This is a good warning to anyone wanting to develop crypto tech anonymously. Eventually if the tech is popular it will be profitable for a well meaning journalist to investigate and reveal your identify and publish childhood photos of you.
He Always Had a Dark Side
221–230 of 380 posts
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#222Not 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.)
Ah, arguing with nerds. :) (maybe 'cutting out a middleman' is pedantically accurate in this case. We seem to have identified at least two middlemen in this process)
Arguing with middlenerds beats arguing with middlemen...
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#223Fantastic read, but... looping a video by reloading it off the server everytime it's finished? You should be giving bandwidth to the poor!
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. The point of donating money to the author of the piece is to encourage them to continue writing this epic story. Giving them Bitcoin is akin to leaving a tip to your serv…
The difference being that others accept these "chick tracts" in exchange for goods and services.
I'm not in the mood to register with some service and hand out my CC data to give the author a buck. In contrast I'd scan a QR code in a heartbeat.
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I have little use for assessing morality. Anybody can do whatever they want. And they get whatever they get. My parent question was more about the reporter's OPSEC. That is, the risks that he's taken.
Wait, what? I was directly responding to your criteria for assessing morality.
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#226Original 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…
Fantastic story! I'm really excited to read all 7 parts.
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is semantics, illegal arms trafficking is a subset of the global market for arms. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_trafficking
nxzero said nothing about legality.
Given he's called a "criminal kingpin" and compared to Viktor Bout, the merchant of death, pretty safe to assume he wasn't selling weapons legally.
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#228> 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…
There was a small community in South Africa that used to connect to the Internet around that time by dialing into X.25-connected modems. These seemed to be owned by banks or insurance companies, and would allow break-outs to US modems that allowed local calling to ISPs. The information about the numbers and credentials were shared on local BBSs. Source: was personally involved
I agree. I used to do the same from France. Got me a a HELL of a lot of trouble in fact, as I've racked up a huge X25 bill with one company, and accidentally registered under my real name to a texan BBS that was later involved in the Hacker's Crackdown.
Also, on the note of 'porn online in the late 80's' is probably impossible, as there were no digital cameras, no scanners to speak of, and the only 'porn' you'd have found would have been rare, and very, very data intensive for the days. I know. :-)
And /most/ countries police forces had absolutely no clue whatsoever about 'online', 'computers', 'modems', 'internet' and 'keyboards'. I know the french didn't!
Those were the days, etc etc :-)
Re: He Always Had a Dark Side
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ca…
It's just not true that it's an uncommon use, see [1] and [2]. So even with the profession left unspecified (which I believe it is, might have missed it) the entropy is less than 1 bit.
[1]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-they-be-accepted-as-a-singul...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_English#P...