Can we please have a little less narrative and a little more information sources? Has anyone confirmed any affirmation in the article?
This is what I'm wondering. Is this simply going to turn into another Satosh hunt?
He Always Had a Dark Side
71–80 of 380 posts
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
To run a BBS you need nothing more than a C64, a 300 bps modem and a phone line. Also, I'm not sure if you know anything about phone phreaking but in the 80s it was pretty much the preferred method of connecting to BBSs internationally.
Yes but from a teenager in Krugersdorp? And South Africa did not have such easy access to the international telephone market. The country was in the middle of economic sanctions at the time - international calls had to be placed through a switchboard with the government run telecom monopoly provider - Telkom. They also cost a literal arm and a leg for a couple minutes and were heavily monitored by the Apartheid regim…
I'm not sure if there were additional barriers to blue-boxing out of SA, but I know people went through SA...
"In the Esquire article, Captain Crunch narrates excitedly to his interviewer Ron Rosenbaum the process by which he connected a single long-distance call via switching stations across Asia, Europe, South Africa, South America and the East coast until he reached a specific telephone in California."
Depends how much chance you have to lose yourself in an internal SA call to one or more SxS COs before the overseas hop, you could be pretty hard to catch. But, if there wasn't a lot of international traffic they could just snoop on the overseas hop and figure out who you were.
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#73Original 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 fro…
Are you me? I subscribe to Applied Science, AvE, Signal Path, and W2AEW. I'll have to check out Mikeselectricstuff and Mr Carlson's Lab. EEVblog is missing from the list, but arguably that one goes without saying :-)
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#74Of course by some legal interpretations, distributing Truecrypt on the Internet would satisfy the very definition of international arms dealer.
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
To run a BBS you need nothing more than a C64, a 300 bps modem and a phone line. Also, I'm not sure if you know anything about phone phreaking but in the 80s it was pretty much the preferred method of connecting to BBSs internationally.
Yes but from a teenager in Krugersdorp? And South Africa did not have such easy access to the international telephone market. The country was in the middle of economic sanctions at the time - international calls had to be placed through a switchboard with the government run telecom monopoly provider - Telkom. They also cost a literal arm and a leg for a couple minutes and were heavily monitored by the Apartheid regim…
There were FidoNet systems as early as 1988: http://www.textfiles.com/fidonet-on-the-internet/n1988/nodel...
Look for "Region,49" and you'll see a small number of them, but they were in Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, and Johannesburg.
Whether they could actually dial out to the rest of the world is open to question, but they would have needed to at least be accessible from the outside world for them to even be on FidoNet in the first place.
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
It'd be the daughter having the child in another country in the early 1970s. I guess there is a good chance that there is no paper trail and a very small number of people that know any details and are still alive (because it happened 40 years ago, not because of anything nefarious).
If one were actually interested, maybe one could just look at all Senator's wives' daughters who traveled internationally in that timeframe?
This is starting to sound dangerously close to doxing (esp. if anything found is shared), even if it's out of pure curiosity.
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#77Not to be pedantic, but you wrote "cutting out the middleman." Doesn't patreon take a small cut? Aren't they a middleman? (Though undoubtedly one taking a much smaller share than previous ones.)
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#78Not to be pedantic, but you wrote "cutting out the middleman." Doesn't patreon take a small cut? Aren't they a middleman? (Though undoubtedly one taking a much smaller share than previous ones.)
Visa would also be a middleman. Or even the post office if you only accepted mailed cash.
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#79What publication is this affiliated with (or: who is paying for this)? "The Atavist" seems like a platform for self-published journalism?
The writing style is weird; this looks more like someone's smash job. Why does www.atavist.com go to a sales page? And where's the nutgraf?
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#80Not to be pedantic, but you wrote "cutting out the middleman." Doesn't patreon take a small cut? Aren't they a middleman? (Though undoubtedly one taking a much smaller share than previous ones.)
Visa would also be a middleman. Or even the post office if you only accepted mailed cash.
There's also gratipay, which doesn't take a cut. Still the credit card's cut, but gratipay offers bitcoin payments, which, if they implement it right, would eliminate the middleman (unless you count miners as middlemen) when the financee cashes out using bitcoin. If they implemented it wrong, then coinbase is the middleman.