By “cut”, I presume you mean “terminated”.  That occurred on 1 March 2018, according to public statements by both parties (you and Alia) earlier in this thread; and of course, Skype is not the only means of “non-public communications”, which include PMs, e-mail, and anything else other than published material.

To be absolutely clear, I here include (but do not limit the question to) communications before the public statements by both parties to the effect that the contract was terminated and prepayment had been refunded.

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I hope so.

You stumbled across a well-known security issue, which usually affects identifiers such as domain names.  E.g., paypal.com vs. pаypаl.com—see, the same difference!  Or the notorious whole-script confusable, аррӏе.com (not the same as apple.com):



Lookalike letters from different scripts such as Cyrillic and Greek are used in lieu of Latin letters.  In this case, U+0430 CYRILLIC LETTER A which UTF-8 encodes to { 0xd0, 0xb0 }:



Tip of the iceberg, indeed.

This exact issue has spawned a plethora of discussion in Unicode TR 39, Internet RFCs (see especially the RFCs related to IDN, among others), and vendor specifications—not to mention, mountains of blog arguments.  I will try to gather up some links for further information.  A quote from UTR #39 below should give a brief overview of the types of confusables.  I will try to answer questions insofar as I reasonably may.

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Registries (not registrars) typically have policies about this.  For example, off the top of my head / if memory serves, in .de you can register domains containing äöü but not any other non-ASCII characters.  The purpose of such policies is to prevent this type of attack.

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I think this should suffice for an overview:

https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/tr39-1.html#Confusable_Detection

Quicksy has pursued grudges against a wide range of different people, from tspacepilot to dooglus to Zepher, generally for outing him in some form of wrongdoing.  He even went after Vod—and after everybody who declined to condemn Vod, viz., Quickseller vs. The World:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180309172034/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1614573.0;all

Ready to red-tag all those heinous scoundrels?

Whereas Lauda has a special place as his psychotic obsession.  I am jealous of Lauda...

I infer that Quickseller is secretly a genius who is performing research for his upcoming book, How to Win make Enemies and Not Influence People.

P.S., I think Quickseller really should kill himself.  Again:  I really wish the guy would kill himself already.  HTH.

Questioning why a guy who doesn’t even know how to make a SHA-256 hash also couldn’t instantly see the LOLness of the script—that is diverting from the investigation, not helping it.

Probative questions remain, such as:


I am still asking that.

@cruso, @scam_detector, were your questions satified?  I think that since unlocking the thread, scam_detector has only asked release of the script—which has occurred.  I ask now what past questions remain unanswered, and if there be any new questions (possibly based on newly accrued evidence).

(I suggest that discussion of what suchmoon and tmfp said about leverage should be treated with appropriate discretion, insofar as that leverage still apparently exists.)

Well, 50 BTC what she effectually claimed her damages would be if aTriz released the script.  She was actually running a thread selling it for—what was the per-copy price, 0.99 BTC?  (IIRC, off the top of my head.)

So, anybody want to buy?  I am now selling pirate copies.  Instead of a discount, I am pricing in Btrash—which is LOL because I don’t have a Btrash wallet.  Send 0.99 BCH to 1111111111111111111114oLvT2, and I will give you a secret pirate link to where you can download the wonder-script!


She was vengeful against aTriz, for some (un)reason.  I wonder why not so much against me.  —Oh yes, she has no leverage against me.


I will reply by referring to the etymology of “draconian”.  Anyway, I insist she desist.  And decease.  LOL.

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I suggest that from the recent events transpiring in this thread, we can conclude:

• Alia is even worse than a scamgirl:  Alia is evil, actively malicious and sadistic.
• The script is even stupider than “stupid equations”.
• aTriz has no programming knowledge whatsoever.  (Sorry, but—LOL.)
• Most questions on this thread have been answered, the primary one for which it was reopened being the existence, identity, and content of the script.  What’s left to wrap up?
• I can probably resume (cough) normal posting habits.  Sorry, folks who watch me.  Time to put the drama of the Alia affair on the back burner—again.

New theory:  Alia is irrational.  Possibly psychotic.  Also, she should really decease from lecturing others about “delusions of grandeur”.  Others have the grandeur, she has the delusions.

I obtained the exact same results from the same tool, copypasting in the script with no trailing newline:

https://www.online-convert.com/result/b805a0a1-0f53-4afc-9a4e-c197e94764d6


Whereas feeding (what should be) the identical preimage to Linux (GNU) sha256sum gives:


The only difference with this is the final newline—I told you, a 1-character difference will change the whole hash:

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I expected there to be some... you know... MAGIC.  Better than “mathematical mumbo jumbo”.


LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.

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How many investors does Alia have?

LOLOL

(The storied nullius is here at a loss for words.  Too busy LOLling at the script which caused all this trouble.)


I at least expect for the Wizard of Oz to have some frighteningly impressive-looking deceptive contraption behind the curtain.

I gave +10 for dropping a script, but I don’t get a matching hash.  Now trying different variations with final newline, etc...

