Cyrus’ Potato Bread

Apologies for not updating the blog super often. Usually I’m more active on Facebook/Twitter, so follow me there if you so desire.

In any case, lately I’ve gotten back into baking. I’ve been on a potato bread kick lately (just finished my fifth tonight), but have also made apple scones, and experimental speculoos paste/stroopwaffel cookies.

The recipe I’ve been using for potato bread is derived from The Cheese Board Collective Works, which is published by The Cheese Board Collective, a fantastic, cooperative cheese shop and bakery in Berkeley, Calif.

Cyrus’ Potato Bread (adapted from pp. 78-79, The Cheese Board Collective Works):

Ingredients:

1.5 oz/42 g of fresh yeast (One rectangular cube that they sell at German supermarkets for €0.19)
1.5 cups (350 mL) cold tap water
4 cups (~1 L) of flour. (Here in Germany I’ve experimented with flour Types 405 and 550, and half-half of each. I don’t notice much of a difference.)
1 tablespoon of coarse sea salt (Original recipes calls for kosher, but coarse is what I have on-hand.)
1 teaspoon of finely ground black pepper (Original recipe calls for coarse, but I don’t have a pepper mill)
A few splashes of olive oil
4-6 Speisekartoffeln, boiled until soft, peeled, shredded (original recipe calls for 2 russet. I approximate to rough volume of two baking-sized Idaho russet potatoes.)

1) Crumble yeast into water in a large mixing bowl until mostly dissolved. (I use my hands, but you could use whatever kitchen tools you prefer.)

2) Add salt, pepper, flour, olive oil.

3) Knead by hand for about 10 minutes. If the dough is too sticky, add a handful of flour. If too dry, add a another splash of water or olive oil.

4) Spread out dough in the bottom of the mixing bowl so it covers the entire bottom in a disc-shape. Pour the shredded potatoes onto the dough and fold the dough all around it. Knead again for another two minutes, and try to integrate the potatoes as much as possible. (Book says: “Do not knead the dough too long at this point, or the potatoes will cause it to become gummy.”)

5) Pour a thin layer of olive oil around the dough ball and leave in the bowl. Cover bowl with a dish towel. (The book says to let rise for one hour. I’ve found that three hours is preferable. Today, I made the dough before I went to work, so by the time I came home today it had been seven hours — I think this was the best one so far.)

6) About an hour before baking, punch down the dough. That means just take it in your hands and compress it as much as possible, and fold it over a few times.

7) About 15-30 minutes before baking, pre-set oven to 225 C/450 F. I have a pizza stone in my oven, but probably you can just use the oven rack or a baking sheet.

8) About 5-10 minutes before baking, flour up a cutting board and place the dough there into a loaf shape. Again, if too sticky, add more flour. Toss a little flour on top too, for decoration. Slice three to four times at a 45 degree angle. (A serrated bread knife works best for this.) Let the slices open up for about five minutes.

9) Take four ice cubes and put them in a measuring cup. Fill with water to a total volume of about one cup (250 mL). Pour into a small, oven-safe dish (I use a 8″x8″ brownie pan), and place on the bottom of the oven.

10) Working quickly, slide the loaf into the oven on the middle rack. (This is where my pizza stone sits.)

11) Set a timer for five minutes. Once that’s up, repeat step 9 and let steam for another five minutes. (This is what makes the crust so good.)

12) After a total of 10 minutes, you may want to rotate the bread 180 degrees if you can.

13) Set another timer for about 30-40 minutes, “or until the loaf is golden and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.”

14) Set on your cutting board, take a picture and share with your friends online! (Let cool at least 10-15 minutes before eating.)

Interview with Marie Javins, traveler extraordinaire

I first encountered Marie Javins (@mariejavins) online sometime back in December of 2005. I was totally impressed by her 2001 solo trip by land and sea around the globe. We met up for breakfast in New York once, and have traded messages as we’ve moved on to live in Europe (me) and the Middle East (her).

As she describes herself on her site:

Marie Javins is an award-winning writer, comic book creator, traveler, and blogger who alternates between roaming the planet by public bus, overseeing the output of a Kuwait-based superhero comic book company as editor in chief, and writing books entirely unrelated to her day job. In 2001, she circumnavigated the world by surface transport live on MariesWorldTour.com.

We’ve corresponded over the last 5.5 years — usually trading travel tips.

