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The fact that both knew that C++ is a programming language at all, must suffice as evidence, at least for the purposes of this Article. Weirdly a real divergence from the Theranos reporting, which on top of that, also was absolutely in the public interest as it affected both the health of patients and was on actual fraud. Here it it exposure for exposure sake and not well reasoned to boot.

But are they themselves newsworthy or is it what they created and that they hold a lot of coins?

There are many people, both FOSS devs and working for major corporations, that have contributed or singularly been responsible for very impactful technologies, but in general, if that person wants to keep their persona discreet and there is no evidence they have done anything of public interest, the reporting remains purely on what they have done. Akin to why Wikipedia generally has rules for notability (I’d argue Satoshi falls under ONEVENT if we are strict here).

To me, the way you describe it, the line appears to be less in whether there may be a public interest and more whether there is public attention. In other words, is the line in the sand whether people should know this or whether they want to (and thus buy copies)?

Genuinely asking, is there a rule set on this the NYT should adhere to? What is the APs position for dem asking a pseudononymous character only notable for a specific thing?


In Austria we put it to a vote. Right after building the first fission plant. We never switched it on after a narrow defeat. At least in our narrow case, the restrictions were exclusively democratic.

Signal, an App predominantly used by governmental officials to leak war plans or bypass historical recording obligations.

The leaps here would get one laughed out of an early 2k conspiracy forum.

Bob uses electricity provided from a coal power plant, therefore he must be able to design a Fission plant. Yeah, these are some massive leaps, the question of why, beyond morbid curiosity, one must dox Satoshi not withstanding. Satoshi or the wallets they controlled were never associated with anything beyond the creation of BTC after all, making the value of knowing who they are or were not really great in my view. If these coins suddenly started funding someone or something, there could be an argument, but this coupled with such a layperson approach makes me doubtful about the ethics or approach.

Ah yes, the cautionary tale where the leadership is willing to accept their own faults, seeks out the most competent to solve their issue, despite initial reservations are willing to go with the suggestions provided and a public that, upon being provided evidence accepts it. Kinda hopeful, if one thinks about it, the Eugenics nonsense notwithstanding…

At first, they had no plan. They tried to imprison their most competent person for being an outsider and being unable to pay their hospital bill at Carl's Jr, before making a public spectacle of working to kill him.

They also consumed all of the french fries and burrito coverings, and were otherwise reduced to eating Flaturin -- "Hand-to-Mouth Goodness". Let us also not forget about the Great Trash Avalanche of 2506.

It was only towards the very end that they came 'round to using water (from the toilet!) for crops, put the smart dude in charge, and they all lived happily ever after.

Perhaps it'd have been a better fit if they actually killed the protagonist, Not Sure, and faded to black after the last edible plant was shown to wither and die. Maybe the end credits could have even included sepia-toned photos akin to those from the Siege of Leningrad, with slow Ken Burns-style layered pans and zooms documenting the peril.

But, I mean: It was supposed to be a comedy. :)


Harm from exposure can take a lot of shapes and sizes that go beyond the physical and the potential prosecution that someone may be held accountable I find weak.

Honest question, did we ever get an answer what was the cause for the sudden change from the original Truecrypt developer?

Even if one doesn't want to maintain that project for purely private reasons, recommending Bitlocker as the drop-in-replacement always made it smell fishy to me.


It's more or less commonly accepted that its creator got jailed for being an arms dealer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Le_Roux


I knew the speculation on him being involved in some capacity, but as the wiki page states, this was never confirmed in any substantial way.

More importantly, if development seized with no public comment, that would be one thing and may strengthen the "he got arrested" theory. However, there was some final communication, specific recommendations to rely on Bitlocker of all things, a new version of Truecrypt was released solely for decrypting existing disks and then the web page was removed, including a flag set on robots.txt to ensure it wouldn't appear on archive.org. All this concurrent to a crowd funded source code audit that, in the end, did not find any server issues or backdoors (I recall some speculation back in the day, that either known code quality issues or an intentional backdoor could have caused the exodus).

That all makes it hard to link this to an arrest of the main developer, though I dislike speculation without any hard evidence and if there is no new information, I'll keep this filed under "there is no answer".


I always believed that rather than publicly stating that they were about to be arrested or worse, which may alert regular, non-tech-savy people, he sent a hidden message in the arguably horrendous recommendation of replacing his tool with BitLocker.

I think he was trying to scream “Run!” without actually screaming “run”.


Wasn’t there something with 7.1A and that the canary was gone after that version too?

Makes you wonder what kind of leverage/information you have to have to only get 25 years for admitting to being involved in 7 murders.

According to Wikipedia, the DEA gave him immunity on additional charges in return for pleading guilty and running a sting against his associates, but before the DEA knew about the murders.

Seems weird that the DEA can even give him immunity unknown crimes, especially ones that might not be directly related to the case and even weirder that they would offer that. Makes you wonder what kind of leverage/information you have to have to get that kind of plea deal.

> He subsequently admitted to arranging or participating in seven murders, carried out as part of an extensive illegal business empire.

Yikes


My theory is that Le Roux was just financing the (two?) TrueCrypt developers.

I would also like to know why is it excluded from Archive.org

https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://www.true...


This can be done by Archive.org doing it for whatever reason (asked, on their own, etc) or it can be triggered by the current owner of the domain modifying robots.txt I believe.



likely chose to shut down rather than bend over, same as Lavabit a year prior. I find it more plausible than the other theory.

I went on a Wikipedia dive and discovered this funny bit regarding the court process surrounding Lavabit and FBI's desire of the TLS private keys.

> The contempt of court was caused by Levison providing the keys printed in a tiny (4 point) font, which was deemed "largely illegible" by an FBI motion, which went on to complain that "To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data."

(And to be clear, that's all they ever saw of said keys)


> The court ordered Levison to be fined $5,000 a day beginning 6 August until he handed over electronic copies of the keys. Two days later Levison handed over the keys hours after he shuttered Lavabit.

I remember that. That was around the time they were using the National Security Letter to make things happen that were clearly illegal. Now look at where we are at. They are using Nation Security reasoning for anything.

That's just stupid. Take 10 people, each enters the data independently, compare their versions and select the most common of each character. With 1 second per character they would finish in an hour, coffee break included. They just didn't want to bother.

Irrespective of whether this particular court order to share the keys was OK in the first place, you shouldn't get to respond to a court order with any kind of malicious compliance even if it isn't "too much" extra work for other parties.

Fair assumption, but unlike Lava, TC never had customer/user data. The NSL/forced shut down theories also make little sense to me however, the fork was up by the end of the week and was easy to foresee. Kinda why this fascinates me so much, no theory I ever read survives basic scrutiny. Perhaps some things, we’ll never know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Torvalds#Linux_kernel_sta...

>When my oldest son [Linus Torvalds] was asked the same question: "Has he been approached by the NSA about backdoors?" he said "No", but at the same time he nodded. Then he was sort of in the legal free. He had given the right answer, [but] everybody understood that the NSA had approached him.

so the assumption here is that TC were also asked to accept "contributions" from bioluminescent individuals, and chose not to. "just use Bitlocker" was a deafeningly loud dogwhistle, don't you think?


Agreed, that whole thing was suspicious. I still use TrueCrypt, because of the suspicious nature of how it all went down.

At least here in Austria, I honestly rarely, if ever, see them do that. Either roads or dedicated/mixed designated cycle paths. We do have enforcement even against cyclists, though more than anything, that catches all the "unlocked" e-bikes, because cycling on the sidewalks is not a thing anyone does.

Even with bikes being off the sidewalk, there is need for a quick way of getting others pedestrians attention.


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