Oddly enough, my data is also in this set (thanks to HIBP I know about that...) - and also thanks to HIBP, I know the domain trader that made me appear in this dataset.
It's unfortunate, as I'd consider myself "leftist".
> It's unfortunate, as I'd consider myself "leftist".
The news media doesn't generalise and it doesn't lie, you are a 'far-right troll' that 'trusted Epik' - silly you!
Seriously though, whatever your political stance, I am sorry you had your details leaked. What you do or don't do privately is entirely your business, and is certainly not of the place of some news media to go sharing about.
> After Alayon’s name appeared in the breached data, his brokerage, Travers Miran Realty, dropped him as an agent, as first reported by the real estate news site Inman.
Perhaps, we should consider that despite many right-wing persons using this domain service, that doesn't mean they _all_ are - and that headlines like this are actually insanely irresponsible.
> Asked why his name, email address and other personal information were listed in company invoices for the “racisminc” and Holocaust-denial domains, Alayon said the data was “easily falsifiable,” that he was the possible victim of extortion and that The Post was “fake news.”
Maybe he was more extreme in his views in the past, and later changed his mind and became less radical. Do these people not believe in reform? If they don't, then surely the only purpose of this article is the sadistic destruction of this man's life without a fair court?
Perhaps he believes in these things in his private life, but exercises separation between his private life and work. I hate to remind people of this, but there's a very good chance that you do not agree with _everything_ your colleagues, family, friends, etc, do. Differences are okay, they are even quite healthy.
> The spokesperson said the company “offers its services to everyone” and that “domains affiliated with right-wing politics comprise less than 1 percent of users.” Epik said it is not aware of its users’ intents and “does not consider its role to be censors of free citizens.”
I'm not sure I want my domain registrar to be political either, even if it means an extremist gets a domain. I fully respect Epik's stance on this. Forcing companies to become political is incredibly dangerous.
That's one of the issues - the "far-right", depending on who is using the term, can range from someone advocating for genocide of anyone without blue eyes and blond hair, all the way to someone who says that Donald Trump wasn't that bad as a president.
Americans have no context for left and right. They literally are both far right because that’s a political alignment, and one that Donald Trump absolutely fits. The ones advocating genocide are violent extremists on top of that.
The democrats are a center-right party while the actual left is effectively frozen out of the political system and is currently focused on building alternate power structures for when the US government inevitably collapses. There’s not a lot of electoral participation on the left because when the choice is fascism or diet fascism, there’s not much point to an actual socialist.
If the "actual left" is "currently focused on building alternate power structures for when the US government inevitably collapses" - how would you define far-left? What are they doing?
I would define “far left” as revolutionary communists, of which there are very few and they’re mostly very young people on Twitter. But the few actual revolutionaries I know are doing the same crap as the right wing militias, there are just a lot fewer of them.
Your average leftist is simply disillusioned with electoral politics writ large; they’re tired of voting for guys like Obama who promise change but then still spend a trillion dollars turning brown children into skeletons. But there’s absolutely a feeling that we’re running out of time and more drastic solutions are on the horizon.
Some join something like DSA which still nominally participates in the electoral system and others build mutual aid networks to circumvent capitalist control.
> The Post publicizes material obtained through hacking with caution, only after verifying its authenticity and ascertaining that there is news value in bringing such information to light.
Sure you do.
So let me just check here: Political purity as an employment requirement... Firing people for this is fine, right?
What happens when the popular politics change?
The "Moral Majority" folks were accused of wanting to be everything the Left has become.
>The "Moral Majority" folks were accused of wanting to be everything the Left has become.
You think people somehow inherently differ because of their political beliefs? We're all human and both sides will act roughly the same but for different stated reasons. Then denounce the other side for it before doing it themselves.
Sure but that's the fun thing, you can support this and believe in free speech. After all, free speech does not mean freedom from consequences to most people. Nor are other people forced to not react to your speech in any way since that would impede other freedoms like freedom of association. And publishing this information is also free speech. You could argue that there should be an expectation of privacy but that's different than freedom of speech or freedom in general.
Freedom of Speech means Freedom from (some) Consequences.
The constitutional right to Freedom of Speech means, at the least, Freedom from legal Consequences. If it does not mean that, then it does not mean anything. The same argument then extends to the informal meaning of free speech.