But since March 1, 2011, she’s been back on the road — this time doing the world tour AGAIN — IN REVERSE, starting off in Melilla, the Spanish exclave in Morocco.

In between braving Nigerian moneychangers and chatting with Scottish-Gambians, Marie found a few minutes (ok, probably the better part of an hour, if not more) to respond to some questions from me by e-mail.

1) So you’ve already done one world tour? Why a second one? What’s your plan/itinerary for this time around?

Marie Javins: My plan is to circumnavigate the globe in reverse of my original trip, seeing parts of the world I didn’t see the first time. It’s a big world — you can’t see it all at once! I have seen many parts of it since the first MariesWorldTour.com, most notably Australia and the Middle East, both of which I’ve resided in for short periods over the last decade. Of course, there are repeats in my plan. There are gateway cities and duplication is unavoidable, but as they are good spots to rest and plan (Bangkok springs to mind, which is a great place to do nothing except see dentists and doctors and eat sticky rice), I wouldn’t want to avoid them.

In 2001, I traveled from East to West, taking the train across the US first and then crossing the Pacific to Australia, then finding my way through Southeast Asia, up into Russia, over to the Baltics, then out of Germany to Cape Town by ship, where I started the long journey north via East Africa. I returned to Europe via Israel and Italy, and crossed the Atlantic from Southampton.

This time, I am traveling in the other direction, west to east. I flew from New York to Spain on March 1, where I caught a ferry to the African continent. I’ve been using trains, shared taxis, and buses to head south since then, running into a bump with the lack of roads in the Congos (at which point I gave up on land and flew rather than miss Brazzaville and Kinshasa by looping over the Atlantic tips of the Congos into Angola), and hope to be in Cape Town by the time anyone reads this.

My next flight leg is June 3 from Cape Town to Madagascar, then on to Bangkok from there. I’ll loop up into China then down via Tibet and Nepal to India—provided I can get the necessary permit—book a trip into Bhutan (a single land border is open), then use budget airlines to fly back to Bangkok from India, and also visit Borneo and Bali before moving onto Australia—this turned out to be a necessary stop to make my RTW ticket work, so I’ll go to Western Australia and Tasmania, both new to me—then Tahiti and the Marquesas before returning home just after Christmas.

This time — the biggest difference (besides higher cost — ouch, US dollar!) is the method of transportation. I used freighters (and the QE2) in 2001. This time, I had enough frequent flyer miles to get a free (or almost free, as there are still taxes that needed to be paid) round-the-world Star Alliance ticket. I originally tried to book ships — which are also less bad for the environment — but I ran into two hurdles.

a) There was a reason I went in the other direction last time, and that’s because it made sense with the season and the shipping lanes. For example, for my 2011 trip, there was only one way out of Cape Town heading east to Asia, and it was thousands of dollars. Having only one option on an extended trip where you live by your wits is never a good idea, though it is sometimes unavoidable. Had I been catching a ship from Cape Town to Europe via the west coast, there would have been multiple options.

b) When I booked the ships in 2001, they were pricey, but this was pre-euro. The Deutsch Mark was the currency of many ships, and the US dollar was quite strong against the Deutsch Mark in 2001. Now, the dollar has taken a beating against the euro. When I finally sat down and did the math, and realized I’d be spending about $10,000 for ships versus flying for nearly free, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

I have mixed feelings about sacrificing the ships. On the one hand, I’ve spent a LOT of time on ships. I don’t feel like there’s a lot more I can say about them. You eat. You sleep. You read. You work on your laptop, maybe see some dolphins, and chat with the crew. This is not particularly riveting material to those who were not there–I remember being teased for my weeks of posts about hanging out with Russians on the Direct Kiwi freighter–but on the other hand, you’ve GOT to build in rest time on a marathon trip. Ship travel is enforced rest, which I need. You don’t have to constantly think ahead to where your next meal and next bed will be. I’m exhausted right now, and the result if that I don’t enjoy traveling in the way I would if I had just gotten off a ship after being taken care of for three weeks.

One problem I ran into with the round-the-world airplane ticket nearly derailed my plans at the start. It’s surprisingly difficult to build an itinerary within the parameters of the ticket. You can only go in one direction—in my case west to east—and you only get six stops with a single open-jaw, and there are a limited number of segments, so you have to plan strategically. But the one direction thing isn’t always correct, as there are destinations you cannot get out of on the airline alliance without backtracking (Madagascar and Tahiti are good examples of this). So sometimes they let you backtrack in order to then jump ahead of where you were. I was trying to get to the US from Tahiti. But Star Alliance’s partner in that part of the world is Air New Zealand, and they don’t fly east out of Tahiti. So I end up flying all the way back to Auckland, to then turn around and fly back across the Pacific to the US. And can’t stop overnight anywhere en route, because that would be backtracking. Which isn’t allowed, though I am technically backtracking.

