I was wrong (and pooya87’s post was completely wrong).  Updating this.

This mainnet transaction apparently burnt 0.00009815 BTC with Green—which may answer my question about libwally (though I do not see an issue for this? which I would have noticed anyway...):
http://explorerzydxu5ecjrkwceayqybizmpjjznk5izmitf2modhcusuqlid.onion/tx/ef1662fd2eb736612afb1b60e3efabfdf700b1c4822733d9dbe1bfee607a5b9b

This mainnet transaction apparently burnt 0.00000546 BTC (dust limit) with Blockchain.com:
http://explorerzydxu5ecjrkwceayqybizmpjjznk5izmitf2modhcusuqlid.onion/tx/64b0fcb22d57b3c920fee1a97b9facec5b128d9c895a49c7d321292fb4156c21

This mainnet transaction successfully sent 0.00003656 BTC to bc1pmfr3p9j00pfxjh0zmgp99y8zftmd3s5pmedqhyptwy6lm87hf5ss52r5n8:
http://explorerzydxu5ecjrkwceayqybizmpjjznk5izmitf2modhcusuqlid.onion/tx/b48a59fa9e036e997ba733904f631b1a64f5274be646698e49fd542141ca9404

Reference:  I somehow missed this message last month, and should probably update OP with it after some more poking around here:


And that answers my question about which wallets failed.

Unedited post follows.  I will keep updating this as I dig for more information, until somebody replies or I get bored.

---

I think it’s bloody obvious that I was talking about the destruction of testnet coins—and how those unidentified wallets would burn real money, if Witness v1 were deployed on mainnet with BIP 173 addresses.  As I read the discussion on bitcoin-dev, that was the decisive factor for both sipa and harding in their respective agreements to break forward-compatibility.

Did you seriously read my post as a complaint about the destruction of real money, with live v1 transactions?  (Rhetorical question; don’t answer.)

As I myself observed further up the thread, the problem with the merits is not with the senders—to the contrary!  I myself almost sent merit to this post.  I would have felt cheated if I had.  It is one of the reasons why I am focused on this topic—one of many good reasons.

---

Why is this post not showing up?  It seems still to be available; and I have not received any notification of a deleted post.  But it does not show on the thread.  Is there now an actual shadow-ban function on this forum?

I believe that this succinctly illustrates the problem with Ratimov’s copy-paste jobs, which I had deliberately mimicked with a copied-and-pasted post of my own:

Explanations are now added in red for the dullards here:

I am also interested in knowing which wallets destroyed funds in tests, instead of just doing nothing.  My educated guess about the cause is that the authors of those wallets did not read this:


Every time an implementer writes code without reading the clearly stated warning in the standard, kittens cry.  😿😿😿  Please do not make kittens cry.  Thank you.

---

Even for handling transactions, I myself was not able to switch (almost) fully to a Segwit-native, Bech32-addressed wallet for a long time after Segwit activated.  Too many senders told me that I had an “invalid address”.

Wherefore I thank Segwit’s architects for forward-compatible addressing—no thanks to implementers who didn’t implement it.

---

We will need it, to survive in the era of a serious push for transaction-blacklisting, “KYC”-enforcing miner pools which now ride in on greed.  In my opinion, Payjoin-style protocols and massive sig-agg CoinJoins indistinguishable from ordinary transactions will be critical to prevent, or at least reduce the co-option of Bitcoin.

Too bad that every upgrade also partitions anonymity sets, encourages the type of mixed-script transactions that make change identification trivial, creates design problems for privacy services (as I am currently contemplating), and necessitates special-casing to avoid mixed-script transactions in protocols such as BIP 78 (Payjoin).


Once we get some critical upgrades such as Taproot and future sig agg, I would prefer to see fewer, less-frequent changes on L1.  Let’s not use up those Witness versions too fast...

---

Have these any of these tests examined the functionality of developer-level implementations, such as libwally?  As to libwally specifically, I have a high regard for its authors, and I expect for it to DTRT; but if it were forward-compatible, then several different wallets should have been forward-compatible.  I see that in the October tests, Blockstream Green (libwally’s flagship consumer) is listed as not forward-compatible (“Fails on validation of the address.”).  Time to dig into the code...

A better question:  Are the test vectors (or better, a full test suite) used for these wallet tests publicly available?  I may talk big about reading the standard; but if I were to develop something (probably just using libwally under the hood), then I should test its functionality before foisting it on others.

Thanks.

That wasn’t my definition of plagiarism, you self-made nutcase.  I copied and pasted that definition of plagiarism from Yale.EDU.  Wasn’t it obvious?  


So, I guess that you “don’t give a shit” what Yale University tells its faculty and students about plagiarism.  That is acceptable:  There is no reason for anyone to give a shit about your opinion.  (Drop the presumptuous “we”.  It is obviously not a royal “we”, for there is nothing royal about you; and it cannot be an editorial “we”, for you are an awful writer.)

---

Ah, so you finally noticed my nym.  You know how when somebody takes the username, “BitcoinBillionaire”, “VIP Boss”, or “Supergenius”, it is usually the opposite of the truth?  ;-)

---

mdayonliner, even if you didn’t want to read the whole 2-page thread, a skim would have informed you that I already spent several hours doing a a full side-by-side collation of the English.  Good work on the parts that you caught, but there was much more—actually, the whole thing except for the first two sentences which were based on the Asmakov article, but apparently expressed in Ratimov’s words (insofar as I can tell).

---

^^^ This.  Sums it up.

nutildah must be high on LSD right now, at this particular moment.  And people on this forum generally have no idea what plagiarism is:  They call insubstantive copy-pastes of uncreative material “plagiarism” (e.g., RegulusHR), but deny that extreme, definitional plagiarism is plagiarism.

What Is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is usually defined as a discrete offense, a specific failure to give credit to a particular source. But it actually raises a much more fundamental question for writers: “Where is my voice in this project?” Seen in this light, the strategies that help you avoid plagiarism can also be strategies that help you gain power as a writer. Once your guiding question about your relationship to sources is “Where is my voice?” you are well on your way to using sources in an effective and legitimate way.

Plagiarism is the use of another’s work, words, or ideas without attribution. The word “plagiarism” comes from the Latin word for “kidnapper” and is considered a form of theft, a breach of honesty in the community. Plagiarizers suffer serious consequences.

But beyond the risk of penalties, there are urgent moral and intellectual reasons to avoid plagiarism. When you write, you’re joining an ongoing conversation. When you plagiarize, you join that conversation on false grounds, representing yourself as someone you are not. What is more, the act of stealing another’s words or ideas erases your voice.

You must always make clear in your written work where you have borrowed from others.

---

---

sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
- https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2020/12/01/a-heartfelt-plagiarism/
- https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/writing/using-sources/understanding-and-avoiding-plagiarism/what-plagiarism
- https://www.pornhub.com/ [NSFW]
- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1184641.msg26140103#msg26140103
- https://archive.org/details/nietzschehislilu00ludouoft
- https://web.archive.org/web/20190926055757/http://www.jir.com/

This is one of the two worst plagiarisms that I have ever yet seen on this forum.  (The other is something that I found in the Russian forum—which, as aforementioned, I have been intending to report.)  It is not obvious, the way that it is presented in OP; OP’s retroversion to Russian does not show that Ratimov’s English-language post is almost entirely a straight copy-paste.  Insofar as I can tell, Ratimov wrote exactly two sentences of this long post in his own words.

It is obvious when you do what OP suggested, which nobody actually did:  Compare Ratimov’s English post with the Google translation of Ratimov’s so-called “source”.  Ratimov did a total rip-off!