The issue is that you’re implicitly trying to find a way to say that these people’s speech should be protected, while the free association rights of their bosses and colleagues should not be. There is no principled way to consider racist trolling free speech, but not also those calling for their firing to also be considered free speech.
I think Popehat says this best.
> Private consequences are something else. Speech is designed to invoke private and social consequences, whether the speech is "venti mocha no whip, please," or "I love you," or "fuck off."1 The private and social consequences of your speech — whether they come from a barista, or your spouse, or people online, or people at whom you shout on the street — represent the free speech and freedom of association of others.
> But speech has private social consequences, and it's ridiculous to expect otherwise. Whether sincere or motivated by poseur edginess, controversial words have social consequences. Those social consequences are inseparable from the free speech and free association rights of the people imposing them. It is flatly irrational to suggest that I should be able to act like a dick without being treated like a dick by my fellow citizens
> Finally, I should note that one social consequence is employment-related. In many American jurisdictions, employment is "at will" unless the parties have a contract that says otherwise; an employer can fire an employee for any reason not prohibited by law. Private employers can generally fire private employees based on their extra-curricular speech. That's private action, not government action; it's an exercise of such free association and free speech by private entities as the law allows. Employers may face social consequences — particularly in a social media age — for exercising that right in a way that angers the public, which is in turn the public's free speech right.
> the free association rights of their bosses and colleagues should not be
I'm not sure "free association" applies to employment. If someone chooses not to have any friends that aren't the same race as themselves, racist as that might be, it's not illegal.
But if they start a business they cannot filter either customers or employees based on race; in that sense they aren't free to choose who to associate in a business sense.
> There is no principled way to consider racist trolling free speech, but not also those calling for their firing to also be considered free speech.
I wouldn't say firing someone is merely an "expression" of speech, it's also the ending of an actual contract.
> I'm not sure "free association" applies to employment. If someone chooses not to have any friends that aren't the same race as themselves, racist as that might be, it's not illegal.
> But if they start a business they cannot filter either customers or employees based on race; in that sense they aren't free to choose who to associate in a business sense.
This is not an argument that businesses don’t have free association rights; this is an argument that they have limits that the state has a compelling interest in.
This argument is like saying that we don’t have free speech rights because there are laws against incitement. It’s obviously silly; “free” never meant “without any limits whatsoever” in either case.
Furthermore, while I agree it wouldn’t be legal to make employment decisions based on protected characteristics, forcing businesses to keep nazis on the payroll against their will strikes me as both absurd and a socially undesirable outcome.
> I wouldn't say firing someone is merely an "expression" of speech, it's also the ending of an actual contract.
Given the nature of at will employment, this actually weakens your argument.
I’d also consider terminating someone for their behavior to be a matter of free association, not free speech. I thought I’d made that clear.
> The issue is that you’re implicitly trying to find a way to say that these people’s speech should be protected, while the free association rights of their bosses and colleagues should not be.
Yes, that is what I am saying - I personally value right to choice of business association lower than right to speech.
> There is no principled way to consider racist trolling free speech, but not also those calling for their firing to also be considered free speech.
You can call for anyone's firing. That too is protected speech. Of course, firing is not speech.
Re Popehat, there is a difference between legal obligation and moral obligation.
I find the idea of being forced to associate with someone whose speech I find repugnant because you value their speech over my free association rights disconcerting.
Not freedom of consequences: that is a bit too vague. What if the consequence is that somebody shoots you dead if you say the wrong thing? According to you, they still have free speech?
Actually I think some real world dictator was literally making that joke, proclaiming that there is freedom of speech in his country. He just can't guarantee for the outcomes.
Then the murderer broke the law and will be prosecuted for that. If the government doesn’t prosecute them as they support the action then there’s no freedom of speech. This is why freedom of speech is generally discussed within the context of the government as the government enforces other laws.
I mean if the government kills them, obviously. Would it then be free speech? Everybody could say what they want, it's just the consequence could be a death sentence.
What about people who proclaim they didn't want to get the vaccine because of their freedom, and then die from covid as a consequence? Did they still have their freedom when forcibly intubated while in a medically induced coma?
Maybe people consider death as the ultimate freedom, freedom from interference of society.
That is why people are supposed to have arrangements with other people who can decide for them when they are in coma. Usually it is family, but you can also designate other people.
At least in my country that is the case, not sure how the US handles it.