(Wait—that is the script?  LOL)

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With a single '\n' on the last line, and '\n' as newline, I get sha256sum:


(I doubt it’s significant as to evidence, since aTriz posted the script right on the heels of the hash; but I seek to be correct, and figure out what happened here.)

Though you’re turning out to be a sly criminal, you fail as a seductress.  How is it that you managed to get absolutely zero leverage on someone with whom you had a very public sexual relationship—namely, me?

LOL

I knew you were simply being friendly to me, seeing as how I belong to null.

But seriously...


I wish to clarify:  I am informing aTriz (and also Alia) that no part of the script can be recovered from the hash.  Not even with a team of cryptographers and a supercomputer.  Adding to the general irreversibility of SHA-256, on presumption that the script is >32 bytes, the pigeonhole principle makes it mathematically impossible to recover the script!

The whole purpose for which I suggested a cryptographic commitment is to “determine identity”.  As for “a very high degree of probability”, well—a 1/2²⁵⁶ probability of hitting a preimage is negligible, so yes.  (And if aTriz is an evil genius who wishes to fool us with a collision attack, then he “only” needed to do 2¹²⁸ work between the moment I asked for a hash, and the moment he committed one.)

I remind everybody that SHA-256 is used many places in Bitcoin.  The mining POW rests squarely on the security guarantees of SHA-256.  The Merkle trees which assure the internal integrity of blocks, and the Merkle chain which assures the immutable history of the blockchain, are all based on SHA-256.  Bitcoin addresses also involve SHA-256 hashes (also RIPEMD-160).

If any SHA-256 security guarantees fail, then all Bitcoins are worthless.  I think that SHA-256 will provide a sufficient security level for committing the identity of this script!

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I believe he was blackmailed into not posting the script itself—so yes, in a roundabout way.  I don’t see why a blackmailer would positively require that a hash be posted.


Then, aTriz can produce the script which matches the commitment; and we can decide which party is more credible.  Right.

I note from the other thread that:


As I have also observed, I did ask Alia to commit a hash.  To my knowledge, she has never done so.  All other things being equal (which they here are most certainly not), I would later trust a party who committed a hash, then later revealed the preimage, over a party who avoided committing to a hash.


An investigation is being stymied by extortionate threats.  To move it forward incrementally, I first seek to preserve the integrity of evidence by fixing the identity of the exact script which was the subject of aTriz’s vouch—while also simultaneously assessing aTriz’s faith in the matter; he hashed something, and would be stupidly self-defeating to cryptographically commit to a lie.

I think my goals in asking for a hash have been accomplished (as long as aTriz did the hash correctly).  Now, on to the next step...

Not funny, when I already posted that hash (the hash of stuff I downloaded from example.com):

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@aTriz, that is the SHA-256 hash of the empty string.  tspacepilot is joking that the script does not exist.  Whereas you committed:



Nothing can be discerned about the script from its SHA-256 hash.  (Nothing, including whether you “got it correct or not”.  I sincerely hope you did.)

(Cutting short a long reply I was about to post.)


Thank you, aTriz.

I suggest at this juncture to move discussion of the script and its disposition over to the Alia scam thread.  Insofar as I am concerned, aTriz has committed himself to a hash—and that adequately settles the aTriz part of this question, for the reasons I already stated:

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Edit:  To be clear:  Above, I speak only of the question of aTriz possessing a gambling script as alleged.  He’d be a terrible fool to make such a commitment if he had no such script.  A few other questions remain here, including one I stated above; however, I believe the script existence/possession was the biggest one.

For the record:  I find aTriz to be highly credible when he states that he has a script, and does not reveal it due to extortionate threat of doxing.

If he publicly commits a SHA-256 hash, that would also much bolster the credibility of this statement insofar as he would instantly destroy his whole reputation in one blow, if future circumstance proved him unable to produce a matching script.  No intelligent person in aTriz’s position would potentially seal his own future doom by posting a fake hash.  Key word:  Commitment.  This implication of a hash commitment is well-known to everybody who knows anything about cryptography—and aTriz should be guided accordingly.

I urge everybody to be level-headed, and remember that we are potentially playing with somebody’s life here.  Not knowing aTriz’s private circumstance, it is impossible to guess what his life is like, or what unjust negative consequences he could suffer from having his dox released by a criminal.

Excellent point.  That’s what I would do, if I were in aTriz’s position.  Of course, it is unlikely that I would ever get into aTriz’s position in the first place.  I say this as the person here who was apparently the second most entangled with Alia—and did not incur any similar state of vulnerability; not even close!

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I think it’s unnecessary to creatively interpret forum rules, when this is an especially “especially obvious” case of “just using the dox as a weapon”:


Being new here, I am not fully familiar with the intricacies of forum rules on doxing.  I am not quite sure what would get banned, and what would simply be deleted.  But Alia’s threats are clearly over any reasonable line, on that particular point.


Aside:  Plagiarism is a serious offense.  Please do not argue as if it were the lesser.

