Takeover of TOR
I wonder which US agencies would have a vested interest in seeing that happen.
Classic tactics - displace, persecute, threaten and allege sexual misconduct - see tactics used on Assange to stifle wikileaks
Jacob Appelbaum has left the Tor Project amid claims of "sexual misconduct" that he says are "unsubstantiated and unfounded." Appelbaum, 33, a prominent hacker and privacy advocate, was a core developer of the anonymizing network software. His departure was announced in a terse statement just before the weekend: Long time …
Obviously it's very difficult to say if the allegations are true, which is why it's such a powerful tactic.
TOR is an attempt to build a new Internet on top of the existing one. Great in principle but it will have all the same problems of the existing one. It's easy to see why someone would want to run a large internet seeing as the current one is so successful. It's easy to see that the gov and corps would want in.
The blog post (which I assume was linked to in the removed comments above) doesn't appear to contain anything defamatory. It states that allegations have been made which are being investigated, and that the Project is receiving legal advice from specialists in that area.
An interesting part:
"People who believe they may have been victims of criminal behavior are advised to contact law enforcement. We recognize that many people in the information security and Internet freedom communities don't necessarily trust law enforcement. We encourage those people to seek advice from people they trust, and to do what they believe is best for them."
Probably good general advice, but what a world we live in.
I don't know, but I suspect at least one of the deleted comments probably linked to the domain that's been, err, dedicated to ioerror - which very definitely does contain a lot of defamatory stuff.
No idea whether the allegations are true (other than that he can be a knob at times), but that site and the social media witchhunt make me sad to be part of the community. There's no reason for everything to have been done quite so publicly (the site in particular), particularly at this stage, and for a privacy loving community to seemingly take so much delight in a public burning doesn't sit well.
'The blog post (which I assume was linked to in the removed comments above) doesn't appear to contain anything defamatory.'
Not defamatory?, I suppose it depends how you want to read it, more precisely, how a lawyer would read it, words being such twisty little things...
From my reading of the blog post alluded to, It didn't exactly do him any favours. The tone of the whole post, the language used throughout it, basically screams that the person who 'stepped down' was as 'guilty as hell' of the allegations against him, even though there has been no talk of any formal police investigations.
The innocent and helpful paragraph you quote above
'..People who believe they may have been victims of criminal behavior ...'
whilst it's all sage advice on the surface, it could also be interpreted as someone covering their bases by setting up quite nicely the 'no one is talking as they don't like the police' scenario
'..We recognize that many people in the information security and Internet freedom communities don't necessarily trust law enforcement..'
"whilst it's all sage advice on the surface, it could also be interpreted as someone covering their bases by setting up quite nicely the 'no one is talking as they don't like the police' scenario
'..We recognize that many people in the information security and Internet freedom communities don't necessarily trust law enforcement.."
@Anon: Or it could be, you know, TRUE. Call me crazy, but Tor users and developers are a group that tend to be both paranoid and distrustful of law enforcement.
It's a must for the browser yes, but only because idiot designers use it for no good reason. It's not a must when building most web sites, a simple page listing accusations against someone would be a prime example of a situation where it's not needed.
To it's credit, this site right here works just fine without JS, and El Reg's got a whole lot more going on than [redacted].net does. While I'm mostly joking about the implication that it's a trap... only mostly. It really does seem like quite a strange choice in that context.
I'm waiting to see what the actual charges brought by the authorities are (or if any charges are even brought). It could just be someone inside the team with an axe to grind. Of course, it is amusingly ironic that someone that works on a service beloved by paedophiles and drug dealers should be accused of "sexual crimes" by his own colleagues.