It’s confusing, and there would be times when a brilliant ticketing agent would sort out how to get me to Yap, then on to Guam, but then couldn’t find a seat to get me from Guam to Australia, which I needed in order to get to the Air New Zealand options.

In the end, I added Australia as a stop when no one could find a way to get me to Yap or Vanuatu or Fiji. After working out that to get from Tahiti to South America, I’d have to fly to Auckland, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and then Peru, I didn’t even end up using all six stops. I gave up and settled for five. South and Central America aren’t on the agenda at all now. That’s fine—those are frequently in my holiday plans when I only have two weeks vacation and am based in New York.


2) How has the world changed since you last did this? What have you packed differently?

The digital possibilities are so exciting now . . . in 2001, I didn’t bother bringing so much as a phone. Remember the days of floppy disks? Yikes. No one would even let you put them in their computers at Internet cafes for fear of viruses.

The world was on cusp of something new and different in 2001, and it was frustrating. I had a digital camera, but I didn’t take it along on my trip since it was heavy, low-res, and there was no way to get the material off of the camera and online. Transferring files involved software and a cable. No internet cafe would let you install your own software onto their machines then. And forget using a floppy (if I had taken my own laptop). Floppy drives were taped up from Bali to Mongolia for fear of viruses. Hanging out in Starbucks while uploading from your own wi-fi didn’t exist yet (though I had some nice iced coffees at Starbucks in Bangkok and stole napkins from the China branches).

The closest thing we had to a global ISP in 2001 was AOL. International costs were frequently insane, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that traveling at ground-level means you seldom came across a hotel with in-room phones. So really, what was the point of carrying a laptop or a digital camera? I couldn’t get the info off the gadgets and into the wider world.

In 2001, I took a film camera with a big extra lens, got film developed as I went, and scanned in at cybercafes, using whatever (frequently awful) imaging software was on hand. I wrote in longhand and typed frantically, paying by the hour, in cybercafes. I wrote raw HTML in Notepad and uploaded it to my webmaster—now we have WordPress and Blogger.

Like I said, it was frustrating. We had all this amazing new technology but were hindered by it not quite being there yet.

Fast-forward a few years, and I wouldn’t even think of going abroad then without my snow iBook, which had the most amazing little Airport card in it. In 2005, I used to sit in coffee shops in Kampala for hours, uploading freelance comic book coloring files for Disney and Marvel. Speeds were slow, but the ability to work remotely made it possible for me to work first in Uganda, and then later to finish coloring a Fantastic Four Masterworks from an apartment I’d rented in Namibia. I wrote “Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik” when I worked and lived in Kuwait, the 3-D children’s atlas in Cairo, and finished writing a guidebook on camping in New Jersey while living in Barcelona.

The most amazing change in the last ten years has got to be the prevalence of wi-fi. I’ve had it in more than half the hotels in West Africa, though it’s frequently broken or excruciatingly slow. Seven years ago, I’d have said the amazing change was the USB stick, which enabled me to transfer things from my own laptop to one in a cybercafe. Now we have the cloud, though I still carry a USB stick.

Or maybe the most amazing change is the mobile phone. Actually, it IS the mobile phone. Let’s rank wi-fi second and the “cloud” third. Because while computing gives me personally the economic freedom of making a living wherever I have my laptop and wi-fi, the mobile phone is giving everyone else independence and capabilities beyond anything they had before. I’m not trying to overstate this. I don’t think it can be overstated.

The mobile phone is to the masses of the unindustrialized world what the laptop and wi-fi are to me. People use it for communication, finance, for snapshots and amateur video, and for getting online. The phone platform has been incredibly useful to me too. I have a first generation cracked iPhone (on your recommendation, Cyrus), and I would not travel without it. I use the Notes feature to jot down info and expenditures as I go. I read my guidebook on Kindle for iPhone, and this is so much more subtle than dragging a book out on a street corner. I surreptitiously snap photos when people think I am texting. I can play a little music at night when I use it as an iPod, and of course there’s the currency app, the distance conversion app, Google maps, the alarm clock, and SMS-to-Twitter, which in conjunction with an international SIM called OneSimCard.com means I can tell everyone whenever my bus has a flat tire. I think of my Twitter stream and Facebook posts as notes for myself, reminding me later of what I thought important at the time, and also to try out stories on a limited audience before posting them on my blog.