When I have other posts to write (and other things to do in my life), I just spent several hours neatly formatting the Google translation of Ratimov’s “source” in BBcode, collating it with Ratimov’s plagiarised post, and packaging it with this explanation.  —All to show the nature of a post which Ratimov evidently slapped together in a few minutes, for which he received much praise.  

I often spend hours of painstaking effort on one post.  I know that some other high-merit users invest similarly.  I have earned 2080 merits.  Ratimov copies and pastes Google translations of others’ work.  Ratimov has earned 3017 merits.  Why should anyone bother, when it is so easy to earn merits with copy and paste?

OP, good work.  I would send you merit on your throwaway account there, if I were not trying to save up some sMerits now.  Perhaps a merit source should merit you.  Perhaps LoyceV or suchmoon, who are so strongly against copypasta posts?

---

The Collation

Forward links:  Plagiarised Post; Original.

Colour codes:

• Text copied by Ratimov verbatim, or almost verbatim.
• Text closely paraphrased by Ratimov.  Some of this “paraphrasing” may be a straight copy and paste; Google Translate does not give the exact same results every time.
• Extraordinarily weird machine translation errors that Ratimov did not even bother to fix.  Emphasizes the essential copy-paste nature of this post.  
• In the original, this text was copied or closely paraphrased/text-spun by Ratimov.

It is recommended to open this post in two different browser windows, and compare the highlighted plagiarism with the highlighted original side-by-side.  The forum’s format does not admit any adequate representation of such a collation.

Where multiple paragraphs in the original were combined into one paragraph by Ratimov, I have preserved the original paragraph breaks with corresponding breaks in the highlighting.

Observe that all internal quotations and images in Ratimov’s post were also simply copied by him from the original.  Ratimov essentially reproduced a cut-down version of the Google Translate English version of a Russian article, and presented it as his own work—with a link to the original tossed into the middle of a list of so-called “source” links at the bottom.

This is not presented a translation of a Russian article, with appropriate credit given to the author, Andrew Asmakov; and credit is also not given to the translator, Google.  It appears to be Ratimov’s article; whereas it is a straight copy-paste, no different than any other “copypasta” besides its breathtaking scope and audacity.

---

Plagiarised Post

N.b. the merits from reputable users, who would not knowingly merit a copy-paste.  As I noted earlier, I had intended to merit it myself, and to make a thoughtful reply.

Merited by DdmrDdmr (2), OgNasty (1), ETFbitcoin (1), mk4 (1), 20kevin20 (1), GazetaBitcoin (1)

Quote from: Ratimov on December 03, 2020, 01:33:06 PM

In this article I would like to touch upon such a theme as online privacy. As we know, now is the period of a pandemic, and it is at this time that rights and freedoms are being infringed, including on the Internet. Governments are using the pandemic as an excuse to restrict access to information. It also expands the powers to monitor and implement new technologies aimed at digitizing, collecting and analyzing personal data of people without adequate protection from abuse. Countries are introducing new Internet rules to restrict the flow of information across national borders.

But any action on the part of the government immediately provokes opposition, especially on the Internet. Indeed, for many users, the principles of unhindered access to information and free expression are fundamental to the development of civil society and economic prosperity. The history of the world wide web is also the history of the struggle for basic human rights, the possibilities for achieving which have grown immeasurably with the development of technology.

Next, let's analyze the 5 most famous program documents published in the network, which still remain relevant, iincluding for cryptocurrency supporters.


1. The Conscience of a Hacker


The first significant attempt to explain the philosophy of hackers was an essay, written in January 1986 and later published in the electronic journal Phrack, entitled The Conscience of a Hacker. It was written by a hacker from Texas called The Mentor, Loyd Blankenship. Referring to the collective image of the world of adults, including teachers who think in familiar patterns, Blankenship writes:

Quote

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?  Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second, this is cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up.  Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me...Or thinks I'm a smart ass...Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...Damn kid.  All he does is play games.  They're all alike.

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.  We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic.  The few that had something to teach found us will-ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.  We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.  We explore... and you call us criminals.  We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals.  We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity.  My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.  You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

Blankenship's work is often referred to as the beginning of a story of confrontation between online activists and the real world in general, which later grew into a struggle with governments.


Lloyd Blankenship about the history of writing the Hacker's Manifesto. H2K2 Conference in 2002.


2. The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

In the 1970s, when the first working prototypes of the Internet appeared, the issue of protecting data in an open environment became relevant. In 1978, American cryptographer David Chaum developed a blind digital signature - a public key encryption model. It allowed the creation of a database of people who could remain anonymous, while guaranteeing the reliability of the information they provided about themselves.

Chaum also dreamed of digital voting, the process of which could be verified without disclosing the identity of the voter, but primarily digital cash. In the mid-1980s, he was able to create a model in which users made payments while maintaining anonymity and guaranteeing the reality of funds. On the basis of these developments, the movement of cryptographers was born, advocating computer technology as a means of destroying the state. The main ideologist of this movement was the former leading researcher at Intel Timothy May.

Timothy May

Inspired by Chaum's 1985 paper "Security without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete," which described a system that cryptographically hides the customer's identity, May set about exploring public key cryptographic security. He was firmly convinced that, when combined with networked computing, this technology could "destroy the structures of social power." In 1988, May published The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, an essay he wrote based on Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto:

Quote

A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.

It says that information technology will allow people to manage their lives without governments, but through cryptography, digital currencies and other decentralized tools. The anonymity these tools bring should be a catalyst for profound social change.

Timothy May writes:

Quote

Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re- routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.

According to May, the ideological foundation of The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto was anarcho-capitalism, a form of anarchism that emphasizes voluntary transactions and the free market. His essay was partly a source of inspiration for the first prototypes of Bitcoin, and many cryptocurrency proponents consider Timothy May to be one of those people who made a huge contribution to its ideological foundation. However, in 2018, when it was 10 years since the publication of the Bitcoin white paper, May stated that, observing what was happening, he experienced "some interest, a certain surprise and great disappointment", and that "Satoshi would vomit" if he saw all hype and yelling to the heavens and HODL, as well as ever tighter regulation.

In his opinion, attempts to "befriend" regulators are likely to kill the key use cases for cryptocurrencies, which should not be variations on PayPal or Visa.


3. A Cypherpunk's Manifesto

Timothy May also pioneered the cypherpunk movement, which he founded in 1992 with John Gilmore and Eric Hughes to champion the ideals of privacy and technology openness. It is believed that the movement was born in one of the informal meetings with close friends organized by May, Hughes and Gilmore. Such meetings began to be held regularly, and in order to attract other people who shared the interests and core values ​​of the movement, an electronic mailing list called "Cypherpunk" was created. In a short time, she gained hundreds of subscribers who tested ciphers, exchanged ideas and discussed new developments. The correspondence was conducted using the latest encryption methods such as PGP.

The group members had heated discussions on topics of politics and philosophy, which, combined with the study of computer science, cryptography and mathematics, led to the emergence of the Cypherpunk Manifesto. The document containing the main ideological provisions of this movement was published in 1993 by the aforementioned Eric Hughes.

Quote

Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.

For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.

The manifesto emphasized that privacy and secrecy are not the same thing:

Quote

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

The ideas of cypherpunks were subsequently implemented to one degree or another in cryptocurrencies. The mailing list included the creator of the Proof-of-Work algorithm Adam Back, the authors of the b-money proposals Wei Dai and Bitgold Nick Szabo, the movement had a significant impact on the creator of Zcash Zuko Wilcox. And it was in the cypherpunk mailing list in October 2008 that someone under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published the famous white paper "Bitcoin: A Digital Peer-to-Peer Cash System."


4. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

In February 1996, the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), John Perry Barlow, published an iconic document called A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which is still considered a classic of Internet libertarianism. The document consisted of harsh and unprincipled statements addressed to world governments and became a response to the Telecommunications Decency Act signed before this US President Bill Clinton, with the help of which the authorities tried to censor the Internet. Barlow's goal was to show that if states are still able to set limits on the dissemination of seditious ideas in traditional media, then on the World Wide Web they are powerless and such attempts are doomed to failure. He did not set the goal of "freeing the Internet", because the Internet was and remains free, and cyberspace has an innate immunity to supreme power.

Quote

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Despite the fact that the act signed by Bill Clinton later in the same 1996 by a federal court decision was declared unconstitutional, the struggle of supporters and opponents of freedom on the Internet continues, and Barlow's "Declaration" will remain relevant for a long time. Governments continue to practice blocking resources, seizing servers, and even physical arrests to this day, but cyberspace has resisted that too. New encryption tools, anonymization and blocking bypass tools appear.


5. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Time is like water - it flows and changes. The history of the struggle for fundamental rights on the Internet confirmed this when in 2008 the world saw the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, by Aaron Swartz.



According to Schwartz's manifesto:

Quote

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal - there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral - it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it - their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge - we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Recently, it is often said that due to the coronavirus pandemic, life will never be the same again. This is probably partly true. But one thing will remain unchanged - the human need for basic rights and especially in the global network, where the main activity is now taking place. This means the inevitability of the emergence of new technologies, and with them - and new attempts by the state machine to crush them under itself.

And the emergence of new manifestos outlining the agenda for the future is only a matter of time. However, they already appear.

---

---

sources:
- http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html#article
- https://activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html
- https://forklog.com/ot-hakerov-i-shifropankov-do-zashhitnikov-svobody-v-onlajne-pyat-programmnyh-manifestov-interneta/
- https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
- https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
- https://manifesto.ai/
- https://openaccessmanifesto.wordpress.com/guerilla-open-access-manifesto/

---

Original

Achtung!  Google Translate can give slightly, subtly different results on different runs; results are not guaranteed to be stable.  Nonetheless, the text that I obtained (including several errors) is, in pertinent part, almost word-for-word identical to Ratimov’s copy.

I, nullius, certify that the following text was copied by me from Google Translate, at the link hereby provided.

Quote from: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https://forklog.com/ot-hakerov-i-shifropankov-do-zashhitnikov-svobody-v-onlajne-pyat-programmnyh-manifestov-interneta/

From hackers and cypherpunks to online freedom advocates - the internet's five programming manifestos

11/19/2020 • Andrew Asmakov


#the Internet#cryptanarchism#hackers#cypherpunks

According to a recent report by human rights organization Freedom House, the coronavirus pandemic has negatively impacted global internet freedom. For 10 years in a row, users have faced a general denial of their rights, a phenomenon contributing to the crisis of democracy around the world.

Experts have identified three trends that indicate a decrease in the level of freedom on the Internet:

• Governments are using the pandemic as an excuse to restrict access to information.
• Under the same pretext , powers are expanding to monitor and implement new technologies aimed at digitizing, collecting and analyzing personal data of people without adequate protection from abuse.
• The race of "cyber sovereignty" - countries introduce their own Internet rules to restrict the flow of information across national borders.

As you know, any action causes opposition. This is especially true for the Internet, for many of whose users the principles of free access to information and free expression are fundamental to the development of civil society and economic prosperity.

The history of the world wide web is also the history of the struggle for basic human rights, the possibilities for achieving which have grown immeasurably with the development of technology.

We have collected five of the most famous policy documents published on the network, which still remain relevant, including for cryptocurrency supporters.

Hacker's manifesto

The first significant attempt to explain the philosophy of hackers was an essay, written in January 1986 and later published in the electronic journal Phrack, entitled " The Conscience of a Hacker." It was written by a Texas hacker named The Mentor, Loyd Blankenship .

At the time of writing, often referred to as the "Hacker's Manifesto," Blankenship was only 20 years old and had been arrested by the FBI shortly before that. The reasons for the arrest are not fully known, Blankenship himself claimed that "he did nothing wrong - he just went into the computer, which he should not have entered." The most likely explanation is the participation of the essay author in the cult hacker group Legion of Doom , which is considered one of the most influential organizations of its kind in the history of technology and was most active between 1984 and 1991.

Referring to the collective image of the world of adults, including teachers who think in familiar patterns, Blankenship writes:

Quote

“You, with your three-element psychology and the tech brain of the 50s, have you ever looked a hacker in the eye? Have you ever wondered what makes it move, what forces have shaped it? "

“Today I made a discovery. I opened my computer. Wait a second ... that's great! He does what I want. If he makes a mistake, it's because I screwed up. Not because he doesn't like me ... Or he is intimidated by me ... Or thinks that I am too smart ... Or does not like to study and should not be here ... "

“You’re willing to swear with your ass that we are all the same. At school we were all spoon-fed baby food, while we wanted a steak ... Those pieces of meat that we got were chewed and tasteless. "

“Now this is our world ... The world of electrons and switches, the world of the beauty of baud. We use existing systems without paying for what could be cheaper than dirt if not run by dirty speculators and you call us criminals. We investigate and you call us criminals. We are looking for knowledge ... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious strife ... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you unleash wars, you kill, you cheat and lie to us, trying to make us believe that all this is for our own good. "

“Yes, I'm a criminal. My crime is curiosity. My crime is that I judge people not by how they look, but by what they say and think. My crime is that I am much smarter than you. This is something that you will never forgive me.

“I'm a hacker. And this is my manifesto. You can stop one of us, but you cannot stop us all ... after all, we are all the same. "

Blankenship's work is often referred to as the beginning of a story of confrontation between online activists and the real world in general, which later grew into a struggle with governments. She was also noted by the creators of the film "Hackers" with Angelina Jolie in one of the roles, including an excerpt from the revised edition of "Manifesto".

[Youtube embed screenshotted by Ratimov for the forum]
Loyd Blankenship on the history of the Hackers Manifesto. H2K2 conference in 2002.

Blankenship himself later worked for the Austin-based company Steve Jackson Games , which develops tabletop role-playing and card games. He was the author of GURPS Cyberpunk , a set of rules for cyberpunk worlds that the US Secret Service removed from the company's office in 1990 after a raid, calling it "a guide for cybercriminals."

In 2014, after working as a programmer, technical writer and game designer at various companies, Blankenship became a private security consultant, and since 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile , he has been working at McAfee, where he leads the department of user interface design for applications and enterprise products. ...

Cryptanarchist manifesto

In the 1970s, when the first working prototypes of the Internet appeared, the issue of protecting data in an open environment became relevant.

In 1978, American cryptographer David Chaum developed a blind digital signature - a public key encryption model. It allowed the creation of a database of people who could remain anonymous, while guaranteeing the reliability of the information they reported about themselves.

Quote

Genesis Archives: David Chaum's eCash and the birth of the cypherpunk dream

Some people are born ahead of their time. They consider their ideas and views to be extremely simple and often wonder why society either does not take them seriously or rejects them as something alien. Progress almost always faces fierce resistance from the status quo, but it wins in the long run. Dr. David Chaum was one of those who were born an "astronaut" ... Read more

Chaum also dreamed of digital voting, the process of which could be verified without revealing the identity of the voter, but primarily digital cash.

In the mid-1980s, he was able to create a model in which users made payments while maintaining anonymity and guaranteeing the reality of funds. On the basis of these developments, the movement of cryptographers was born who advocated computer technology as a means of destroying the state.