Certainly there are people who prefer to not be forcibly intubated. Or consider other cases where life supporting machines are even more gruesome.
I mean, I'm not sure what your point is. This is absolutely a key problem that newspapers have; on the one hand, no-one wants a news environment where newspapers just publish press releases, but on the other hand most people don't want a repeat of the News of the World scandal either. Newspapers have to tread a fine ethical line on just how involuntarily disclosed information can or should be used.
Clearly, an environment where newspapers _never_ reported on leaks or hacks would be a problem; realistically they'd just be press release services at that point. On the other hand, an environment where newspapers uncritically published every leak and hack would _also_ be a problem; this would cause a lot of problems and would, frankly, be such a huge volume of information that it would be useless. They _have_ to editorialise.
It's been the case for a very long time that a sufficiently offensive political opinion would get you fired if brought to the attention of your boss. I think the difference between "business as usual" and McCarthyism or the current purges is how much more effort people are willing to put in to dig up dirt, and how much less offensive the dirt has to be.
That being said, the examples given in the article aren't very sympathetic. Back in 2013, Donglegate[0] was absolutely baffling for me, because I wasn't aware anyone could get fired for an overheard dick joke. Getting fired for running an actual Holocaust denial site seems fine.
I think criticizing people for running websites like “theholocaustisfake” is less like “attacking people for having bad thoughts” and a bit more like “attacking people for poisoning the well”.
I'm not sure what you're after here, but between your comments in this thread, the trollish username, and the fact that your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle (or close), I've banned the account. Would you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with?
> I picked the username because it was only a matter of time until somebody would accuse me of being a nazi - as is the norm these days for anybody who doesn't adhere to the mainstream leftist ideology.
That confirms both that the username is trollish and that your purpose is to use HN for ideological battle, which is against the site guidelines.
We ban accounts that break the site guidelines. If an account uses HN primarily for political battle we're going to ban it regardless of which politics you favor or disfavor.
As for the Holocaust, at at minimum you're concern trolling about it, which is obvious flamebait.
I want to comment on one more thing: calling somebody a "troll" is an insult.
Over several years, I have been called troll many times, just because I called out leftist conspiracy theories or misguided conceptions about economics. I think I have only called somebody an "idiot" once, and even that was quantified with "if you believe x, you are an idiot". I always try to explain patiently what is going on.
I don't recall you ever banning somebody for calling other people a "troll". I guess it is just such a normal reaction for lefties these days, anybody who disagrees with them has to be a troll. You have banned me several times for criticising socialism, though.
You yourself are calling people "trolls", so I guess you won't change your policies. And it is fine - pg handed the site over to you, so you can form it to your liking. Just don't pretend you are doing it for some higher values. You just don't like criticism of leftist ideology, that is all there is to it. As long as you don't ban people for spouting insults, spare me your "guidelines".
Actually I was careful not to call you a troll. I said your username was trollish (meaning that it adds a provocation to every thread it posts to), and I said your repetitively bringing up the Holocaust was at minimum concern trolling (I could also have said sealioning)—the point being that going on and on about how you're not questioning the Holocaust is weird, like insisting you're not a cop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBE9TZP26FI. It's guaranteed to provoke (hence concern trolling), and it inevitably brings up darker associations, because extremists are known to play games with this sort of thing—non-denial denials, etc. We don't want any of that here.
> You have banned me several times for criticising socialism
> You just don't like criticism of leftist ideology
People make up this narrative about why we ban them all the time; ideologues on the opposite side say the same thing. None of it is true. You can tell that in two ways: first, the claims are completely contradictory (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870), but they rely on the same logic, so the logic must be wrong; second, all you have to do is scroll through past moderation comments to see that we moderate people on all ideological sides—and get flamed for it from all sides, too.
Since we've had to ban you several times, it's probably time for you to realize that you're simply not using this site as intended.
This entire comment section is maybe the clearest example I have seen in a long time of why so many other industries outside of tech kind of look at the tech scene as a amoralistic dumpster fire.
I never used to see the value of trying to include humanities as a part of a tech degree until a few years ago and now I think it can't happen fast enough.
So many of the arguments presented here wouldn't pass any kind of a 101 level class.
I strongly suspect you never had a 101 humanities class. Pretty sure "philosophy" is all about what you know and what you can and what you have to believe.
