411–420 of 526 posts
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I thought they were contributing to the Python web framework called Tornado (quite popular especially before asyncio caught on, but still well-known nowadays).
I was like "what's a tornado repo? a reference I don't know about to a whirlwind of activity? maybe a bot attack of some kind." +1 disambiguation needed
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Honestly, I don’t care what happens to crypto bros. They put profit before environment. Fuck em.
PoW uses less energy than global dishwasher usage. Do you feel similar sentiments against Home Depot and dishwasher users? Facebook data centers aren’t pretty either in this regard. Edit - additionally, tornado runs on eth, which is soon to be env-friendly PoS.
The switch has been delayed 6(!) times since 2017. It‘s perpetually happening “soon”. I believe it when it’s actually live.
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> What separates pre-sanctions Tornado from any other tech that can feasibly be used for something evil (e.g. cash money, PayPal, any cryptocurrency, e2ee messengers)? I don’t have the technical answer. But from the instant tumblers became a thing everyone with AML experience saw the endgame. It’s providing, as a service, a function directly analogous to real-world layering. It does nothing else. And nobody involved…
The fundamental problem is that "money laundering" is an oxymoron, because money is fungible . So the government has created an always-applicable law, pinky-swore to only use it to prosecute "bad guys" (like many federal add-on laws), and is now expanding their scope to persecute a project that mitigates a general security vulnerability that exists in most cryptocurrencies, because the existence of that vulnerability…
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Honestly, I don’t care what happens to crypto bros. They put profit before environment. Fuck em.
PoW uses less energy than global dishwasher usage. Do you feel similar sentiments against Home Depot and dishwasher users? Facebook data centers aren’t pretty either in this regard. Edit - additionally, tornado runs on eth, which is soon to be env-friendly PoS.
The commenters saying be reasonable, they were sanctioned, GitHub had to do this, should look into the last time code was made illegal or similar turmoil and what the developer community did in response…It was not accepting sanctions or govt failures to understand code as “well that’s that.” - Phil Zimmerman (PGP) was under criminal investigation for arms exports by releasing the code for consumer encryption. The cas…
Isn't it hypocritical to celebrate when platforms kick off the people we don't like, then mourn when they kick off the ones we do?
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Honestly, that sounds like a good idea. White phosphorous munitions are generally illegal under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
Here is where the missunderstanding seems to keep happening (regarding White Phosphorous and Tornado Cash). The mere existence of tools like Tornado Cash or White Phosphorous is not illegal (at least wasn't until yesterday), but illegal use of those always was. The distinction is important, but seems to have been lost somewhere along the way.
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The US Constitution provides protection against ex post facto laws. A retroactive punishment is unconstitutional. It may be argued that these github accounts did not belong to us citizens and thus were not protected. Or it may be argued that Microsoft was doing this of their own freewill and therefore the constitutional prohibition does not apply. But there is generally within the American psych a distaste for retroa…
This is not an act of ex-post facto lawmaking by a legislature. This is the executive doing what it has been tasked with doing under a mandate supplied by Congress in accordance with it's role as laid out by the Constitution. The Courts are not likely to be swayed by this argument. I doubt the legislature will touch anything that enables money laundering with a 12 foot pole. The novelty here is that prople are being…
As far as I can tell, the executive branch was not mandated to delete anyone who contribted to/was a "member" of the github tornado dev group.
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I'm assuming that the problem for Github is that they can't reliably know which of the contributors are "currently part of" TornadoCash and which ones are unrelated people who just contributed code some time ago, and since they absolutely must block the former, in the case of uncertainty the only safe option was to block everyone who seems related.
None of the Tornado developers are anonymous. They are all well known and respected members of the security/privacy community, and I have personally hung out with them multiple times in the US at public events, where they often speak etc. This isn't some shadowy cabal, they are programmers and mathematicians who think sometimes people might not want the world to see where they are spending their money. Crazy right?
The IRS and bodies responsible for enforcing laws like those against "funding terror" (remember that?) certainly think that is crazy.
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The fundamental problem is that "money laundering" is an oxymoron, because money is fungible . So the government has created an always-applicable law, pinky-swore to only use it to prosecute "bad guys" (like many federal add-on laws), and is now expanding their scope to persecute a project that mitigates a general security vulnerability that exists in most cryptocurrencies, because the existence of that vulnerability…
The definition of money laundering is concealing the origin of money obtained from an illegal source. You may not like the fact that this is illegal, but it has a clear definition and most people want it to be outlawed, so it is. It's obviously not "always applicable": I've never taken steps to conceal ill-gotten gains and neither have the vast majority of people.
A traditional banking analog would be if the feds went after brick and mortar banks for allowing customers to deposit checks from named payors and withdraw cash or create a new check. A law-abiding customer might take advantage of this property to receive a paycheck from an abortion clinic and then make a donation to their church. Whereas a criminal might use the same scrubbing to receive a payment from a known drug dealer and then turn around and pay their mortgage. Yet the bank's whole business isn't declared a priori illegal due to concealing the origin of the funds on the outgoing payment.
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I don't see how blockchain devs can do any of these things. Nodes and miners run the network, not devs.
Tornado Cash in particular is (was?) a smart contract, so they could straightforwardly have built in an auditing service as an oracle.
Does this exist?