The main ideologist of this movement was the former leading researcher at Intel Timothy May .


Timothy May

Inspired by Chaum's 1985 paper "Security Without Identity: A Transactional System That Will Make Big Brother Anachronistic," which described a system that cryptographically obscures the customer's identity, May set about exploring public key cryptographic security. He was firmly convinced that, when combined with networked computing, this technology could "destroy the structures of social power."

In 1988, May published The Cryptanarchist Manifesto , an essay he wrote based on Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto:

Quote

"A ghost wanders the modern world, the ghost of cryptanarchy."

It says that information technology will allow people to manage their lives without governments, but through cryptography, digital currencies and other decentralized tools. The anonymity these tools bring should be a catalyst for profound social change.

Quote

“Computer technology has come very close to providing individuals or groups of people with the ability to communicate and interact completely anonymously ... This will completely change the nature of government regulation, the ability to collect taxes and control economic interaction, the ability to keep information secret and even change the nature of trust and reputation. "- wrote Timothy May.

According to May, the ideological foundation of the Cryptanarchist Manifesto was anarcho-capitalism, a form of anarchism that emphasizes voluntary transactions and the free market.

Quote

What is cryptanarchism?

1 What is cryptanarchism? Cryptoanarchism is a variation in which cryptographically secure anonymization technologies, digital pseudonyms, and digital money are used to bypass government controls such as surveillance, censorship, and taxation. 2 How did cryptanarchism begin? In the 1940s, Western intelligence agencies began to explore the idea of ​​having the recipient of a message participate in the encoding process. In 1973, a British mathematician ... Read more

His essay was partly a source of inspiration for the first prototypes of Bitcoin, and many cryptocurrency proponents consider Timothy May to be one of those people who made a huge contribution to its ideological foundation.

However, in 2018, when it was 10 years since the publication of the Bitcoin white paper , May stated that, observing what was happening, he experienced "some interest, a certain surprise and great disappointment", and that "Satoshi would vomit" if he saw all hype and screaming to the heavens and HODL, as well as ever tighter regulation.

Quote

“I don’t know how Satoshi wanted his creation, but I don’t think his vision included cryptocurrency exchanges with their draconian identity verification and anti-money laundering laws, account freezes and mandatory cooperation with intelligence agencies on the subject of“ suspicious activity ”. It is highly likely that all this chatter about governance, regulation and blockchain will result in the creation of a society of total supervision and control, where everyone will have a personal file, ”Timothy May said then.

In his opinion, attempts to "befriend" regulators are likely to kill the key use cases for cryptocurrencies, which should not be variations on PayPal or Visa.

Timothy May coined the term "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse" , which refers to drug trafficking, money laundering, terrorism and pedophilia, used by governments to intimidate and justify restrictions on cryptography and, as a result, restrictions on privacy and anonymity.

In December 2018, at the age of 66, Timothy May died of natural causes at his California home.

Cypherpunk Manifesto

Timothy May also pioneered the cypherpunk movement, which he founded in 1992 with John Gilmore and Eric Hughes to champion the ideals of privacy and technology openness. It is believed that the movement was born in one of the informal meetings with close friends organized by May, Hughes and Gilmore.

Such meetings began to be held regularly, and in order to attract other people who shared the interests and core values ​​of the movement, an electronic mailing list called "Cypherpunk" was created. In a short time, she gained hundreds of subscribers who tested ciphers, exchanged ideas and discussed new developments. The correspondence was conducted using the latest encryption methods such as PGP.

Quote

Bitcoin and privacy - how cypherpunks realize the dream of a free internet of the future

They write code. Their code is open to everyone and can be used free of charge. But they don't do it out of altruism - they know that someone in this world has to write code and create programs that help protect privacy. They are convinced that privacy, including from government agencies, whose attention to the private life of people with everyone ... Read more

The group members had heated discussions on topics of politics and philosophy, which, combined with the study of computer science, cryptography and mathematics, led to the emergence of the Cypherpunk Manifesto . A document containing the main ideological provisions of this movement was published in 1993 by the aforementioned Eric Hughes .

Quote

“Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to keep writing code to protect information, and since we see no other way to protect our data, we keep writing code. […] Our code is available to anyone on earth. We don't care too much that some people don't like what we do. We know that our programs cannot be destroyed, and the growing network cannot be stopped. "

“Confidentiality is essential for an open society in the digital age. […] Confidentiality in an open society requires the use of cryptography. […] We cypherpunks are called to create anonymous systems. We protect our privacy with cryptography, anonymous email forwarding systems, digital signatures, and electronic money. [...] Cryptography will inevitably spread throughout the world, and with it the systems of anonymous transactions that it makes possible. "

The manifesto emphasized that privacy and secrecy are not the same thing.

Quote

“A private matter is something that, in the opinion of a person, the whole world does not need to know, and no one should know about a secret matter at all. Privacy is the ability to choose what information about yourself to reveal to the world. "

Eric Hughes

The ideas of cypherpunks were subsequently implemented to one degree or another in cryptocurrencies. The mailing list included the creator of the Proof-of-Work algorithm Adam Back , the authors of the b-money proposals Wei Dai and Bitgold Nick Szabo , the movement had a significant impact on the creator of Zcash Zuko Wilcox .

And it was in the cypherpunk mailing list in October 2008 that someone under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published the famous white paper "Bitcoin: A Digital Peer-to-Peer Cash System."

Cyberspace Declaration of Independence

In February 1996, the founder of social organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) , John Perry Barlow published a cult document entitled "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace» (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace), and today is considered a classic of Internet libertarianism.

The document consisted of harsh and unprincipled statements addressed to world governments and became a response to the Telecommunications Decency Act, signed before this US President Bill Clinton, with the help of which the authorities tried to censor the Internet.

Barlow's goal was to show that if states are still able to set limits on the dissemination of seditious ideas in traditional media, then on the World Wide Web they are powerless and such attempts are doomed to failure. He did not set the task of "freeing the Internet" because the Internet was and remains free, and cyberspace has an innate immunity to supreme power.

Quote

<<<vimeo video>>>

“Governments of the Industrial World, you are weary giants of flesh and steel; my Motherland is Cyberspace, the new home of Consciousness. On behalf of the future, I ask you, who have everything in the past, - leave us alone. You are superfluous among us. You do not have supreme authority where we are gathered. "

“We did not choose a government, and it is unlikely that we will ever have one, so I appeal to you, having a power not greater than the one with which freedom itself speaks. I declare that the global public space we are building is by nature independent of the tyranny you seek to impose on us. You have neither a moral right to rule over us, nor methods of coercion that could really frighten us. "

“Governments are truly empowered by the consent of those they rule. […] You declare that we have problems for you to solve. […] Many of these problems do not exist. Where there are real conflicts and shortcomings, we will identify and eliminate them by our own means. We establish our own Social Contract. This mode of government will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. "

“You are terrified of your own children, because they feel at home in a world in which you will always be immigrants. Because you are afraid of them, you cowardly shift your parenting responsibilities to the bureaucratic apparatus. […] Your increasingly obsolete information industry would like to perpetuate its dominance by pushing laws - both in America and elsewhere - requiring ownership of speech itself around the world. "

“These increasingly hostile colonial measures put us in a position in which the adherents of freedom and self-determination found themselves in their time, forced to reject the authority of a remote uniform power. We must declare the freedom of our virtual selves from your dominion, even if we agree that you continue to dominate our bodies. We will spread our "I" throughout the planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. "

“We will create a civilization of Consciousness in Cyberspace. Let it be more humane and honest than the world that your governments have created before. "

Despite the fact that the act signed by Bill Clinton later in the same 1996 by a federal court decision was declared unconstitutional, the struggle of supporters and opponents of freedom on the Internet continues, and Barlow's "Declaration" will remain relevant for a long time.

