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He Always Had a Dark Side

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Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#61
post #6

>>"He was particularly protective of Le Roux’s birth mother, making me promise not to reveal her name. “Sad and interesting story,” he said. “His real mom’s mom is married to a U.S. Senator.” When I asked him who the Senator was, he said, “That I can’t say, mate. That’ll get me shot.”" This is probably a bigger story.

US Senators generally are not powerful enough to have people shot.

You are assuming the violence would be carried out using senatorial powers. Senators are generally very wealthy people, and it doesn't take that much money to hire someone to kill another person[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_killing#Statistics [2]

2: I have to say I was fairly hesitant to search for that data. It's not the kind of thing you want showing up in your search history...

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#63

By "arms dealer" do they mean "kind of sketchy online pharmacy entrepreneur"? Because I didn't see anything about weapons in this article. Perhaps that's still to come in part 2, but as of right now the title is extremely linkbaity. EDIT: title has been unlinkbaitified (previously "Truecrypt was written by a international arms dealer") EDIT2: title has been reverted to the linkbaity version (previously changed to the…

His name seems to be quite well known at this point, lots of stories about him cooperating with US feds in 2014-2015.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/world/asia/in-real-life-ra...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/nyregion/us-reveals-crimin...

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#64

Original author of the story here... Just to add that 1. yes, the reporting on Le Roux's childhood is more tentative based on a family source (well backed up by docs and images sent to me). But the fact that the same Le Roux created E4M which formed the basis of TrueCrypt is something I think I've established definitively, company and site registration trails show it very firmly (and PLR himself admits it in court, b…

Absolutely excellent reporting and writing. I'll start reading the other 2 parts now.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#65

Thank you. It's amazing how some authors use thousands of words to deliver such little information.

The article is overwhelmingly about the life and background of Paul. That's really the scoop here from the author's perspective, the fact that he happened to be the TrueCrypt founder is sort of an interesting aside (though also the reason anyone really cares to read about Paul's life).

edit: and the article author just posted on this comment thread saying the article(s) are more about Paul, not really specifically focusing on his connection to TrueCrypt.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#66

Original author of the story here... Just to add that 1. yes, the reporting on Le Roux's childhood is more tentative based on a family source (well backed up by docs and images sent to me). But the fact that the same Le Roux created E4M which formed the basis of TrueCrypt is something I think I've established definitively, company and site registration trails show it very firmly (and PLR himself admits it in court, b…

Aren't you nervous about doxxing someone like that so thoroughly?

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#69
post #13

> Lulu told me that when Le Roux was 15 or 16, in the late 1980s, the local police raided the family home and arrested Paul for selling pornography online. This seems a bit odd to me, having lived in South Africa at that time. There's almost no way a guy at home would have had that kind of access in Apartheid South Africa to the internet back then. There was access, but it was through big companies or academia and on…

Any story featuring a character called "Randy Bush" should be taken with a pinch of salt...

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#70

Original author of the story here... Just to add that 1. yes, the reporting on Le Roux's childhood is more tentative based on a family source (well backed up by docs and images sent to me). But the fact that the same Le Roux created E4M which formed the basis of TrueCrypt is something I think I've established definitively, company and site registration trails show it very firmly (and PLR himself admits it in court, b…

Setup a Patreon. I'll throw in $20 per article for long-form journalism like this. Youtubers who make long-ish videos (i.e., EE's who tear down industrial gear narrating analysis[1]) have recently taken to this model and it's absolutely fantastic. My money goes to support the continued generation of new content, cutting out the middleman. "Pay because it's good" is the best content monetization model yet.

[1] Ben from Applied Science [https://www.youtube.com/user/bkraz333] Mikeselectricstuff [https://www.youtube.com/user/mikeselectricstuff] and AvE are all incredible. Some of the underappreciated but really educational channels are(Sharhair from the Signal Path[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKxRARSpahF1Mt-2vbPug-g] and Paul from Mr Carlsons Lab [https://www.youtube.com/user/MrCarlsonsLab], along with HAM'er W2AEW [https://www.youtube.com/user/w2aew]. These guys don't even have Patreons - they just do it to because they want to disseminate knowledge.

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