5 ms·

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

Topfi 6mo ago
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.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 6mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Torvalds#Linux_kernel_statement 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?
jug 6mo ago
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)
- pas 6mo ago
  > 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.
  - trinsic2 6mo ago
    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.
- bornfreddy 6mo ago
  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.
  - account42 6mo ago
    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.
  - janc_ 6mo ago
    Using OCR you could reduce that to seconds.

Topfi 6mo ago

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.

b65e8bee43c2ed0 6mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Torvalds#Linux_kernel_statement 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?

jug 6mo ago

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)

pas 6mo ago
> 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.
- trinsic2 6mo ago
  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.
bornfreddy 6mo ago
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.
- account42 6mo ago
  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.
- janc_ 6mo ago
  Using OCR you could reduce that to seconds.