Governments continue to practice blocking resources, seizing servers, and even physical arrests to this day, but cyberspace has resisted that too. New encryption tools, anonymization and blocking bypass tools appear.

Quote

“I’m completely free to talk to Edward Snowden anytime I want, even though the NSA guys would like to know when and what we’re talking about,” John Barlow told Wired in 2016 , calling it further proof that governments from the physical world have no real power on the internet.

On February 7, 2018, John Barlow, who also wrote the lyrics for the legendary rock band Grateful Dead, died at the age of 70 at his San Francisco home. As Wired tech reporter Stephen Levy wrote in an obituary, the "bard of the internet" is gone.

The guerrilla manifesto on open access

Time is like water - it flows and changes. The history of the struggle for fundamental rights on the Internet confirmed this when in 2008 the world saw Aaron Schwartz's “Guerrilla Manifesto on Open Information” .

[Youtube embed screenshotted by Ratimov for the forum]

According to Schwartz's manifesto:

Quote

“Information is power. But, as is usually the case with power, there are those who want to have it alone. The entire world scientific and cultural heritage, published over the centuries in various books and magazines, is rapidly being digitized and hidden from prying eyes by a handful of private corporations. "

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies own the copyrights and make a lot of money. And this is completely legal. There is no way we can stop them. "

“But all of this is happening in a dark underground. This is called theft or piracy. […] But sharing information is not immoral. This is a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed do not agree with this. "

“Big corporations are undoubtedly blinded by greed. This is required by the laws according to which they function. Their shareholders will rise up if profits are missing. And politicians bought by corporations cover them up, inventing the laws they need. "

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make copies of ourselves and share them with the world. We need to take materials that are not copyrighted and add them to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and make them freely available. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file-sharing networks. We must fight for Guerrilla Open Access.

"With enough of us around the world, we will not only send a compelling message against the privatization of knowledge, we will leave this system in the past."

Born in 1986 in Chicago, Schwartz lived a short but extremely vibrant life, bursting, like Jim Morrison in the 1960s, on the other side of the information space.

Already at the age of 14, he became a co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification, after which he worked under the guidance of the creator of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee at W3C. Schwartz got into the first program at Y Combinator with startup Infogami, which later merged with the popular site Reddit and later worked on projects such as Open Library, Creative Commons, and watchdog.net.

Another contribution of the Internet legend is the creation of Deaddrop, later renamed SecureDrop , a platform for anonymous information leakage , which is used by the world's largest media. The list of projects to which Schwartz had a hand is endless.

On January 11, 2013, at the age of 26, Aaron Schwartz committed suicide. Shortly before that, he was charged with hacking into the computer network of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), on the aggregate of which he could face up to 35 years in prison.

*****

Recently, it is often said that due to the coronavirus pandemic, life will never be the same. This is probably partly true. But one thing will remain unchanged - the human need for basic rights, and especially in the global network, where the main activity is now taking place.

This means the inevitability of the emergence of new technologies, and with them - and new attempts by the state machine to crush them under itself.

And the emergence of new manifestos outlining the agenda for the future is only a matter of time. However, they are already appearing .

Subscribe to ForkLog news in Telegram: ForkLog FEED - the entire news feed, ForkLog - the most important news and polls.

#the Internet #cryptanarchism #hackers #cypherpunks

Covid is Schrödinger’s Virus, the quantum superposition of not-real and man-made.  The superposition collapses to either state through observations of people voicing their opinions on the Internet.


Cite this as: NULLIUS. “Covid Decoherence.” Journal of Quantum Sociology, 13:37:0–∞, 2020, doi:NaN/NULL.

This advances prior research, in which I found that Covid was created by a nonexistent cat using powerful AI.

---

Speaking as someone who has serious rational objections to many of the reactions to Covid, for my part, I do not appreciate the massive amounts of illogical and unscientific chatter about Covid.  It is not helpful.  So as for my “opinion”!

Bech32 is still awesome.

Unfortunately, the great dream of a forward-compatible address format hit a snag with Segwit v1; nonetheless, it has been taken as an opportunity to make Bech32’s error detection even better.


See the above-linked gist for more technical information.

A new BIP is forthcoming.

Note:  This has no practical effect whatsoever on the bc1q... Bech32 addresses that you are using today.  Those addresses are fine.  It is only a potential problem for the forthcoming Taproot upgrade, or for use of Bech32 with other protocols.


Understatement.

---

The problem is little enough that it seems the balance against forward compatibility was tipped by a cold, cruel fact:  Implementers are idiots! :-/


For thoughtful, forward-compatible design to be useful, implementers need to implement the standard correctly.

It is not merely an implementation problem:  It is an implementer problem.  Too many implementers are simpletons who monkey-paste and cargo-cult bad code, just to push out the door some semi-functional bugware that they can spam naïve users into using.  Why should the architects of a system make the effort to provide an elegant design, if almost nobody implements it correctly?

<blink><size=2²⁵⁶pt>
Developers, please get it right with Segwit v1:  Implement address handling correctly, so that the users of your software will have forward-compatible, correct-to-spec handling of future Segwit v2, v3, v14... addresses without upgrading.  This will allow early adopters to start using the new version immediately, without the chicken-and-egg network-effect problem.  Thank you.
</size></blink>

This makes nullius cry:


😿 🤬


Please, I want someday to enjoy the pleasure of a major Bitcoin upgrade without needing to keep multiple wallets so that I can receive money from users of old software.

I think that I am not the only one who would enjoy that.

With Segwit v0, we needed a huge push to educate users.  Now, we need another push to educate users—and a push to educate developers, such that we should not need to repeat the same push every time the witness version gets a bump.

---

References for those who want to know what happened here:

• Jonathan Knowles, 2019-05-28, sipa/bech32#51: bug report
• Pieter Wuille, 2019-11-07, [bitcoin-dev] Bech32 weakness and impact on bip-taproot addresses
• Pieter Wuille, 2019-11-22, Bech32 insertion analysis
• Russell O'Connor, 2020-07-15, [bitcoin-dev] Bech32 weakness and impact on bip-taproot addresses
• Rusty Russell, 2020-10-08, [bitcoin-dev] Progress on bech32 for future Segwit Versions (BIP-173)
• Pieter Wuille (as quoted above), 2020-12-05, [bitcoin-dev] Progress on bech32 for future Segwit Versions (BIP-173) (gist with analysis source code and data)

---

Local rules (recently updated).

Since people love screenshots, here is a screenshot—made ugly as practicable, to suit the subject matter:


I am not too pernickety about demanding that edits must be clearly marked.  I don’t always do so myself, when the edit is not substantive or not the subject of controversy.  But this is clearly dishonest.  It is a material misrepresentation of what suchmoon originally wrote in OP.

---

So, suchmoon and her meatpuppets only want to insult me when they think it will hurt me.  If I shame suchmoon appropriately, they all shut up—and suchmoon tries substantively to misrepresent OP’s original content.  Disgusting, and doubly disgusting.

—And this was triggered by my intolerance of suchmoon’s deplorable behaviour of intentionally defying my ban of her from my self-moderated threads.  Does she want for people whom she bans by name to post anyway in her self-moderated threads,^* then create a new topic calling her “a cunt” when she deletes their posts?  (* She did more of this than I have yet documented in public.  I did not want to give it too much attention, lest she be incited to do more of it—it is as if I am dealing with a retarded six-year-old here.)

