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Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

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Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#51

Post by javajosh »

dfc wrote: post #14
javajosh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Au contraire. Journalists are highly motivated to plough through the data for the scoop. ("Data scoop" is certainly an interesting development in our 21st century, btw!) I'm happy to let a highly motivated person do the ploughing, and give me the highlights, especially about a subject as marginally interesting as Scientology.

Au contraire? Respectfully, in my opinion sitting back and hoping someone else has the motivation to be inquisitive/curious is counter to the spirit of HN. Furthermore as others have pointed out (as well as myself in another thread) CoS has deep pockets and I imagine that serves as a decent motivation for big media to not publish the incident.

I think the underlying message here is that Scientology is a lot more interesting to you than it is to me! Honestly, I care about global warming a lot more and yet I didn't take much time to sift through the "Climategate" emails in detail[1]. I also care about Linux security, and yet I've not done an audit of the kernel I'm currently running. I also care about the federal tax code, and have certainly not taken the time to analyze it for inconsistencies and unfairness.

Would you say that these decisions are "counter to the spirit of HN"?

Of course, Paul Graham started HN mainly to have intelligent, on topic discussions about technology and startup issues. And in that sense, apart from my aside about "data scoops", I am probably posting contrary to the spirit of HN, since the bulk of this message and the one before it are just simple opinion expression, rather than anything more susbtantive. Heck, now that I think about it I'm tempted to delete them both!

[1]http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_... And for the record, those emails are pretty disgusting and I'm surprised and disappointed at the reaction.

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#52

Post by tptacek »

pud wrote: post #46

It troubles me a tiny bit to see comments on HN like (paraphrased) "Members of [group that has different religious beliefs than me] are evil." I am not defending religion or Scientology.

Very yes. It troubles me more than a tiny bit.

What does this have to do with HN? We'd flag off posts about Scientology as irrelevant. So basically, this is at the top of the page as a celebration of hacking organizations nerds don't like. It's how we nerds do bullying.

And I think Scientology is probably a criminal organization.

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#53

Post by tptacek »

NathanKP wrote: post #48
pud wrote: post #46

It troubles me a tiny bit to see comments on HN like (paraphrased) "Members of [group that has different religious beliefs than me] are evil." I am not defending religion or Scientology.

I would day almost every religion has dirty secrets, because with power over people comes evil actions. Scientology in particular has a bad reputation of engaging in particularly dubious activity though, as even a cursory inspection of their history will reveal.

Oh, well then, to hell with the rule of law.

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#54

Post by dfc »

ctchocula wrote: post #45
deno wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention there’s the language barrier…

Maybe someone will parse the emails and have a detector that will find the ones written in English.

That's the spirit;) Most of the marketing material that I have seen is in English. But that is just based off skimming the attachments

Extracting the MIME attachments is pretty straight forward:

  ls *.txt |xargs -n1 munpack

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#55

Post by javajosh »

dfc wrote: post #30
mikescar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing complex about this--it's a time-saving measure. Obviously there will be plenty of people sifting through this data, and we are free to rely on them to do so. You don't have to do everything yourself and find every data problem interesting to keep within the 'spirit of HN'.

It has nothing to do with finding everything interesting. I was speaking about the "if there is ever something interesting , the journalists will investigate/sum it up for me" line of reasoning. And whats with the "we are free" language, its not a cable news show. When did I ever say that anyone lacked the liberty to do something?

Tell you what, you sift through the data and let me know what you find via email!

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#56

Post by ma2rten »

pud wrote: post #46

It troubles me a tiny bit to see comments on HN like (paraphrased) "Members of [group that has different religious beliefs than me] are evil." I am not defending religion or Scientology.

Scientology is not regarded a religion everywhere. In Germany it is considered a cult instead and it is even on a government watchlist. As students we were warned about it in school.

EDIT: I was just looking at Scientology's (English) Wikipedia page and came across this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scientology_warning_leafle... . I though it would illustrate my point. Those are three government-issued leaflets with the title "Protect Our Democracy". One is on organized crime, one on Islamic terrorism and one on Scientology.

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#57

Post by deno »

stock_toaster wrote: post #28
tjoff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because uploading it to a free file hosting service can easily be done via a compromised machine and/or tor (don't know how well uploading large files over tor works though) - maybe even a library/public computer, making it quite hard to trace (though when using a public computer you need to take other precautions, like avoiding surveillance cameras). Also since nothing is made public instantly you have time to erase…

> With bittorrent you need at least one seeder that is available long enough to feed the swarm (in decent time), during that time a lot of things can go wrong (if anything goes wrong when uploading to a free hosting service you just start over, nothing lost). Don't most clients support web seeding[1] these days? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)#Web_seed...

That’s actually pretty good way to bootstrap torrent anonymously. The issue is just keeping webseeds alive long enough, which can be tricky if the upload is fairly big.

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#58

Post by mikescar »

dfc wrote: post #30
mikescar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing complex about this--it's a time-saving measure. Obviously there will be plenty of people sifting through this data, and we are free to rely on them to do so. You don't have to do everything yourself and find every data problem interesting to keep within the 'spirit of HN'.

It has nothing to do with finding everything interesting. I was speaking about the "if there is ever something interesting , the journalists will investigate/sum it up for me" line of reasoning. And whats with the "we are free" language, its not a cable news show. When did I ever say that anyone lacked the liberty to do something?

You're reading entirely too much into minor points.

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#59

Post by DanBC »

dfc wrote: post #6
bmaeser wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is a lot of data. i think journalists will sum it up for you, if there is something interesting.

That is a strange philosophy/view-point for HN...

Good journalists should be able to plough through the data and put the information into context; referencing previous news stories or other organisations.

Unfortunately, as can be seen by the bloody awful mess they make of almost any scientific or medical or technical press release, it's unwise to rely on a journalist to provide sensible analysis.

Maybe there's some great crowd-sourcing website that could do this? (A bit like the "Human Flesh Search Engine" in China, but different.)

Or perhaps as a MVP someone could just write a script that turns many words into links to a wikipedia entry?

Re: Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails

#60

Post by rondon1 »

evertonfuller wrote: post #31
MultiRRomero wrote: post #20

Am I the only one who doesn't find this all that positive? I already think scientology is bad/evil/dangerous, and I think that illegally getting access to their secrets might make the opposition (us) look worse in the public eye. Everybody has dirty secrets, both sides, and it's a bit low to go after the other side's private emails. It'd be much easier to fight/debate against their public image, which is easy enough,…

Right with you. This is illegal, plain and simple. Acts like this should not be celebrated. No matter if it's against the 'bad' guys.

Gay Marriage is also illegal in many places, but that doesn't make it wrong.
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