All that said, I have read some interviews with other travel writers where they go on at length about the evils of instant communication, where they are happy to judge people using laptops and phones on the road as being somehow deficient as travelers, as if their contact with home is impure and damaging to their experience. It reminds me of the inane debate of travelers-versus-tourists, where someone in a hostel crows their superiority to granny on her dream trip on a guided tour. To this I say: Must be nice to not have to make a living while you travel. And to have the luxury of having people at home to take care of things, so that you don’t suddenly have to figure out why your tenant’s cable TV got cut off while you’re in Kinshasa. I can’t help but peg someone as semi-Luddite for making a statement about modern technology being detrimental to the travel experience, as if there is some neat definition of what one should enjoy while on the road. Fine, you wander the streets looking for a room. I’ll just stand here and make some calls.

Besides me needing to work for a living and these being the tools that bring in the money that pays for my trip, I’m not out here in the world with the notion that by stopping somewhere for a short time, I’m able to immerse myself in a culture. That’s fiction. You try to learn about a place, try to get past only meeting taxi drivers, waiters, and front desk clerks—and that is the primary reason I go by public transport—but it’s actually quite rare to get past a superficial understanding as you travel. I can’t say it doesn’t happen because it occasionally does. But I do believe it takes being resident to understand a culture, and even then, the process is long and unreliable.

One last comment on packing: I’ve gotten so slack about it. In 2001, I had a gadget for everything. This time, I barely brought any of that. I know now that if you can’t buy it abroad, you probably don’t need it anyway. That hasn’t lightened my bag though—the space that was made available by losing the SLR, the film, the gadgets, and the books is taken up by my laptop, my Lumix, my chargers, my mini-hard drive with all my video files and my comic book materials on it.

And my Kindle. That’s an astonishing invention for the traveler. Looking at maps on it blows, but I no longer have to lug around heavy guidebooks and then try to locate a book I want to read among the crap at the typical hostel book swap. I definitely prefer reading a paper book to a Kindle book, but for someone carrying everything on their back, the eReader is a godsend.

3) Has doing a massive road trip like this lost its luster at all? Seems like from your blog posts and tweets that you’re a bit more frustrated with the process and are just powering through for the sake of doing it. Am I missing something?

Oh, no, you’re not missing anything. I am tired. Exhausted, actually. But what you’re missing is that this is how it was last time too. It’s normal to be frustrated when you travel at ground level on public transportation.

Travel sounds so glamorous until you’re actually on your sixth day of 11-hour bus journeys over potholed roads, feeling the sweat of a stranger up against your forearm, and the breath of another on your cheek.

A massive road trip like this has in many ways lost its luster—although I do get a twisted enjoyment out of things the worse they are, but that’s more in retrospect, after I know the resolution — because unlike the first time, I knew exactly what I was in for. Frustration mixed with the dull boredom of staring out a window all day, followed by a frantic free-for-all as you try to navigate the unfamiliar in a strange city with several people jostling for your business.

Over the last ten years, I’ve grown much fonder of a different style of travel than the one I’m currently undertaking. I prefer to live in a destination for months, getting a feel for a place’s daily rhythms, slowly learning about a culture. What I learned while living in Cairo, for example, is how little I’d taken away during the times I’d visited as a tourist. And in spite of spending seven months in Cairo in 2007, I had to admit that by the end, my eyes had been opened to how little I genuinely knew and understood about the culture not-my-own. What this means on a trip where you race through cities spending only a few days, or a week here and there, is that you get only a general feel for a place, and maybe you have a few interactions that make a nice story. But you don’t know a place. My story, when I race around the world, isn’t about the places I visit. It’s absurd to think I’m some sort of expert based on a short stay in a country. The story is more about the process of travel set against each region, and about my adventures — both internal and external — against this backdrop.