Now, the only reason why she doesn’t lock this thread is that it would be tantamount to announcing her capitulation—plus, it would be an invitation to create a “Reeeeeeeeee: suchmoon is a cowardly troll who says ‘nullius is a cunt’, then locks the thread and runs away!” topic.


pugman’s archive of my allegedly NSFW post; scroll up for a snapshot of OP:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201127120859/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5293050.msg55693619#msg55693619
current OP:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201207004520/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5293050.0

---

And let us not forget that suchmoon’s general ire at me started with her opposition to my cracking down on the Yobit scam.  But I get ahead of myself...

Lauda was never a merit source.  You see, CH, this is a large part of your problem:  You often state factually untruthful misinformation.  It is doubly a shame, because you sometimes have some good points—and you undermine them by being, shall we say, “careless with the facts”.  Truthfulness is of the utmost importance to me; that is why I so admired Lauda, and always will.

Now, my post was about Ratimov.  The point of the Lauda contrast that I made halfway through my post was about Ratimov.  Ratimov has chosen to deal with this accusation by shooting the messenger, and denying that plagiarism is plagiarism.  About Ratimov:


Why don’t you think that this is at least as bad as what many others have been punished for, if not much worse in substance?

A casual copy-and-paste is bad enough.  OP’s highlighting make it easy to see, this is an instance of systematically assembling text piecewise from others’ words.  And Ratimov has essentially admitted that he copied the text from someone else.

The post is very recent, earned 7 merits, and no doubt increased Ratimov’s reputation with some of the more intelligent users of the forum.  I myself happened across that post recently, and intended to merit it and reply.  (If I want to reply to something, I usually wait until I reply to send merit.)  I am shocked to see that it actually is not his.


No, you can get thousands of merits with much more knowledge and effort than Ratimov evidently has.

I am not very familiar with Ratimov’s post history.  “...not only with this article”?  Have evidence?

---

I may perhaps be a little bit less adamant—just a little bit—

• —if there were any ambiguity whatsoever in the apparent authorship of the body text of the post.  I viewed the post itself, not only OP’s quote.  I sincerely tried to guess how a reader could discern that the text of the post actually quotes is spun from others’ words.  No way.  It is impossible to view the “source” links at the bottom as a mark of authorship:  Any reasonable person would see them purely as footnotes referring to sources of information, not as authorship credits.  Indeed, although I did not fully check the whole post, he seems to mix informational references with “sources” as authors.
• —if Ratimov did not deny in principle that it is plagiarism to post something written by someone else, fully in the manner as if he is the author.
• —if Ratimov had not chosen to reply with an ad hominem attack against an accusation brought with evidence—
  
  
  Quote from: Ratimov on December 05, 2020, 08:40:35 PM
  It's okay, just another idiot-troll who, not understanding the situation, runs screaming in the meta, hoping to make some kind of sensation.
  
  —and by ridiculing the bringing of evidence (!).
  
  
  Quote from: Ratimov on December 05, 2020, 08:40:35 PM
  What a pity that he spent so much time decorating the text, but did not find the time to read my topics more carefully.  
  
  These knee-jerk reactions must stop!  Posts by anonymous parties, alt accounts, and “Newbies” (who may sometimes simply be longtime lurkers) should be judged by whether they are good are bad.  Most are bad—but then, many posts by “Legendary” accounts are also bad.
  
  I have always acted according to this principle.  In my prior experience, I have been accused of scamming by an anonymous alt account who apologized to me after, instead of attacking him as an “alt sockpuppet troll”, I acknowledged that his evidence against someone associated with me was correct, and I coöperated fully in the investigation of that scammer.  I am actually quite thankful to whoever was behind that account:  The investigation that he started saved me from getting sucked deeper into a scam by someone who had fooled me.  If I had started off by attacking him ad hominem on the basis of his using an obvious alt account, then my reputation would have been fried after theymos showed up with IP evidence that it was a known scammer—and I would have deserved it.  It was only my own sincerity and avoidance of knee-jerk reactions that saved me from saying, “go away n00btroll!” to the investigator who blew the lid off one of the most infamous scams of the past few years on this forum.

I am curious to see what lovesmayfamilis has to say about this.  (Among other things in the Russian forum.)


As for me, don’t worry—nobody will “pick me apart”.  ;-)  I will reply to you in the other thread another time; I am trying to catch up on some other things now.

This is plagiarism.  Extreme plagiarism:  It is a more sophisticated form of “text-spinning”.

Some of those who think that it is not plagiarism may be fooled by the language barrier.  I suggest taking a closer look at how the referenced English post is stitched together from others’ words.

Assembling an essay from (translated) copies of others’ words, in the manner as if they are your own words, and then placing links to “sources” at the bottom, makes it appear as if you referred to the “sources” as the sources of information for text that you wrote yourself.  —Which is plagiarism.  In substance.  By definition.

Rikafip’s initial remark is correct as to the substantial essence of the matter.  Ratimov’s deflection that this is not academia is a misdirection.


How many words does Ratimov actually write by himself on this forum?  


Besides stealing credit for authorship, this also devalues the effort of those who produce original work.

I say this based on personal experience with the time and effort required to produce a post of length, scope, and quality comparable to the referenced post which claims to be “by” Ratimov, but instead is slapped together from pieces of others’ work.

---

For the record:  For over two weeks, I have been planning an action related to the Russian forum which idiots may now mistake as being incited by this.  It is the reason for several of the exclusions that I made 2020-11-21, which barely missed Loyce’s 2020-11-21 scrape.  It has been delayed by distractions from the forum’s most highly trusted trolls, and by IRL personal tasks.

I didn’t know that Ratimov was stitching together posts from words written by others.  I did know that plagiarism and other wrongdoing are unaccountably acceptable behaviour in the judgment of Russian DTs.

---

I dislike the growing trend of plagiarism accusations being used as a political weapon on this forum.  I further dislike the trend of brushing off valid accusations with ad hominem diversionary responses to alt accounts.

Emphasis is in the original:


For example, when Lauda was correctly accused in May, neither Lauda nor I made the idiotic ad hominem “n00btroll, go away” brush-off.  Although I infer that person behind that particular account probably had a malicious anti-Lauda motive for expending the effort to dig up those six-year-old posts (!), the use of an alt account was unnecessary in that case:  I know from private discussion that Lauda would not have retaliated for a correct accusation made on the basis of sound evidence.  Furthermore, both Lauda and I merited a different Newbie account’s thoughtfully presented inculpatory analysis of her posts.  The argument thereby stated was cogent, professionally presented, and apparently not malicious despite its harshness towards Lauda; I thought that it was meritorious.

Compare Ratimov’s response here:  Shoot the messenger.


I don’t care who OP is, or what his motive is, if he brings a valid accusation backed by evidence.

Please address the substance of the matter.

+1 WOsMerit for understanding that part of my fully intended double treble meaning.

The quantum mechanical paradox of cunts is that one cunt can have multiple women.

---

But how can f(woman) not be injective to cunt?  

#nohomomorphism



inb4 someone pops up and makes me explain that a “nerd” is not necessarily a humourless autist.

...Echo...

---

Among other things, “normal” includes having a firm grasp of reality, and not defining new new new normals under the influence of hallucinogens.

“Disordered thinking” is defined by psychologists, q.v.

---

Opinions are like cunts:  Every woman has one.

The word that you seek is “meatpuppet”, a term that I am introducing to this forum from Wikipedia’s editing community; for a correct usage example:

Shitposters streaming in from a TG channel most assuredly qualify as meatpuppets.

