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He Always Had a Dark Side

mastermind.atavist.com

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Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#191

Post by adrusi »

afreak wrote: post #171
adrusi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> gratipay offers bitcoin payments, which, if they implement it right, would eliminate the middleman [...] when the financee cashes out using bitcoin And tell me, how does one cut out the middleman when they convert their Bitcoin earnings to US dollars or whatever currency they prefer?

A few people will donate bitcoin. A few things can be bought directly with bitcoin. On average, you'd expect that the fraction of your income paid in bitcoin would be similar to the fraction of goods and services that you can pay for with bitcoin.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#192

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

spacehome wrote: post #167
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.

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

'He' is sometimes used in this fashion, but it is an uncommon use, and it's arguable that in some contexts the author actually means a man and has not considered the possibility of a woman. Certainly in this case, why would you assume that it is used in a gender-neutral sense?

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

Fair point.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#193

Post by cakeface »

dfc wrote: post #135
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they be nervous about doing their job? Also, one X, not two: https://stallman.org/doxing.html

Is Stallman a new William Safire or Brian Garner? I never knew this was one of his areas of expertise. Oxford lists "doxx" as an alternate but accepted version. I don't have an OED license so I dont have access to the full etymology they use. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dox

The OED does not have listings for "dox", "doxing" or "doxxing". Well, one entry for "dox" that relates to orthodoxy but that does not apply here.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#194

Post by harryjo »

ksenzee wrote: post #154
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they be nervous about doing their job? Also, one X, not two: https://stallman.org/doxing.html

> Don't make the mistake of pronouncing "Exxon" like "exon"; you will appear unsophisticated. This is some really advanced trolling, on the level of the emperor's new clothes.

https://stallman.org/articles/exxon.html April 1 2013

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#195

Post by harryjo »

m0nty wrote: post #146
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they be nervous about doing their job? Also, one X, not two: https://stallman.org/doxing.html

> Thus, we usually have to write the name of the oil company as "Exxon", though its proper spelling is "e exx o n". (Don't make the mistake of pronouncing "Exxon" like "exon"; you will appear unsophisticated.) The development of the Exxon exx is shown here: http://www.logodesignlove.com/exxon-logo-raymond-loewy It's clearly a double-x rather than any more exotic character, the styling is just that - styling. The Wiki…

The additonal 'x' was added cosmetically, to disambiguate form (a person named) "Exon"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon#History

There's no particular reason to believe they wanted to change the pronunciation as well.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#197

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

mirimir wrote: post #188
landryraccoon wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are moral rules situationally dependent on the personal feelings of the person subject to those rules? I would hate to be in jail, but I think it's morally and ethically valid to put people in jail in certain circumstances. Similarly I think that politicians and public figures should be subject to a high degree of scrutiny and transparency about their personal lives, even though I personally wouldn't enjoy such treat…

By "feel", I meant more what you might feel justified in doing about it. The key "moral rule" for me is to only mess with people who have messed with me. I don't get into third-party stuff, and I have little sympathy for those who do.

So what you're saying is, it would be moral for this guy's murder victims to dox him, but not a reporter? The funny thing with murderers is that they can only really be stopped by third parties.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#198

Post by chipotle_coyote »

mirimir wrote: post #165
myrbergs_army wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are you essentially positing that the only relevant consideration to whether publishing information about someone is ethically defensible is whether or not the subject feels good about having that information revealed? It seems to me there is a material difference -- and a vast one at that -- between "I have done serious investigative work and wish to present evidence that Joe Foobar is a criminal kingpin who can be linked with drug-running and murders" and "I am publishing personal information about Joe Foobar because he said something mean about a group I identify with and I wish to screw with his life."

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#199

Post by __jal »

EliRivers wrote: post #119
Negative1 wrote: post #48

tl;dr: the article describes the origin of one of the 'masterminds' of the truecrypt collective (the group that programmed truecrypt). It describes how his upbringing led to his viewpoints on privacy, hints at a conspiracy to eliminate public cryptography and talks about something called a 'cryptoparty', which I'm still scratching my head about. The article also hints he may have been involved in the illegal drug and…

Back in my youth, I recall a "crytoparty" being a meatspace event in which people handed out and signed each others keys in order to create a web of verified trust.

Yes. It was a thing people did for a while to attempt to bootstrap PGP/GPG's web of trust, as you say, but also as a PR sort of thing. Crypto was even more black-arts then than now, and with some of the demonization due to the war with the Clinton administration over ITAR, you heard some of the same stuff you hear now about having something to hide, enabling terrorism, etc. (At the time, the "Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse" - drug dealers, pornographers, terrorists and kidnappers - were the boogie men; it seems kidnapping is less scary these days, so that one gets left out.) Showing how it worked was good PR, as far as it went; I saw a lot of people get that little kid with a decoder ring look.

It was mostly a cypherpunks thing, but I understand others sympathetic to the idea picked it up. There were quite a few in the Bay Area, ca. 1993-97-ish. Perhaps later.

I recall one entertaining party where proof of identity via government issued paper was forbidden.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#200

Post by acqq »

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…

But E4M is not Truecrypt, see the post of jron citing Wikipedia here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11382303

Paul Le Roux stole E4M source from SecurStar, and TrueCrypt programmers "forked" that source code. So Paul Le Roux surely didn't "write" TrueCrypt as such, isn't the current title here on HN inaccurate?

Mods can we please have the real article title

"He Always Had a Dark Side"

here instead of the current one?

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