehow, Mandela led an effort that just rose above that. He probably prevented a lot of pain just by not giving into such things.
To me, the peaceful transition is the achievement. It is the amazing part of it.
There is a lot of inaccuracies here (not only in your post but I am replying to stuff above):
First, there was significant pressure on de Klerk from Western governments. Thatcher told him to release Mandela, for example. The reason she did not support sanctions is because they would likely harm South Africans for no reason...this was justified by later events. As pressure on de Klerk would have made it a lot harder to negotiate with Mandela freely.
Two, de Klerk became leader and his first action was to try to form a path to reconciliation. Mandela played his part by abandoning terrorism (I am not sure why this is disputed...this is what Mandela said about himself). de Klerk's position was, however, not particularly easy because whilst everyone acknowledged that the system had to change, it wasn't clear how to get to that point.
Three, the article implies all white South Africans were racist...this is not true. This assumption is not why apartheid happened either. de Klerk was not Botha. The US experience dominates the world, the assumption that everyone in the NP was racist is not accurate...let alone saying everyone of a certain race must have been racist.
Four, there has been massive upheaval. The economy of South Africa has collapsed, and the ANC did seize property under the auspices of BEE. Large companies were told they had to hand shares to ANC members or they would be shut down, these companies then took out loans to buy back their shares. The current President was a friend of Mandela, union leader, he was then gifted hundreds of millions in shares...that is how he became wealthy (and, if you can believe it, he is the "anti-corruption" guy).
Five, the reason there wasn't bloodshed because there was a transitional period. This was agreed by both parties, this is why Mandela wins plaudits for recognizing that NP had legitimate concerns that had to be taken into account to move forward. But...this still hasn't stopped the country collapsing.
Six, the argument that there must still be racism because of economic inequality is a uniquely US take. The ANC expropriated wealth en masse, the majority went to party insiders, and there has been almost no interest in serious economic policy-making because...the country is majority black, and the ANC are the black party. The reason people are poor is because there is no education and so they have no skills, crime is also out of control...this doesn't have anything to do with someone else not being poor (and btw, almost everyone in South Africa is now poor, the currency has collapsed, everything has collapsed, there is so much corruption that electricity cuts frequently...yes, those white people again though...this is why Malema is popular).
Seven, it was reasonable for de Klerk to be wary. What happened to Rhodesia? Everyone has this idea that everything would be fine, just trust Mandela...okay, there is a country next door where you saw whites being slaughtered en masse when Zanu-PF took power. The country has still been ruined, but that didn't happen at least.
He essentially preserved the economic/racial balance of apartheid, while he and the people around him became the new insiders. He started hanging out with the Clintons and giving diamonds to Naomi Campbell.
> To me, the peaceful transition is the achievement. It is the amazing part of it.
Apartheid was "peaceful" enough. The problem is the lack of "transition." The same people are still living in the shacks their parents lived in.
> that's why non-South Africans look on Mandela so fondly.
Non-South Africans had a lot of cognitive dissonance because they did business with South Africa and they didn't like what that said about themselves morally. The end of Apartheid gave them the license to continue that business guilt-free. It's like how sharecropping debt peonage to the same plantations that people were enslaved in and the leasing of convicts who had been sentenced to decade-long sentences for the crime of vagrancy let Americans feel better about how much they benefited from slavery.
Does poverty not also ruin lives? There's room for people to disagree about the specifics but the lack of widespread wealth redistribution has certainly killed a lot of people as well, it's just easier to ignore than a war.
South Africa does have wealth distribution policies in the form of requiring all companies that do business with the state or which need licences (like mines or telecoms) to have a minimum number of black ownership and black employees.
South Africa also has affirmative action.
In fact, there are more race based laws in South Africa currently than during Apartheid.
https://freemarketfoundation.com/race-law-in-south-africa-30...
Now maybe you're talking about violent wealth redistribution. That generally doesn't work. It results in collapse and everyone gets poorer.
Zimbabwe bring the prime most recent example.
The current President also benefitted heavily from BEE as he was a close personal friend of Mandela. Made hundreds of millions.
If you say that you are going to take large amounts of other people's assets, there is no way to run that process and not have huge amounts of corruption.
The problem has been: very high crime, heavily mismanaged infrastructure (Eskom is collapsing due to corruption, ANC politicians were taking tons of money from contracts), no investment in education, and so a population with no skills. I am not sure what wealth redistribution fixes...it has been tried repeatedly. It is like people thinking that a $1m loan from your father turns you into a different person...no, most people will end up wasting that money too.