Maybe you confuse it with "Bible class 101", where you get told a set of moral rules that you are supposed to follow and never question, because they are supposedly given by god.
Still, I would be curious to hear your reasoning of why it is supposedly morally mandatory to believe in the Holocaust?
> I think it should be possible to discuss even the details of the holocaust
Details of Holocaust are allowed to be discussed and are discussed regularly. Discussing details of holocaust and holocaust denier are two different things, turns out.
Paradox of tolerance; the only way to have a tolerant society is to be intolerant of intolerance. You have to make that exception or you lose the entire thing. Very much a “sorry not sorry” about “cancel culture”.
Popper didn't say to be intolerant of all intolerance, he said only to be intolerant of intolerance that cannot be countered by reasoned argument or kept in check by popular opinion. In no sense are far-right ideas "popular", and they are easily countered by reasoned arguments.
Popper's paradox of intolerance is probably the most misused and misquoted argument in online debates these past few years.
Except they are proving difficult to keep in check. January 6th was pivotal because 1. It's very lucky it didn't go in the other direction, 2. People watching learned a few lessons for the next time.
I disagree that they are difficult to keep in check. Jan 6th was a failure of capitol police and other law enforcement agencies. The mob that breached the capitol was around 800 people, which is easily managed by a small police force.
They had ample evidence that these protests would be in the tens of thousands. I'm sure you've seen the police presence for BLM protests, so I think the response here speaks for itself. I honestly don't see how this indicates the far-right are difficult to keep in check. It really shows that law enforcement didn't even try, either because they didn't believe they would become riotous or violent, or (hopefully not) for more nefarious reasons.
Why? There are over 1,500 capitol police officers. That's more than enough. Militarizing the capitol the way they did was total overkill; security theatre that they used to get a bigger budget.
Because security is an illusion, and theater is a part of that. January 6th shattered part of that illusion and, having happened, it is now a part of the consciousness. Every protest will now be a possible threat, a chance for fear to win. Until there is enough time passed for it to fade it must not be reproduced. Also, I don't want a situation where 1500 capitol police even have to defend our institutions. Getting to that point is already a major lose.
Violating their expected privacy, fostering moralistic vigilante justice against them, and creating an environment where they have to fear expressing opinions -- that's "poisoning the well" in a far worse way.
They're trying to be secret, that's true. But expectations of privacy are for personal matters, this is posting hostile things and then hoping nobody finds out it's you. I don't think the author necessarily has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
> creating an environment where they have to fear expressing opinions
The Holocaust was a thing that happened. Pretending it didn't isn't expressing an opinion.
> They're trying to be secret, that's true. But expectations of privacy are for personal matters, this is posting hostile things and then hoping nobody finds out it's you. I don't think the author necessarily has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
I disagree with this. I think they did have a reasonable expectation of anonymity, they just didn't do a great job at protecting it. Per the article it seems like Epik accept fake names and cryptocurrency; they could have done that and avoided this mess.
I'd expect my registrar to protect my personal address, for example, despite the website being my full name. And for my other domains I absolutely would expect them to protect my identity because I paid for WHOIS protection. And none of them are even remotely controversial.
> The Holocaust was a thing that happened. Pretending it didn't isn't expressing an opinion.
Also disagree. It's an opinion, but a wrong one that they should face social opprobrium for.
Do you think a political opinion like 'taxes are too high and should be lowered" is on the same moral footing as misinformation like 'the holocaust did not really happen' ?
They may well be. You can make that judgement for yourself; but you haven't the right to make it for me.
I have personally known people who honestly believed the Holocaust had been exaggerated in scope. They were wrong, but telling them "shut up!" wasn't going to help educate them. Showing them some of the stuff linked from here [1] did.
The issue isn't people's opinion. Was everyone whose privacy was violated saying "that the holocaust did not happen"? And who exactly is the arbiter of what's acceptable, if not the law? The issue is that the people who released this data were not law enforcers, they were vigilantes. Maybe some people hold vigilanties in high regard, but I don't. If someone says something you don't like or something you think is inaccurate, reply to it, inform people of what's wrong and convince them of why you believe you are right -- don't trample all over their legal rights. The violations of privacy were indiscriminate and based on the reputation of the company not the individuals -- not that targeting privacy violations would have made things any more legal or acceptable. The loss of expectations to legal privacy are a horrible "poisoning of the well" and eventually hurts everyone.