Even knowing how tired I would be and how little I’d take away from each region on a trip like the one I’m on, I still wanted to do it. Before I left home, I made a deal with myself. This is the last time, I thought. Do this kind of trip one last time. Tolerate the long bus journeys, the chaos of the ports and the gare routieres, because the benefits of seeing so many places from local transport outweigh the risk of vehicle accidents and pickpocketing, the inconveniences, the numb feet, and piercingly pained knees. I told myself: Get through this one last one, Marie, and you can go back to renting a flat in Barcelona for three months instead, to a short two week holiday in Colombia here, ten days in Cuba there, residences or holidays instead of expeditions. Just this one . . . last . . . time . . .

I would like to write a book about the West Africa leg, of course, a sequel to “Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik” (Seal Press, 2006), where I went from Cape Town to Cairo in 2001. But we’ll see. So far, I don’t have a story, just a series of vignettes playing out in shared taxis and on buses.

4) What are you most looking forward to on the trip this time around?

I knew West Africa would be exhausting, but I was also looking forward to it since it’s relatively undocumented in comparison with the eastern Cape-to-Cairo route. Now that that’s over, I am looking forward to the Asian loop. This is going to take a lot of research, but I have my month in Bangkok to study up on how to get a permit to get into Tibet and how to not spend a fortune going into Bhutan. There is a $200/day minimum expenditure to go to Bhutan, but when I looked at the operators that run groups, the fee was a great deal more. I will have to sit down with the Bhutan Tourism website and chase links to find a local operator that suits me.

I’m also excited about the Marquesas trip. I’ve booked a dorm bed on the Aranui, the freighter that makes monthly circuits around these remote Pacific islands out of Tahiti. I looked into doing this trip independently, but the flight costs mixed with the accommodation were so high that the dorm bed made a lot of sense. Plus, the islanders hold a festival once every four years, where they all display their crafts, and this year’s theme is “the apprentice.” I’m not sure exactly what to expect, but the Marquesas are remote enough that this isn’t going to be geared to tourism.


5) Some people say that people who are perpetually on the road, or on these long-term trips like you are “running away from something.” Do you buy that? How do you react to other people’s reactions of what you do?

If someone actually says outright “What are you running from,” I will tell them they’re just silly. What a cliché. “Running from people like you,” might be the right response to that comment. You can’t run away. You carry everything with you, way over you luggage limit in invisible baggage. I don’t believe that travel inherently changes anyone aside from giving them more confidence and less prejudice, though from the various platitudes I spot on travel operator’s sites, in magazines, and in personal blogs, I seem to be alone in thinking this.

That said, I find being on the road constantly bad for my state-of-mind. I spend a lot of time at home too, because when I traveled too long, I found myself rootless. Everywhere was home, and nowhere was home. Friends were abstractions, and I was completely emotionally independent. In my late thirties, I realized that being alone in the universe wasn’t something I wanted, though it took me a few more years of working in Kuwait and Cairo before I was able to settle down and stay home for three years.

Not everyone has this problem, and many people choose to stay abroad. I do love the challenge of improvising a solution in a foreign culture, where you have to think on your feet and try to solve a problem you had no idea existed a few minutes ago. But I have learned over the years that I prefer to visit that life, and that while I am a good expatriate due to my natural inclination to be alienated, I choose “home.” I’m abroad for ten months this time, seeing parts of the world that are new to me and working on my stories about the trip. But I have not given up my apartment this trip, I’m still working in comics, and I haven’t even turned off my phone. This is the choice I’ve made and it’s good for me to have roots, but it’s not the right answer for everyone. Some people are able to put down roots in other places, while others stay rootless and wander the world, enjoying the adrenalin that comes along with never knowing what comes next. But me, I need a home base and I need long-term friends. That’s what I’ve learned about myself and my wanderings over the last decade.

My iPhone tracking data

So in the wake of this iPhone tracking data scandal I did what a lot of people did — download the app and track my own data.

My map is plotted here:

Now, I got my iPhone in February 2011 in California. I have no data for the two weeks I was in California, nor the layover in Dallas/Forth Worth airport. Nor do I have any data showing my trips earlier this year to Hannover, Budapest, and two weekends ago to Aubel, Belgium and on to Maastricht, the Netherlands. I just have data for the immediate area around Bonn and my trip last week to Berlin.

Interesting.

Comodohacker speaks

I wrote an article about the Comodo hack for Deutsche Welle here. The following is an introduction to the full interview (further below) with Comodohacker.