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The existence of a viable ANC was arguably pretty important to the international pressure, though. Absent a viable opposition, you probably do not _want_ to exert _too_ much pressure on a rogue state, however nasty, because its only response is to either go full autarky, or collapse into complete chaos.
Take North Korea, say, another extremely nasty rogue nuclear-armed state. Even if there was a level of pressure that the international community could put on North Korea that would collapse it (it's already pretty far down the 'autarky' route), you can see that countries would be unwilling to go quite _that_ far, because there's no viable opposition and it would likely collapse in a very dangerous and ugly way.
You don't even need to use hypothetical examples. Libya, Iraq, arguably Syria, Yemen, Yugoslavia.
Though to be fair none of these had happened prior to apartheid.
> What actually ended apartheid was international pressure
There wasn't any international pressure. There was a withdrawal of the continual and embarrassing support from Britain and the US, the only people other than Israel who hadn't been overly troubled by Apartheid. First from Britain, because as bad as she was, Thatcher was nauseated by Apartheid, then from the US who would have had to actively intervene (as they are right now in a similar context) in order to preserve Apartheid. This was only 25 years after the US had ended its own legal Apartheid.
The US political class was largely indifferent to Apartheid (aside from periodic expressions of mild disapproval of both sides and condemnation of Communist-backed terrorism), so when they saw how the wind was blowing within SA ("fear of a civil war"), and that individual domestic politicians could be damaged or gain politically through their actions towards SA, the US supported the "coup" (as always) so they could keep doing business without interruption.
So I'd instead say popular pressure among citizens of the US and Britain against their own politicians, and the resulting withdrawal of Anglo-American support. Everything else but "international pressure" I agree with totally.
“ as they are right now in a similar context” You can be more direct about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians! All it takes for evil to succeed ….
There's no similar context because the Apartheid system that existed in South Africa has no resemblance to today's Israel.
In particular:
- There's no racial segregation laws; an Arab-Israeli can travel anywhere a Jewish-Israeli can. In fact, Arabic is an officially recognized language by the state of Israel, and throughout the country, every public service has signs in Arabic alongside Hebrew.
- Jews are not a minority in Israel, they comprise 78% of the population.
> There's no similar context because the Apartheid system that existed in South Africa has no resemblance to today's Israel.
According to Human Rights Watch[1], Amnesty International[2], and many other human rights organizations, the regime in Israel today is in fact recognized as a system of apartheid. Mandela himself shown a lot of solidarity to the palestinian cause[3].
[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2022/02/qa-israel...
[3] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/nelson-mandela-30-years-p...
So, believe biased organizations or the dictionary. I'll go with the dictionary.
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> Arab-Israeli can travel anywhere …
That is simply not true. E.g. The city of Hebron is segregated by religion - see https://youtu.be/Z42HhaywhGQ?si=bTBhEFi5lgBJQX9v
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How is it "Palestinian apartheid" when Israeli soldiers are the ones enforcing it?
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> If the alternative offered by the Palestinian Authority is ethnically cleansing all the Jews out of Hebron, it seems reasonable for the soldiers to be there to keep the peace?
So demanding that settlers who illegally occupied land is “ethnic cleansing”? And you seem to be ceding my point and agreeing that it is apartheid, but justified.
> The Israeli government is obviously not perfect, but Arab citizens of Israel are generally treated way better than Jewish citizens of Muslim countries.
Whataboutism and irrelevant.
One comment ago you were saying it’s “”Palestinian apartheid”, now you are saying that it may be apartheid but it’s justified and so what, other countries are worse. I’m sorry but this I’m not going to engage any further with this type of discourse.
in your opinion these are settlers illegally occupying land, in their opinion they came back after they were ethnically cleansed from Hebron in the 1929 and 1936 massacres
sometimes life is surprisingly complicated
That's not why there's massive income inequality in South Africa. LOL.
Sometimes all it takes is for the right people to see at the right time that their opponent bleeds just the same red blood as they do.
That might have been the symbolic last drop that made the bucket overflow.
I disagree with how this post was downvoted so heavily – this in an illustrative moment of rapprochement near the end of apartheid; saying it ended apartheid was a figure of speech, of course it didn't end apartheid in and of itself. It's as reasonable as saying that the fall of the Berlin Wall ended the Cold War.