Loss of privacy has happened in the past, like with Wikileaks from which Pizzagate originated.
>If someone says something you don't like or something you think is inaccurate, reply to it, inform people of what's wrong and convince them of why you believe you are right
President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, wrote: "A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on."
Fighting misinformation is way harder than spreading it. Because misinformation spreads virally because it's clickbait and interesting, while fact checks are boring.
Abandoning rights and freedoms in the name of expediency is also a lot easier than standing up for them. And recovering those rights and freedoms once lost will be a long and miserable process.
The parent post seems to be saying that employers firing someone for their disagreeable political actions (at least outside of their workplace) is wrong.
Agitating contrary to the majority sociopolitical opinion should not make one unemployable; Firing people for inappropriate or immoral political opinion is not new, USA has already been there with e.g. Hoover's Red scare and the 1980s "Moral majority", but in hindsight it seems quite clear that this approach was wrong at least back in those years when it was targeted by the right wing towards the [USA-]left.
I'm not sure about what exactly he's been saying and I don't really care to read that because it's likely to be stupid, but I'd consider even stupid and extreme opinions and suggestions (in both directions!) on public health policy, pandemic solutions, elections, geopolitics, immigration policy, religion, human rights, LGBT rights, workers rights, voting rights, socioeconomic equality, affirmative action, education policy, gun policy, healthcare, reproductive care, etc all as political opinions.
Crimes, harassment and libel are another issue, but for that we generally want a legal process to determine the guilt and appropriate punishment; simply firing accused suspects is not a proper response because it's not sufficient if he's guilty and far too much if he's not.
There's nothing to fight in court, in USA it's completely legal to fire someone for their political beliefs in the "at will employment" states. The argument against similar actions during Red Scare and Moral Majority is not that they were illegal but that now in hindsight we see that they were wrong, despite fitting the governing moral/political desires of the time, so similar acts should be avoided in future and perhaps even restricted, in which case there would appear a way to fight this in court.
How many years before we realise that denying the holocaust wasn't wrong?
The problem with being fired isn't because of views then, you'd think people with views that would get them fired would be working to get those laws changed.
My position is that the society should decide if something (e.g. denying the holocaust) is punishable. If it is, then we should implement laws against it (as e.g. Germany has done) and punish people for it after establishing their guilt with due process and with the level of the punishment we collectively have decided. And if it is not, well, then people shouldn't be punished until the laws do get changed.
I.e. I'm think that making someone unemployable or outcast as a harsh (and perhaps even "cruel and unusual") punishment which should happen only for things the society has explicitly forbidden, and after we have properly established that the accused is actually guilty. Obviously, it's not the situation right now in USA (at least not in the at-will states), where employers have a wide (IMHO too wide) discretion of what they will tolerate for non-job-related acts of employees after work; some will fire antivaxxers, some will fire pro-vaxxers; some will fire holocaust deniers; some will fire people for having an OnlyFans account; etc. (and, crucially, they'll fire them for assuming they are like this, which won't always be true).
IMHO this discretion needs to stop, as it the case in some countries with different employment laws. And if we do want to have a harsher treatment for some of those things (e.g. holocaust denial is a good example) than for others, then that distinction should be decided in laws by the whole society, not unilaterally by company owners.
Your sentence has two clauses: "did business with Epik" and "had their details released".
AFAICT, the people who have been combing through that database and releasing details on people on the net, in a readable format have been selective about who they look for and release details about. So the answer (still AFAICT) is yes, if by release you mean in a human-friendly and/or googleable manner.
If, on the other hand, you consider the dump itself to be releasing details, no matter how difficult it is to read, then the answer is no. But that seems a rather pedantic, otherworldly no.
Sometimes governments or other organisations that are required to publish things choose to publish bad news late on Friday before a three-day weekend, or on another day when most people won't notice and the publication will be ineffectual.
In my heart I don't consider that publication. It is the minimum required by law, but in my heart I don't see it as real. I suspect that most people feel as I do.
Because of that, I also don't see publishing Epik's customer list as a 150GB database dump as real publication. Having to downloading 150GB, loading it into the right DBMS and figuring out the schema is enough to keep the data away from the general public. De jure it's public but de facto it's buried.