On March 15, 2011, a major Internet-security company, Comodo, said that it sustained a major security breach, by allowing nine “SSL certificates,” to be issued in their name. These certificates are used to digitally authenticate a secure connection to websites like Gmail, Hotmail and Skype. The hacker acquired fake certificates for Gmail, Hotmail, Google, Yahoo, Skype, and Mozilla. However, once this attack became known, those certificates were revoked, eliminating their risk of being used for malicious purposes. On Tuesday, Comodo further announced on an security e-mail list that two more registration authority accounts had been compromised.

The first breach came through a Comodo partner in Italy, GlobalTrust, which had its network compromised apparently by an Iranian hacker. Comodo disclosed the attack on its company blog on March 23, but noted that “this may be the result of an attacker attempting to lay a false trail.” Computer security experts often note that they can never be 100 percent certain of the origins of such a breach.

However, security researchers are very concerned that if a Iranian government agents or other malicious agents could duplicate this attack, then that could create serious problems.

“In theory, an Iranian attempting to log into his Yahoo account, for example, could have been misdirected to a fake site,” wrote Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer at F-Secure in Finland, on his company’s blog last week.

“That would allow the perpetrators to obtain a host of online information including contents of email, passwords and usernames, while monitoring activity on the dummy sites. Since the targeted sites offer communication services, not financial transactions, Comodo said it seemed clear the hackers sought information, not money.”

Last Saturday, March 26, someone claiming to be the “ComodoHacker,” began posting messages and technical details of the attack, leading many to believe that he was, indeed, responsible for these breaches. Comodohacker said that he was a self-taught, 21-year-old university student in Iran.

To learn more, Icontacted him using the e-mail address that he provided on these posts. However, it is impossible to verify with 100 percent certainty the claims that he makes. His responses have only been edited for spelling and clarity.

Cyrus Farivar: What’s your name, and where do you live in Iran? What school do you attend? How can you prove that you are in Iran?

ComodoHacker: My name is ComodoHacker. University, I don’t want to prove it, I already sent my political views and my writeups shows I’m from Iran. Anyone doesn’t believe, I think have personal problems, no offense.

What was your ultimate goal in terms of cracking the system of digital certificates? How were you trying to use them, presuming you’re not working with the government? Why these specific targets, Yahoo, Skype, et cetera?

I answered this question too much time. First of all, I should say, there is no Green Movement in Iran, just some gangsters with woods and stones, attacks normal people in a day they get out. Really they are counted and they just harm people.

From here, I say to them, stop being a gang and hear the voice of people of Iran, do not obey instructions who comes from people outside of Iran, they don’t have power to do anything, they just use you for their targets, they write reports about how they managed [protesters] in Tehran and get paid, what you can in return? Jail.

Let’s back to idea of its usage. MKO members [Note: an Islamic socialist organization that advocates the overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran] have secure private networks in Germany, France, Canada, USA, Iraq, Jordan. Other Green Movement leaders mostly reside in USA.

Some remaining and counted people lives in Iran. Accessing and owning their private networks, maybe already done, maybe I’ll do it. But with a good control on their gateway and my signed certificates everything would go well, right?

A group of people who just harm and have no use for people, should not have privacy in digital world, with zero-day bugs [Note: A flaw in a security system that the operators of that system are unaware of] I have which I don’t want to even name vulnerable software or hardware, owning network itself is so easy. For decrypting traffic, I need some other tools which I gathered. I invite Comodo CEO to talk, I don’t want to talk about second breach to Comodo.

Comodo was lucky for detecting me, who knows? Maybe another not popular [certificate authority] decided to not talk. Or maybe they didn’t notice anything (at least not yet)?

I said it once, as I live, privacy in Internet is impossible. I would be happy to publish PGP and GPG keyrings of these gangsters which they think protect them. Enough said. Enjoy surfing Internet.

You’ve said that you acted alone. Do you understand why that’s hard for a lot of people to believe?

It’s because people don’t understand power of Iranian scientist, they also didn’t believe our power in physics, in laser, in sending satellites, to be honest, I’m tired of explaining my country’s potential, when we decide to do something, we just do.

Everything isn’t what you see, everything isn’t materials you touch, there is some stuff you can’t see, like God, sometimes God helps some people. Most of people doesn’t understand, it’s exactly what Holy Quran says. That’s someone like me in my age owns Internet security structure alone, decrypt most of encryption protocols, breaks A5/1, breaks other software/hardware which I don’t want to talk about them.

Have you had any contact with anyone in the Iranian government, Sepah [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps], Basij, Gerdab.ir or anyone else in that vein prior to, during, or subsequent to this attack?

