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He Always Had a Dark Side

mastermind.atavist.com

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Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#281

Post by misnome »

acqq wrote: post #247
pwnna wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP of this post here. Not sure why you're downvoted and tried to upvote it to rebalance. I also realized after reading the article for the second time that it did not say that PLR is TC's author directly, but rather that it is unclear if he is. I made a mistake while first posting as my reading made me believe he's the author of TC. I tried to point it out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11382412 Additiona…

Thanks to you and lvs. At least I see the title was just changed to the original article's from the linkbaity one to which I've complained. Now it's finally "He Always Had a Dark Side"

But this means absolutely nothing.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#282

Post by tptacek »

patio11 wrote: post #245
tptacek wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little confused. I agree that there is such a thing as maliciously or recklessly posting personally identifying information about people. Is that "doxxing"? If so, why are we pretending that this story constitutes "doxxing"? Because that is what the comment to which I replied upthread claimed.

No relevance to this story; I've just seen you say "Doxxing is a thing that only Redditors care about" a time or three on HN, and believing that to be something that you believed generally rather than specific to this article, found it necessary to say "Actually, that's a bit more of a widely-held position than you seem to believe."

Yeah, what's triggering those responses is a Reddit-tinged reaction to nuts and bolts investigative journalism as if it were somehow contravening a new Internet norm.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#283

Post by blywi »

gpm wrote: post #242
blywi wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could have been automatically triggered by some kind of dead man's switch.

The announcment contained information that you couldn't really set up in a dead man's switch payload years earlier > This page exists only to help migrate existing data encrypted by TrueCrypt. > > The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP. Windows 8/7/Vista and later offer integrated support for encrypted disks and virtual disk images. Such integrated support is…

Well, the end of support for Windows XP in 2014 was announced in 2008. Windows Vista and 7 were available, and the Windows 8 launch was at hand before the date of his arrest. But the text omits to mention Windows 8.1 which was announced by Microsoft in 2013, after the arrest but well before the Truecrypt announcement was published in 2014.

This could be because Windows 8.1 was only considered a relatively minor upgrade to Windows 8 by the author, or because it's existence was unknown at the time when the text was written.

This remains open to speculation, but it does not refute the possibility of a dead man's switch.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#284

Post by mintplant »

zorpner wrote: post #272
dang wrote: post #246

The submitted title was "Truecrypt was written by a international arms dealer named Paul LeRoux". That broke the HN guidelines by cherry-picking a single detail from the article, and it's also misleading enough that we're getting emails complaining about it. Rather than litigate what the article does or doesn't show, we've simply reverted the title. It seems particularly bad to make the title say something that the a…

It's a real shame that a bunch of people were tricked into reading an excellent piece of long-form journalism because someone singled out why it might interest them. The HN front page has a context, and the new title is completely incoherent there. Do better .

The previous title was factually incorrect: it did not match the claims of the article. Even the OP admits it was a mistake.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11382412

The new title may not be great (as it's copied from the article, where it exists in the context of a larger series), but it's at least an improvement over one that was simply wrong.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#285

Post by jron »

Natanael_L wrote: post #278
jron wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some interesting circumstantial connections to Satoshi: Considered to be a "brilliant" programmer with a strong C++ background - Most people would call you crazy if you attempted to put a 6 billion dollar prize behind an internet facing application without memory safety Author of crypto/privacy software - E4M and possibly TrueCrypt written in C++ Experience hiding identity both online and off Millionaire -…

Satoshis original code wasn't considered brilliant, though. Not crap, but more in the style of an academic that understood programming than that of an experienced programmer. The code was written as a basic proof of concept, not with long term maintainability in mind, and the code for the wallet client was not well separated from the code for parsing the blockchain, or from the networking code or from the mining code…

Brilliant code != beautiful code. Dan Kaminsky called Satoshi's programming alien technology with regard to security.

I haven't looked for similarities but I'm guessing someone has already compared the two using Aylin's CodeStylometry work: https://github.com/calaylin/CodeStylometry

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#286

Post by Mz »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #70
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…

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…

"Pay because it's good" is the best content monetization model yet.

Glad to see this sentiment here.

If Patreon is too involved, content creators can also put a PayPal tip jar on their site:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-...

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#288

Post by benchez »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #70
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…

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…

The writer is one of the founders of the magazine that published this story, he'd be cutting himself out by setting up a Patreon.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#289

Post by venomsnake »

stordoff wrote: post #218
kbenson wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> The study [by the Australian Institute of Criminology] also found that the average payment for a "hit" was $15,000 That's a surprisingly low amount. I'd've guessed $100k+ or more.

That is average. Since no one will investigate the death of a some low level guy with criminal history (just gang warfare for redistributing the market) I guess you could find them on the low end. And that leave some bigger sums for the high profile targets.

Re: He Always Had a Dark Side

#290

Post by mirimir »

atmosx wrote: post #279
mirimir wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I don't have a clue. Who gets to decide? Some murderers are presidents, and others are on trial. There's really no point in arguing about it.

Start here: https://www.congress.gov/constitution-annotated/

What about those of us who aren't US citizens? SOOL?
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