Observe that the WP:MEATPUPPET link redirects to WP:SOCKPUPPET, and both related concepts are defined and discussed on the same page.  “Oh, see my support from all of these bounty-chasers who came from my TG channel, created new accounts, and posted what I told them to!” is textbook greedy shill meatpuppetry, not different in practice than sockpuppetry.  Moreover, I think that it qualifies as incentivized forum spam; such spam should be deleted by the moderators, given sufficient evidence that that is the source of the flood of “supportive” Newbie posts.  If I had time to kill seriously investigating each account on a case-by-case basis, I would also consider tagging such accounts.

A general note, while I am defining new terms to the forum:  Judiciousness must be used in accusations of meatpuppetry.  People who happen to agree, or who simply are friends, are not thereby automatically meatpuppets of each other.  In my opinion, in the abstract, the key question is whether or not people are exercising independent judgment and voicing their own independent opinions.  Wikipedia’s definition offers us one clear indicator that they are not, and it is directly applicable to this thread:


See also, “astroturfing”.

---

I see what you did there.

Now, I will buy it for chump change^* and permanently redirect it to the Catbat Witch’s goodbye thread. 😼

---

* For users who have been BANNED by Sarcasm, I should explain:  Maybe not six figures; and I doubt that the value of the domain on the “domainer” market is not really affected by whatever garbage it has showed.  That they use the domain for this rather than selling it illustrates how profitable SCAMS can be for those at the top of the pyramid, at least for awhile...  For comparison, bitcoin.com would still be worth plenty—despite its currently being abused to host a scam.  Vod cast a hell of a pun, and I am exercising humour under its spell.

Requested, with objective quantitative metrics of cuntiness:

IsNulliusStillACunt.<whatever>

...in the general spirit of:

Funny that nutty has never dared to accuse me of being on “social media”.  ;-)

---

Doooood!  Regardless of whether I agree or disagree with you, that was a snappy comeback to the application of Saul Alinksy Web 2.0 Edition debate tactics by the forum’s Timothy Leary.

—Protip:  Insulting someone’s thereby alleged sources of information without facts in evidence is a fallacious argument ad hominem.  Pointing out that admitted hallucinogenic drug users have disordered thinking, and have permanently compromised their own powers of judgment, is a valid argument ad hominem.

OP, your main account does not currently show me any warning banners on your threads—not the red banner, and not the yellow newbie warning banner from a logged-out browser.  I don’t know why...  Have you checked recently?  More about you below; but first, let’s illustrate some of what I have to say about your banner problem, with the example of a point about me!  :-)

---

AWESOME! 🧨


I am officially lobbying thermos @theymos! to put that banner^* at the top of all my threads, and to sticky suchmoon’s troll thread in Reputation.  To drive home the point, he should administratively override the “NSFW” rule, and add to the banner a real-life photograph of a cunt (shaved, lips spread).  Make it official:  “nullius is a cunt”!

(* Border #c0809c, background #faf0ef, though perhaps it could use a few tweaks.  I need to consult some Pantone charts for cunty colours, and/or take some colour samples of skin and genitalia from porn.)

Actually, I would not be wholly surprised if this somehow works its way into thermos’ April Fool’s joke a few months hence...

And seriously, it is a classic (or should I say, an anticlassic) of gutter-minded low cultural standards.  It is a thread of sociological and psychological significance, which should be studied as doctors study cancerous tumours.  Oh, and by the time it is through, suchmoon will die of sheer humiliation over it.  She trolled herself as hard as the goatse man sitting on a traffic cone.

When Robovac (label says “Made in Switzerland”, but it’s actually assembled in Switzerland from parts made in Vietnam) says to “have a thick skin”, he obviously doesn’t mean for people to have a thick skin and sharp claws toward suchmoon.  Whoops.

—By the way, I note that suchloon has now changed her little spam pic for her object of passionate obsession, Mr “cryptocunt”.  pwned!  A few minutes with potrace, and some creativity...  It can be fixed.

---

The foregoing conceptually illustrates a question for OP:  Why do you care?

If you are being principled about defamation, well—Lauda was principled about defamation, so you are learning from her.  Lauda fought suchmoon about this, because Lauda red-tagged for defamation, and self-appointed DT cheerleader suchmoon has decreed that red tags must be trade-related.  (...and all the while, suchmoon uses “neutral” tags to defame people and/or cast them in a false light...)

Thus if you want to stop defamation, to have a consistent standard, you need to join in the legacy of Lauda’s fight to make sure that DTs can tag defamers without risking DT exclusion.
Whoops.  Your main account has a Lauda tag for defaming Lauda. :-/
I cannot see the reference link; archive.fo started Google-CAPTCHAing Tor users sometime last year, even at their onion, and I refuse those Google CAPTCHAs.  If anyone could provide me the original link, or an archive.org link, that would be appreciated so that I can see exactly what happened when I was gone in 2018–19.  No, I don’t want for cryptohunter to repeat himself:  I want to see archival content represented by the archive.fo link.  Thanks.

Now, let’s not derail this thread and its highly productive discussion into an argument over Lauda.  I knew Lauda better than that—she was not at all a “scammer supporter”; and the last time that I earnestly tried to chase down the “evidence” that one of your presumed alts presented of Lauda’s being a “scammer supporter”, all I found was that years ago, when she was a total n00b, she bought into a scammy altcoin which, a few years later, she herself called a scam.  So many n00bs get sucked into scammy altcoins—it is why n00bs need to be warned about such scams, with tags and flags.

Let’s talk about you.

So, besides principles, what other reasons could there be for you to fear using your main account on account of its trust ratings... hmmm...

You claim to have millions of dollars worth of bitcoins, Lambos that can pull heavily loaded horse trailers (lulz!), etc., etc.  Taking what you say at face value, some red paint really can’t harm you financially.  Can it?

You condemn sigspamming.  As a practical matter, the most popular complaint about red trust is, “Oh noes, now I can’t get the best campaigns and richest bounties!!”  I guess you don’t care about that.

Why not do what Quickseller does:  Ignore the trust ratings, and just do your thing with your main account.  I actually admire his balls, the way he keeps going like that.  There is even something noble about it:  “I am me, and you won’t change my identity!”

Nowadays, every new post by Quickseller is essentially a big fuck-you to everyone who still red-trusts him.  He has shown evidence of good character, and he hasn’t done anything bad in a long time; his DT rating will eventually thus become a joke to the smarter regulars—if DT members don’t eventually revise their tags and their flag support, sooner or later.  Lately, I have indeed been chuckling whenever I open a Quickseller thread in a logged-out browser, and see the big banana above his OP.

Anyway, every intelligent user who reaches above Newbie rank will build a trust list that excludes at least a two or three dozen score DT1s.  So they will not see even a hypothetical? red banner on you, unless you got in trouble with someone wise and judicious, such as Lauda.  (Admittedly, you may be in trouble!)

Any-anyway, every intelligent user uses the trust system as a guide, not as the all-important Source of Revealed Truth.  This is not to denigrade the importance of stopping bad tags, but have some perspective about using your main account.  If you have a reputation with longtime users on the forum, and a big post history, then intelligent users will take everything into account:  Your trust page, and otherwise.  (Admittedly, you may be in big trouble.)

If (hypothetically) the trust ratings on you were all just totally wrong, then I would agree with you that the banner is unjust, and it should be somehow removed.  But let’s talk first in practical terms—and in terms of refined, intelligent discourse that even suchmoon could understand:  Why do you give a fuck?

---

A challenge to OP:  Continue this discussion using your main account!  It will actually upset suchmoon.