No, to be honest, [I’ve been wondering] about it also, no one can reach me personally via tracing that IP, that’s not my actual IP, I have too much tunnels, in fact I tried to be completely hidden and being appeared from another country’s IP, but I didn’t noticed my tunnel’s VPN connection disconnected from target server. So they saw my first tunnel. I thought some people inside Iran, some press or any other org. will contact me, but no one contacted me, maybe they didn’t find my email address or they got so deep in that IP. Who knows?

Why post on Pastebin about the hack? Why did you wait four days until after Jacob Appelbaum‘s [Note: an American security researcher] original post to respond? Why attract attention to yourself?

Because I saw a lot of false allegations about my hack, some said it was Iranian government, some said I’m from Cyber Army, etc. I decided to tell the truth about it. I don’t like to see my work assigned to someone else, in previous works.

Comodo said on its blog: “The IP address of the initial attack was recorded and has been determined to be assigned to an ISP in Iran.” Why didn’t you conceal your IP better, presuming you are actually in Iran?

Answered above.

What’s next for you?

All encryption systems/protocols CIA have access to them but my country doesn’t. I’ll reverse/cryptanalysis/attack in any method I can, owning servers, breaking algorithm, reversing code to break them and bring equality.

As I said in my first post, CIA have access to all e-mails of me, a copy of my e-mail goes to CIA officals before even reaching you, I want same rights, why not?

Funny printer bug patched two years after being public, because creators of Stuxnet (USA and Israel) ordered so. So I have my own zero-days for several highly critical softwares which I don’t want to even name them, I use them on my targets, no one should patch it. I love equality.

I’m Iranian-American, so I don’t doubt the capability of Iran or Iranians. 🙂

But still, you haven’t quite answered this basic question: What was your ultimate goal and what did you plan on doing with these certificates, and why target these specific companies, Yahoo, Skype, etc?

Decrypting traffic of anti-Islamic republic groups like MKO and Green Movement leaders like Balatarin and other site’s members, I already own a lot of their networks. It will help me to decrypt all their encrypted communications. Their private networks are located in France, Germany, Jordan, USA and Canada. Some of them also connected to people in Iran via VPNs. They should know from now, they are insecure, I got what I wanted, Comodo published breach, others don’t that’s all.

Portrait of a year in Bonn

Crazy to believe. Our one-year anniversary of arriving in Bonn was on Friday. I’m trying to run through a mental list of all of the things that we’ve done, seen, eaten, traveled to, and people we’ve met since we first set foot in Bonn on March 25, 2010. (Reviewing my Twitter posts helps too.)

Departed Oakland. Arrived, bags in hand. First stayed: Hotel Ibis. First dinner: Mediterraneo. Bonn puns. First apartment (danke, Thomas and Couchsurfing!) in the Bonn Altstadt. Cherry blossoms on Heerstrasse. First outdoor beer of the spring. I start jamming with the Rheinbläser. Eislabor. A weekend in Hamburg. Bonn Capitals baseball games. Rheinaue Flohmarkt. Made American, German (and heck, Danish!) friends. Funnybone Club im Kellar.

Started a German “intensivekurs” at IFS. Global Voices in Santiago. World Cup in Bonn (‘Schland!). Spargelzeit. Our first wedding anniversary! Spent a day biking to Koblenz. Started hosting Spectrum!

Biked into the Netherlands just to watch a World Cup game. Fettes Brot show in Cologne. House-sat in Niederdollendorf. Hiking in the Ahrtal. A weekend in Mainz. Road trip to Luxembourg. Said goodbye to some Bonn friends who left for the US, but made new ones.

New (and totally sweet!) Bad Godesberg apartment. Baking bread. Spiel (we met Klaus!) Berlin. Snow. Maastricht. Liège. Brussels. December in France (and more snow). New Year’s in the UK. Flooded Rhine. Bonn Tweetup. Two weeks back in the 510! Karneval! (Alaaf!) Budapest.

What’s next for the rest of 2011?

Bike trip into Belgium with Nate to check out Val-Dieu. Re:publica in Berlin. Alex visits? My book drops! Readings in NYC. Paris, Geneva, Lyon. Rebecca’s book drops! Nena visits! Amsterdam. Croatia via Kosovo to Greece! Brussels, London. Copenhagen? Xmas back in the 510.