This is going beyond "political purity" as the guy was quite evidently involved in racist behaviors. Racism is not a political "right" or "wrong", it's just straight up wrong. Holocaust denial is another one of those issues that isn't "political" but rather a belief that stems from ignorance and hatred. Firing people for being racist is, in my book, completely acceptable.
Please don't turn this into a political purity thing. As far as I'm aware, the only people who've faced consequences are people who have owned and run domain names that are inexcusably terrible. I'm no believer in cancel culture, particularly the aspects that get people punished for things they've posted online as teenagers and young adults. But that's entirely different that running a website for holocaust deniers and racists. An employer has a right to fire someone like that.
The right wing of this country has really confused freedom of speech with freedom from consequence. In addition to freedom of speech, the constitution provides for freedom of association, i.e. the right to associate or disassociate with groups or people.
The problem is that 15 years ago, most companies and people didn't pay as much attention to social media as they do today.
It's interesting to me how many people are ready to lap up this data, what's more surprising is these people aren't journalists but some weirdly named think tanks.
Seems like there's a solid industry around mapping "hate" groups and studying them.(and potentially doxxing their members by the sounds of it)
> After the call, which Camp recorded and posted online, he boasted of “lying to the Washington Post” and began harassing a Post reporter via text and social media.
That's one of the least subtle things I've ever seen and I've been following some of this for a while.
- The Epik leak contains 15 million records [1], including scraped data of people who have never had any relation to Epik whatsoever.
- Epik has operated as a seemingly ordinary domain registrar since 2009, and controls over half a million domains [2]. Their rise to infamy over far right wing hosting did not occur until around 2018 [3]. Despite this, the leak contains their entire historical user database.
This is a case of doxxing millions of innocent people to expose a couple of assholes. The way I see it, if you celebrate this hack, you truly are a scumbag no better than any of the people behind "theholocaustisfake.com".
This is actually pretty accurate summary of the situation.
Doxxing people is never cool. It’s a great responsibility no one should have, especially when innocent people can get hurt in the process. Mistakes in correlating the data have already been made.
multi-million dollar newspaper, founded in 1877, owned by the richest person in the world, telling me what I really needed to know: the name, occupation, and location of the owner of the website "theholocaustisfake.com".
salaried individuals sifting through data dumps to compile identifying lists of people to publish to their millions of readers in temporal perpetuity.
> Alayon told The Post that he does not own the “racisminc,” Holocaust-denial or other web addresses but declined to say if he had owned them in the past
Njalla is a registrar that allows purchase of domain names with Monero and other cryptocurrencies. So this will never happen to any domain squatters and enterprisers here, as there would be no identifying information such as the kind needed to process credit card transactions :) and Monero distinctly does not have further tracing to prior fund ownership.
Just write whatever you want in the WHOIS information of course, and then still keep the free WHOIS privacy on. You can put contact information in the DNS information if you are just trying to sell the site.
I'm not a cryptocurrency fan. Or a fan of the far right.
But if you value secure data, communications, and interactions, there's little better test than that those you'd least want to support would be able to use a tool without risk of being exposed by its use.
Because if they're able to, anyone with good intentions but who is at risk whether from establishment, corporate, criminal, or violent radical/reactionary actors, will be able to do so as well. Which I see as a societal good.
I'd like to see a world which does a better job of balancing legitimate common weal interests in accessing such information, whilst affording strong protections against general surveillance and fishing expeditions. I think we're terrifyingly far to the latter extreme, and that law-enforcement agency alarmism over "dark threats" is a case of crocodile tears.
it is only happenstance that online purchases require name and address, as this is required to process over credit card networks at lower transaction fees (due to slightly lessened ability for payment fraud - which could be reversed - from the payment processor's perspective). As crypto currencies do not have reversal without nearly complete network consensus, such information is not applicable.
There's a certain sense to that. If it is effective for the worst of society who are constant targets, it will work for grandma. However that is assuming the technology can become user friendly/cheap.
No, there is no sense to that. The worst of society have a lot of tools that are effective for them, that your grandma has absolutely no use for. The worst of society will also put up with using some pretty weird things as long as they will help them break the law, that are incredibly awkward to use for anyone else.
My point was that if a solution was battle tested to withstand the scrutiny that the ne'er-do-wells encourage, then random person who knows nothing can feel comfortable that their use of the technology is also secure. It's kind of like calling something "military-grade". In addition I also qualified the statement to ensure that your second point was covered, that overhead could restrict it's use.