Perhaps then, since your Legendary account can’t be called a “n00btroll”, it may be accused of being someone else’s alt.  If you are very lucky, you may become Lauda’s alt like me.  But I doubt you have earned that.  Anyway, it is a forum tradition...


You don’t need to acknowledge the link between accounts, which is often an unwise policy.  (When a user is accused of being a sock account, admitting when it is true leads people too much to demand denial when it is false; and I am well on record as being against inquisitions that coerce people to deny false accusations without evidence.)  Perhaps cryptohunter got bored with his Lambos, decided to check what’s happening on the forum, and noticed that OP here is highly intelligent and in need of support.  #justsaying

---

I agree with you that the selection of merit sources is badly implemented, and some merit sources behave irresponsibly.

I think that merit source privileges should be subject to periodic review—and “unapplications”, in case of those who systematically abuse source merits as a political tool to build their own meatpuppet armies.

(Pro tip cryptohunter:  Next time you want to argue with DireWolfM14, try calling him a meatpuppet instead of... the usual.  Wikipedia links add authority, especially Wikipedia links about Wikipedia adminstrative policies and community standards.  —Also, point out evidence that when DireWolfM14 makes alt account accusations, they are sometimes so bizarre that either he must be taking LSD like nutildah, or he must be mentally retarded—and either way, he is a superannuated child.  —If you stop defaming Lauda, and stop following the suchmoon/nutildah playbook of following around users they dislike with troll off-topic personal attacks, maybe you can even become my fan!)

But with that said, let us examine some empirical evidence of just how much certain users can control others via the merit system.

I noticed that this account, whose post history reflects that it must be my #0 fan, attained the Member-rank requirement of 10 merits in just over 46 hours after account registration—when some particular DTs and merit sources seem to hate it for some reason!

Check the post history.  6 of those merits came from OgNasty’s tests of competence for basic signing and encryption.  But 4 of those merits were purely from writing good posts (for example), and it now has 6 merits for good posts.  If sufficient effort were wasted applied, it could obviously become Legendary just as fast as activity allows.

The drama-queen popularity contest players can’t stop meritorious users from getting merits!


I don’t see this user’s free speech being controlled by the merit system:

Despite nutty nutildah following it around with off-topic personal attacks:


—which assuredly violates this standard:

---

For the record, I think that the trust system is broken.  I have been expressing my criticism of what I call “democratic DT” since about 76 hours after I returned to the forum at the beginning of this year; and I have described the change from old DT to new DT as “out of the frying pan, into the fire”.

In my opinion, this was the most plausible solution ever suggested; but it no longer exists:
I keep quoting that post only because it’s good.  I agree with actmyname that it probably was not a CH thread.

I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with the points in OP here.  Partly from my own opinions, and partly in the manner of devil’s advocate, I am simply trying to engage CH in a constructive discussion.  I have been intending to try to engage him in a serious discussion.  The only holdup is that he is purportedly busy with his millions, and I am busy with a book (LOL at the concept blurred as “NSFW”).

^^^ OP, please add a poll on whether I should change the sign to read “suchloon”.  It is catchy; alas, “loon” does not etymologically connect with “lunatic”, and as such, “moon” meanings.  Nonetheless, it is almost a cute pun!  (I will then ignore the democratic poll, and do whatever I intended anyway.  —suchloony makes the pun, but breaks the elegance of the rhyme.)

---

PSA:  Amusing though a parody may be, it must be legible to be appreciated properly.

Clusterfuck:  Hannibal Lecter with Dickens, on a such-loony “nullius is a cunt” thread whereby the forum’s Timothy Leary has already admitted to a mental level of Beavis and Butthead.

---

Damn it, why don’t people dare to say such things with their main accounts?  :-/

---

I would encourage myself to take the high road, except when I need to make a point in terms comprehensible to the mental level of the audience.

---

Plagiarism!


^^^ Cunts are somehow relevant, too; therefore, this is on-topic.

---

My cunning scheme to confine her trolling of me is working.  Everybody (including nobody) can have fun shitposting about me in this dumpster fire of a guttersnipe “fuck you cunt shit bitch” thread.  Then, maybe I can get something more important done.

Just don’t tell her, ok?  I am so glad that she has me on ignore, so that I can speak privately here!

Foxpup, on looking back over the thread, I think that my last post came off toward you in a way that I did not intend.  I don’t quite apologize, because I was sincere in what I said, itself; I was simply being candid, not trying to criticize you personally.  See below for a further note on that.^*


Zeroth of all:  Now, I am asking!  —And not receiving any clear, authoritative answers.  —And being criticized by some people for asking, as if I were asking a stupid question.  Observe that the topic title ends in a question mark.

And first of all:  I would ask, if I were doing something that I thought was questionable.  I did not think that an art-museum piece was questionable; and in the first instance, I would not choose to participate in a forum where it was.  As you can probably tell by now, this is an important issue to me.

(As I expected that it would be to others.  Where are all of the ACLU types?  Doesn’t the ACLU raise hell if some church ladies cover up a nude statue in a public park, or whatever?  I am pretty sure that if I look on ACLU.org, I can find plenty of long wall-of-text essays about the social and cultural importance of protecting artworks.)

I consider the prohibition of fine art to be disgraceful.  Disgusting.  I wouldn’t significantly involve myself in any site where I knew that it may happen.  Yes, it is a private forum that I am free to leave at any time.  I was also free to not sign up here, if I knew that something like this could happen.

(That is not difficult:  I have never been so deeply involved in an Internet forum; and other than some fire-and-forget throwaway accounts, I have not really participated in any forum since perhaps around 2003 or so.)

People who have praised me when I stood up for principles that they agreed with, should understand that I am being principled here.  I need to explain that—not to make the topic about myself personally, but rather, because I am even puzzled at why people seem not to understand why I don’t just shrug, forget it, go back to business as usual.  Not going to happen.  The deletion of those posts was major turning point for me.

Deleted:

It is usually a matter of principle to me that one who values his own work should never give it away as “user-generated content” (a) to any site not under his own control, (b) without compensation.  Hereby, this forum’s primary general topic is important to me.  I thought that I understood the forum rules, that the rules were acceptable to me, and that the rules would be applied consistently.  Whoops.

The past few days, I have almost regretted ever signing up here.  —Not quite, because of some of the people whom I never would have met otherwise.  And today, on the third anniversary of my very first “Brand New” post, I have been having some dark thoughts about this:

Boldface, italic, and underlining are in the original; highlighting is hereby added:

I will probably seek a solution that is more constructive.  —Or more destructive.  —Or both.  I am talking about this to make a point; if I intended to do a drastic action, I probably would not announce it beforehand...  But for those who are wondering why I don’t just blow this off and move on, I think that that adequately illustrates how seriously I take this issue.


I didn’t “know perfectly well what [you] meant”; I took what you said at face value.  Doesn’t that succinctly sum up the problem whence arose this thread?

Anyway, I thought that you would appreciate discussing art history.

At this juncture, in reply to the remainder of your post, I began an earnest reply that went way off-topic...  Never mind.

---

* Part of the problem is that the post was stitched together from pieces of a much longer draft, in an attempt to make it more “succinct”.  The red-lettered warning about things offensive to Foxpup was originally in a discussion about how workplaces differ; and reductio ad absurdum, office employees at AVN, Pornhub, or for that matter, Slixa could probably be fired for reading my posts (unless it is only to demand that I be cancelled and deplatformed from the Internet).  Obviously, actual porn is acceptable in those work environments.  (I speak here as to non-sex employees; such companies have office staff, too!)  In the original draft, it comes off very differently.