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He Always Had a Dark Side

mastermind.atavist.com

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Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#161

Post by cellularmitosis »

jjoonathan wrote: post #73
iheartmemcache wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Another addition to the above excellent list is "bigclivedotcom". Lots of teardowns of cheap Chinese electronics with an eye towards what exactly makes them dangerous. https://www.youtube.com/user/bigclivedotcom/videos

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#162

Post by anigbrowl »

johnloeber wrote: post #77

Not 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.)

I suppose Patreon is technically in the middle but since their cut is small and transparent it's not like a 'man in the middle' attack where the intermediary is secretive about how much they're collecting and so on.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#163

Post by jessaustin »

Mahn wrote: post #145
Nickoladze wrote: post #8

So he dropped TrueCrypt and told everybody it was insecure when he was picked up by the feds, fearing that they would try and force him to open a security hole? Wow.

The article is unclear as for whether he was still involved with TrueCrypt by the time they got him though. It sounds like he had quite a lot going on to even care for TrueCrypt at that point.

Sure, but he can't assume that his captors are rational. They might very well blackbag him to some undisclosed dungeon and work him over until he convinces them that he doesn't have commit access. (Which duration might exceed his remaining lifespan, in such conditions.)

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#164

Post by spacehome »

nxzero wrote: post #156
bithush wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate how much can be made from arms trafficking!

Clearly the US makes a massive amount of cash selling weapons; yes, US is not an "arms dealer" - but likely comparable.

> US is not an "arms dealer"

> the US makes a massive amount of cash selling weapons

DOES NOT COMPUTE

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#165

Post by mirimir »

myrbergs_army wrote: post #121
mirimir wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As tptacek says, I don't view reporting like this as "doxxing." As the series hopefully shows, Le Roux was a hugely newsworthy figure for many different reasons, so reporting his background and how he got there is part of understanding where he is now. As for being nervous, many of the major players in the story are in US custody, and perhaps somewhat counterintuitively a lot of people involved want to tell their par…

To me, it's just semantics. Let's say that someone published this much information about you. And let's say that they had whatever justifications. That there was widespread agreement that it was OK. Whatever. How would you feel?

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#166

Post by rincebrain »

tptacek wrote: post #142
rincebrain wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between learning private information and disclosing it. Publishing information on a particular private individual because the public's benefit is sufficiently great is a hard line to even vaguely pin down - a home address, all private contact methods, and enough personal data to forge their identity on a passport application is probably never warranted to publish, but you're going to acquire that…

Did I miss the place in these stories where the author published the subject's home address?

I was not attempting to insinuate that the author had done so; I was just thinking aloud on the distinction between "doxxing" someone and what journalists often do.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#167

Post by spacehome »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #91

> I can’t say how I’d figured out the connection between his anonymous email and the person I’d emailed previously. I can’t say what service we used to communicate, nor where Lulu lives, nor what he does. Curious, then, that the author chooses to gender them. If the author used 'they' or rewrote sentences to be gender-neutral, it'd be one less bit of entropy.

Not really.

As much as it pains social justice warriors today, in English, the words 'he', 'his', and 'him' have a gender neutral usage.

And in any case, saying that a computer science security researcher is male is way less than a bit of entropy.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#168

Post by jb613 »

"Hafner told me that in the middle of the development work for DriveCrypt, he discovered that Le Roux was still working on E4M and had incorporated some of his work for SecurStar into his personal project. Hafner was furious. Because E4M was an open-source product, the source code that Hafner had personally funded, he claimed, could now be used by anyone to develop an encryption product of their own."

I've seen this a few times now (employer doesn't want employee to take knowledge out).

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#169

Post by ars »

myrbergs_army wrote: post #59

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…

Long form is awesome, but it's not for everyone. Have considered also publishing a summary document? (Instead of letting random commenters do it.)

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#170

Post by anigbrowl »

RyanZAG wrote: post #35
spullara wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

Wealthy kids have access to toys others don't I knew what a modem was and why I wanted one long before I actually got my hands on one, because I'd seen American teenagers using them in movies, eg War Games in 1983 (which I rewatched recently and was rather surprised to find it still holds up for what it is). Also, there may have been no need to call internationally. When I was into home and later business computers as a teen in the 1980s in Ireland (which was then as economically benighted as SA for quite different reasons) things like porn, bbs software, and lists of 'interesting' phone numbers were circulated on floppy disks; I ran a safe stash out of my school locker because the teachers thought I was too nerdy to be mixed up with the 'delinquent' kids. A single sided 5.25" floppy seemed like oodles of storage space back in those days XD

I don't find this claim so remarkable, though it's certainly possible that the details are fuzzily remembered nearly 30 years later.

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