You actually hit the nail on the head there: It is a lot like calling something "military grade". Military grade is not something regular people want! Military grade is clunky, cumbersome and problematic for reasons that are a tradeoff for things that matter a lot to the military, but which are not an issue at all for regular people.
You don't want your car to be covered in heavy armour. That gains you nothing and costs you a lot. But the military does want that, a lot.
But let's do apples to apples here, because you are comparing "military grade" hardware and I'm talking about software, something where component costs are 0 and have 0 cost to duplicate.
But that's really secondary to the point, if something has proven itself in the most strenuous conditions you can feel confident that it will meet your needs. Assuming your needs are in line with the aforementioned conditions, ex. yes, a "military grade" laptop will be bulky, and grandma will not care about that feature, but someone in an auto-shop who needs a laptop to withstand all sorts of punishment might feel the extra bucks are worth the confidence.
My assumption here is you and those with similar views do not view privacy as a requirement for grandma, and I think that is the crux of the argument. Privacy can be its own reward and everyone will determine their own value for it. If grandma's circumstances are that she needs/wants that privacy, then having a battle tested solution that can be counted on is an easy decision to make.
That's not really what I was saying either. The technology behind it costs nothing to reproduce. Sure there are costs, ex. there were costs to develop the technology, there are costs to maintain infrastructure and costs for continuing development. However those costs also exist in our current system and they could easily be seen as lower with cryptos.
It is nothing, since nobody is going to be shooting at your car unless you live in a warzone. It gives you protection against a non-existent threat, while costing you money and convenience.
you are trying to straddle a line and it won't go anywhere.
so let me help you: crypto is a better solution for e-commerce and people won't be able to get doxxed when employing the best practices. the best practices will become more convenient.
from my perspective, you are advocating for the worst opsec possible: "hey everyone add your name, address, and the private key to all your funds for the credit/debit network to every site, just because using crypto is inconvenient for grandma for now and therefore only for the 'worst of society'"
its funny to me because you don't even realize thats your argument, since you are focused on the specific use case of far-right subscribers not being able to get doxxed when actual criminals actually hack a website
To the bunch here that complains about their data being in there and them supposedly being leftists: You're not very much a leftist if you're doing business with a company owned by a person well-known to be a Neonazi.
Funny, when this happens in the other direction it's called harassment.
The guilt by association here is transparent, as is the implication that it's okay because it's hitting the "right" people, i.e. the right. Who are then immediately labeled far-right by fiat.
Far left extremists are far too high on their own supply, and are torching the principles of free society left and right. And they still somehow think they wouldn't have been the baddies 80 years ago.
I wouldn’t be cheering this data breach on as if ‘Anonymous’ or other internet vigilantes are the good guys here (They are not).
Rather than cause a complete exposure of everyone’s sensitive data, just report whatever illegal content you find to the authorities to force Epik to take it down.
One day Anonymous is on your side and in the next day they are not. They can try to do this to anyone they don’t like, even if innocent users are involved.
That is not something to celebrate or cheer about, is it?
Despite "domains affiliated with right-wing politics comprise less than 1 percent of [Epik's] users", the focus was emphatically on Epik's "right-wing" and "racist" users. There was zero reporting on the consequences to non-affiliated and left-wing users.
Admittedly, the featured victims of the breech are unsympathetic characters, so it's hard to really be upset. Which is upstream's point: the article invites us as readers to indulge in schadenfreude which, let's be honest, is a kind of cheering.
The downside of such articles for people of all political stripes is that it seems to imply that online anonymity, such as that supplied by Epik, benefits only reprehensible people peddling reprehensible views.
It's easier to call for legislation that limits online anonymity if it is generally perceived to help only those who everyone can agree are awful.
Throughout history, good people have needed anonymity from the government and even from popular consensus. The Underground Railroad, homosexuals, Jews, civil rights activists, anti-war demonstrators, to name just a few prominent examples.
I am old enough to remember when a year ago, these same media companies censored the hunter Biden story falsely claiming it was Russian disinfo and result of hacking and thus didn't report it.
Do you really believe this is about data breach and not about only political vendetta? The article is doing a lot of cheering if you read the article.
"After a scandal narrative [about Hunter Biden] failed to gain traction in the mainstream press, conservative media and personalities pivoted to a "meta narrative" that the press, social media platforms and the "deep state" were suppressing news of the scandal."
