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Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum

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Re: Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum

#51

Post by syngrog66 »

rhblake wrote: post #43
xcasex wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Veterans who have spoken out about brashness, him being socially clumsy, him being an asshole. There are as of yet unsubstantiated, uncorroborated & unverified stories.

They have essentially described him as a sociopath. That's very different from merely being brash and clumsy...

perhaps. but the set of things which are not illegal include: being brash, clumsy, an asshole or even a sociopath.

Rape and sexual assault are illegal. Let's let the courts decide that, based on evidence. Not rumor, innuendo or mob retweets.

Re: Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum

#52

Post by kbenson »

rhblake wrote: post #43
xcasex wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Veterans who have spoken out about brashness, him being socially clumsy, him being an asshole. There are as of yet unsubstantiated, uncorroborated & unverified stories.

They have essentially described him as a sociopath. That's very different from merely being brash and clumsy...

Unless you have some training that makes you qualified to assess that (in which case qualifying yourself as such would help), perhaps you should refrain from throwing around terms like that.

Re: Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum

#53

Post by syngrog66 »

kbenson wrote: post #42
rhblake wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a number of high-profile, veteran, respected, typically anti-authoritarian members of the hacking community - including multiple Tor project members - have spoken out against Applebaum in the past week. That it's all being orchestrated by some three-letter agency is theoretically possible , sure, but I think that's extremely unlikely . Applying some Occam I just end up with a tragic case of an abusive asshole. (I…

> Which, at the time, I thought was a bit odd bringing up in casual conversation with someone he didn't know. I'm not sure that being crass is necessarily an indicator that he's more likely to be a rapist. That's the problem with all this, there's a lot of substantiated stories about him being an asshole, an actual refutation by the party involved of one of the stories that was originally conveyed by a third party, a…

it almost makes me wish we had some kind of... I dunno... "system" by which we as a society can be very specific about what is allowed and not. and a system for determining whether the disallowed things happened or not. and a system also for then punishing people who have been found guilty of those disallowed things.

I'm just brainstorming. Perhaps in a hundred years we'll create a way to do that. Until then, let's all just whisper and rumor and accuse and retweet and go with how we "feel" at any particular moment. /s :-)

Re: Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum

#54

Post by jordibc »

scott_s wrote: post #38
CoffeeDregs wrote: post #36

I'm confused. This was on the front page a moment ago. Now it is not. This article was 119 points @ 3 hours Current front page contains (sampled): 38 points @ 2 hours 87 points @ 4 hours 59 points @ 3 hours 26 points @ 2 hours 110 points @ 6 hours 35 points @ 7 hours Or am I just not seeing it?

Stories that get flagged by users will drop in their rankings; this story was probably flagged by users.

Any idea of why it has been flagged?

Were the ones that spread suspicion about Appelbaum flagged too? It looks to me as this would be quite relevant news.

Re: Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum

#55

Post by Sacho »

jordibc wrote: post #54
scott_s wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stories that get flagged by users will drop in their rankings; this story was probably flagged by users.

Any idea of why it has been flagged? Were the ones that spread suspicion about Appelbaum flagged too? It looks to me as this would be quite relevant news.

There was some talk about them not being appropriate for HN, because it was all hearsay within a fairly tightly-knit group. However, none of them were flagged, as far as I know. I don't know what flagging means on HN - this post is marked as flagged and I had to search for it to find it(I was planning on posting the same thing).

Re: Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum

#56

Post by andy_ppp »

A_COMPUTER wrote: post #48
andy_ppp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these people would be wise to go to the police rather than writing blog posts/twitter comments that imply vague wrong doing without any clear crimes involved.

Honeywell stated a couple things that clearly violate consent, and could reasonably be described as rising to the level of legally actionable. I was very critical of some of the weak discounting of the possibility of JTRIG-style character attacks, but when notable, reputable people in the community come forward with specific relevant first-person claims, I believe it's important to take it more seriously.

It's impossible to draw any conclusions without a fair trial. Apart from saying we should assume innocent until proven guilty. It's a really good idea that seems to have been marginalised in the age of the web.

Re: Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum

#57

Post by atzpawn »

Who is "Jill Bähring"?

1) The statement is pushed via the same odd channel as Appelbaum's message.