Fmr. US State Dept. official in Tehran Henry Precht on WikiLeaks

The following message was sent to the Gulf2000 email list on December 19, 2010 and is re-printed here below with his permission. Henry Precht is a retired Foreign Service officer who was country director for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and subsequent hostage crisis. -CF

As I understand it, Wikileaks has captured a huge half of State Department cable reports — the less interesting half. As Frank Rettenberg has written, the really good stuff is sent under captions (EXDIS, NODIS, etc.) that restrict distribution. Each Department principal (assistant secretary and above) will have a flunky whose job it is to winnow the traffic that arrives hourly. Into the burn bag go much of the reporting that Wikileaks is publishing; into it also goes lots of the restricted traffic that provides no special insights. What is left are the relatively few messages that are read by policy-making eyes. The Wikileaks material is destined mainly for desk officers whose knowledge is supposed to be encyclopedic and must constantly be affirmed.

The Wikileaks stuff is generated by political officers whose words are designed to give the flavor and context of life abroad, frequently, but not always, in support of established US positions. (The Department has difficulty coming up with nominees for its dissent awards.) Thus, I imagine an Iran listening post will report on the complaints of dissatisfied Iranians while not considering it news when a regime supporter praises A/N. Not unusually, the reporter may also try to elaborate on the news described and published by journalists, i.e., the accepted wisdom. The most useful reporting is when Washington is taken by surprise by a conversation or observation.

So how did the views of various Gulf royals about Iran slip into the Wikileaks collection? Perhaps a mistake in classification. (That will surely not again be repeated.) Perhaps, the reporting officer did not consider the views as news, having been frequently expressed in cables. Similarly, the unflattering descriptions of various European leaders were probably considered part of the commonly accepted truths appearing in the press — and thus not requiring special (EXDIS) protection.

In my distant day, a certain etiquette was observed in references to favored foreign leaders. I don’t recall ever reading a rude word about the leadership of Israel, or Sadat or the early Mubarak, or the Shah. Fear of leaks? Or the bended knee syndrome? Whatever the reason there was every inclination to protect friends and to avoid open discussion of our differences with them. Once an economic officer in Embassy Tehran, completing a four-year tour, wrote a detailed memo describing corruption in high places. Only two copies were made and they were closely guarded. Perhaps the occupiers of the Embassy have published it. Generally, speaking they did a much more comprehensive job a (if selective on certain subjects) of exposing official communications to the daylight.

Unhappily, the sheer volume of Wikileaks material will weigh heavily on US diplomacy for years to come. Foreigners will be less forthcoming with our officers; the reports produced by those officers will be more restricted in circulation. It will be harder to conduct our business under those conditions.

Henry Precht
Bethesda, Maryland

Iranian blogging pioneer temporarily released from prison

I just filed this latest update to the ongoing Hoder saga.

Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan was temporarily released from a Tehran prison, after having been incarcerated for 26 months, according to a report Thursday on Mashregh News, a conservative Iranian news website.

The site was among the first to report Derakhshan’s conviction at the end of September on charges of “conspiring with hostile governments, disseminating anti-Islamic propaganda, disseminating anti-revolutionary propaganda, blasphemy, and operating and managing obscene pornography websites.”

The account was confirmed by a source close to the Derakhshan family, who wished to remain anonymous and said Derakhshan was “happy to be out,” adding “we have been pushing for this for months, especially after his trial, but it has always been refused.”

The same source also told Deutsche Welle that Derakhshan “will be out for a couple of days only,” and that the family had put up $1.5 million (1.3 million euros) worth of bail to ensure Derakhshan returns to prison when demanded by authorities.

More here.

Joint French-Canadian statement in support of Hossein Derakhshan

Joint Declaration by Canada and France

(No. 341 – October 20, 2010 – 1:15 p.m. ET) The Honourable Lawrence Cannon, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada, and Bernard Kouchner (pictured), Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of France, made the following statement today concerning Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who is detained in Iran. Mr. Derakhshan is a Canadian citizen and his companion is a French national.

“We are jointly requesting that the Iranian authorities release Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who may have been condemned by a lower court to 19.5 years in prison.

“The governments of Canada and France are very concerned that Hossein Derakhshan continues to be detained in solitary confinement in Iran, in violation of fundamental rights. His case, which constitutes an affront to freedom of expression and information, is a priority for both our governments.

“We are also asking Iran to recognize Mr. Derakhshan’s dual citizenship, in particular by guaranteeing consular access, in accordance with the Vienna conventions.”