Social media platforms literally were suppressing news of the story. That's literally, verifiably true, and the suppression was indeed a bigger scandal than the original story. All of the reasons other media outlets touted for not covering it, and social media touted for suppressing it, are obviously nonsense, as is clear by coverage of literally any other story based on leaked or hacked materials over the past 20 years, including this one.
Good. The extreme spread of fake news and misinformation on the right will have consequences like this where a somewhat legit story(with a lot of false exaggerations) gets buried because of the other times things like this were fabricated. Boy who cried wolf and all that.
I might be inclined to debate that fairly if left wing misinformation were also treated equally (is Trump really a compromised Russian asset since the 80s?), or if the establishment media actually took responsibility for this sad state of affairs where half of the country doesn't trust mainstream news. Journalists have spent years breaking public trust on honesty and partisanship, then cried foul when Trump beat them at their own game.
You seem to want to blame the people on the right for this situation, but they are the symptom, not the cause. If you're interested in fixing this, then stop compounding the problem, like suppressing stories that make your favoured side look bad.
Trump literally said he was a Russian asset and has been compromised since the 80s? Please quote what he said and where he said that and/or what part of that wikipedia page documents that.
If you can't quote that or anything even remotely like it, then this counts as exactly the kind of misinformation that I'm talking about.
And I suppose you get to decide what's dishonest and what's a smear, for all of our benefits of course. Maybe you should take a moment to reflect on the meaning of democratic principles.
I think we can let reality make that choice. The things that actually happened, those are OK, and the ones that are made up bullshit, they can go. How about that?
Ok, so the recent independent confirmations that the laptop's emails are genuine indicates the original story was not entirely made up bullshit, correct? That there's some warranted suspicion there.
And the 5 years of reporting that Trump was a compromised Russian asset since the 80s are just as much bullshit as all the Fox News reporting that Obama was a secret Muslim and not a real American citizen, yes? And you would also support suppressing those bogus claims about Trump just as much as you would support suppressing those claims about Obama.
Just to make sure we're all being impartial about reality here, and not treating one set of claims preferentially because of who they're about or where they come from.
What it means by "a scandal narrative failed to gain traction" is that the mainstream press ignored the actual contents of the hack and focused entirely on falsely discrediting the information it contained as fake (a claim which fell apart almost immediately, at least for all the Hunter Biden emails which were politically interesting - something the non-conservative press has actually just started to notice), objections to the morality of using hacked data which are mysteriously absent here, and of course endless articles about how "conservative media" were using it. It's remarkable how whenever something happens that's politically inconvenient to Democrats, most of the US media coverage ends up being about the Republican reaction to it! In fact, that sentence from Wikipedia is a downstream consequence of this ... at least in theory, their policy is to just regurgitate the mainstream media narrative.
Remember, too, that the Hunter Biden emails involved the future president of the USA and his family whereas this involves random obscure anonymous internet users that none of the Seattle Times' readers would even have heard of had prior to the press deciding to go after them. It takes an extremely partisan notion of newsworthiness to consider the latter worthy of reporting but not the former.
Assuming you have read the article instead of the headline, the article mentions more than that and includes reactions from those who are relieved and cheering the news of the data breach.
Or are you going to continue to deny that the article didn’t mention this?
So we have a newspaper in a city with 67.30% Whites and 15.43% Asian doing a little virtue signaling.
In the witch hunt they use illegally obtained information. How do we know that the data sets are even correct? Can one use information from a hack? Will these journalists be prosecuted like Assange for using such information?
I don't like the websites that the witch hunt target participated in, but public shaming like this (of non-politicians) is worse.
Well, that part says three things. First, that someone's name appeared in the Epik dump as having paid for some domains, and names the domains. Second, that the journalists spoke to that someone, and that he said certain things. Third (and implying that this was public knowledge before this article), that he was fired by his employer, also named.
How do we know that this is correct? We can download the data via torrent and see that his name actually does appear, we have to trust that what he told the journalists is correctly quoted, and that he was fired? I've no idea, I suppose neither the employer nor the employee will be eager to talk about that, many people aren't.
The journalists may be prosecuted, but for what? If that already was widely enough known that his employer fired him, what is the significant change of this article? And what else might they be prosecuted for?
It's unfortunate, as I'd consider myself "leftist".