2) The person exists for one year as a retweet twitter account. From a privacy perspective this person does not seem to "exist" on the internet for long.

3) The name sounds like a combination of a German name and an American(?) surname, the legend is also that she resides in the Netherlands. Is this person for real? It was used as a token persona by an apparently base- and meaningless Der Spiegel article, an interview of few youngsters including Jill (20) who - apparently without training as a DaF teacher - carried out German language courses in Costa Rica, returned and lived with her parents. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/spiegelwissen/d-79922555.html

Re: Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum

#58

Post by scott_s »

jordibc wrote: post #54
scott_s wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stories that get flagged by users will drop in their rankings; this story was probably flagged by users.

Any idea of why it has been flagged? Were the ones that spread suspicion about Appelbaum flagged too? It looks to me as this would be quite relevant news.

I have not flagged it, so I am speculating. But users flagging stories is the most common reason stories with a lot of points leave the front page.

These types of stories tend to get user flags for two reasons: they are more voyeaurism than news, and the actual discussions often become flame wars. Also note that I am not a mod, I've just been here for a while.

Re: Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum

#59

Post by daveloyall »

petertodd wrote: post #9
daveloyall wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! But, since these are Tor people, shouldn't statements be digitally signed? Does a confirmation tweet from anything less than a celebrity mean anything?

Not everyone involved in Tor and the surrounding community is a cryptographer who uses PGP regularly, or even at all; AFAIK Jill Baeh is not. In any case, basically you'd be saying that Twitter and/or her Twitter acount is compromised, as a few others are interacting with that account, and have been following her since well before the tweet (I personally know many of the people in the conversation around Jill's tweet…

OK. I won't take that bet, because you're probably right. :)

I'd still like a more general solution to determining the authenticity of statements on the internet.

In practice, people use Twitter for that. Seems weak. But, I don't use twitter, so I'm disregarding the community trust aspect that you described. Maybe it deserves more respect that I'm giving it, but we do have PKI available...

Re: Statement by Jill Bähring Regarding Jacob Appelbaum

#60

Post by PavlovsCat »

syngrog66 wrote: post #10

When I read all the complainers stories my initial reaction was I noticed a fairly consistent style of "spinning" each account in a way to smear Applebaum. They each seemed designed to imply he did evil things, without truly saying it. Today we get this account, from one of Applebaum's supposed "victims" and, surprise surprise, her tale is pretty innocent and de-spun and totally oppositely aligned from the anti-Apple…

> Rape is a real thing, and when it happens, thats bad. Lying and spinning and smearing are also real things that happen.

That's what upset me the most. We saw accusations of abusive behaviour used to justify abusive behaviour. And we saw accusations of abusive behaviour used to slip in claims about plagiarism without even attempting to back those up. Regardless of the plausibility of the accusations against Appelbaum, since two wrongs don't make a right, that (and the unwillingness or inability to address it) made the assumption of good faith impossible. And that's not even mentioning the "totally unrelated" Twitter account.

The whole "conspiracy" stuff is a red herring to me. That is, people can speculate about that until the cows come home -- but not to dismiss the obvious, the whole campaign as well as the shaming people who spoke out against the process, and the attempt to excuse bypassing the legal system with how bad it is, then being so much worse. The list of WTFs is long.

https://twitter.com/Shidash/status/741259721756319744

Does that say it all, yet? How far does it have to go?

It was really fun getting ignored and downvoted or mocked by a throwaway just for actually asking hard questions and not just patting some "respected whoevers" on the back, by the way.

The difference between peer pressure and peer review is that with peer review, the more peers you have, the more eyes on the problem you have. With peer pressure, you still only have one set of eyes, but more peers make it squint harder, until it's completely shut. And this was a great demonstration of that, of the total absence of that free thinking hacker spirit that's so easy to print on the label of a tin, but so hard to keep alive in one.

No hard feelings, but know this: seeing someone with a torch and pitchfork, or seeing someone close their curtains as if they haven't seen anything when a lynch mob is out and about, is not really better than seeing someone be abusive to a person, sexually or otherwise. Until you see that person repent and make fantastic changes, it changes something irrevocably. You cannot unsee it. Same goes for "communities".

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