(Further aside:  Moderators have no ban power; administrators have that.)


There are two severable issues here, thus two different threads:  The questioning of aTriz about his own actions, and the probative value of the script for investigating Alia.  Note that aTriz’s good-faith assistance with the latter would answer much of the former.  Your suggestion would neither establish that aTriz used a betting script (much less the betting script being sold), nor provide significant evidence on Alia.

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Well, I think Alia would be thrilled to wreck aTriz’s business and force him to hit the NEWNYM button.

That’s not really much of an argument.  Abstract justice is; and so is this:

I think it depends on the actual threat level to aTriz—something which only aTriz can assess.  There are plenty of people on this forum who are pseudonymous, and continue with their well-established nyms after having been doxed.  (The most notable example, as you know, is someone at a very high level here.)  If aTriz uses Paypal, Skype, and Gmail (presumably without strong countermeasures), then it is clear that his pseodonymity requirements are quite low in the first instance.  Either that, or he is much more foolish than anybody imagines.

So—it is up to aTriz to understand his own threat model, assess what real-life risks he could incur by being totally doxed in public, and balance that against the cost of NEWNYM.  Given that he’s a founding partner in a growing business, NEWNYM cost would be very high for him—a fact which Alia well knows...

(I offer to consult on that threat model; if aTriz so desires, he may contact me privately for that purpose.)

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Caution, please:  RGBKey offered an audit in a circumstance different from what has now developed.  I would not hold him to that offer here, in a different context.  I think that only RGBKey can say if he wants to step into a now much escalated mess involving extortion and doxing against other users.  (N.b. that I was careful not to suggest him as an auditor when I had that idea independently.  I was glad when he offered an audit of his own initiative.)

When has ibminer ever offered to audit this script?  To the best of my knowledge, Alia “offered” that on his behalf; I’ve asked why she named ibminer for that, and Alia ignored me.  I don’t even know if ibminer claims the requisite specialist competency—I know he’s smart, but so am I, and I myself am not competent to perform a professional audit of this script.  (RGBKey is.)

Note also:  Such a private audit is usally paid, and paid well.  It was magnanimous of RGBKey to offer an audit for free.  I infer that he was acting in the public interest, just as do many skeptical investigators who perform competent scientific investigations of extraordinary claims.

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Damn it, suchmoon, you are beginning to sound like me:

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True—the excuse of having been a scam victim does have limits; and aTriz is ultimately responsible for his own actions, just as is the rule for everybody.


This, I much understand due to Alia having ridden in on my coattails:


I think most people would agree that locking up my signature for three years at 1.1 BTC would be cheap at thrice the price.  No, that is not an offer.  I am simply (again!) pointing to the context of the signature deal with Alia.

This does not explain why the contract was so poorly written; but it does much to explain the unprecedented deal with a Jr. Member (plus why I feel at least some level of moral responsibility toward aTriz in the matter).


That was bad.  But given the totality of the circumstance, I myself would be willing to give him a pass on that—albeit unavoidably, with incrementally decreased trust in the soundness of his judgment.  (Here distinguishing trustworthiness of wise judgment from trustworthiness of honest intentions.)  I think this seems consistent with the earlier results of this thread, when it was locked before.


Ironically, whilst penning a short essay which included these words:


...I was also thinking of college girls (plus bored housewives) who become “camgirls” whilst trying to conceal their faces.  I see plenty of that.  That is what I believed Alia to have been.  Most of them are probably doxable, easily.

This is why I mentioned aTriz’s (unreliably I think) alleged age, which would make him at oldest a tot when Paypal was founded.  The younger generation grew up immersed in—no, tangled in the Interwebs.  Slinging off a Paypal transaction is something they do without a second thought.

There are many people innocently, naïvely wrecking their own privacy nowadays.  As a privacy activist, I am motivated to help them, not to hurt or condemn them.  I do condemn those who are apathetic about privacy (and most of all, those who take the “if you have nothing to hide” active anti-privacy line; but I don’t think that’s at all relevant here).  If aTriz were to show substantial interest in learning to better protect his privacy in the future, I think this would be an opportunity to help fix a widespread problem—one case at a time.

(I say the foregoing as someone who has volunteered much time and effort trying to help people including Alia learn security and privacy.  I’ve been doing that for decades.  Most of my such efforts have been futile.  P.S., use PGP!)


Agreed, yes, and yes.

Wherefore I suggest the following constructive approach for aTriz:

• Immediately commit a SHA-256 hash of the script.
• Assess threat model.  Per what actmyname said, consider depriving Alia of all future leverage by immediately releasing the script.
• Address remaining reasonable questions, such as my above questions about non-public communications with Alia on the date of 1 March 2018 (as measured in UTC time).

I do think that aTriz started with a sufficiently good reputation that he could weather this and recover, if he handles the matter appropriately.

I suggest the long-term perspective:  One year hence, when I make Hero rank in Activity Period 1283, the Alia affair will be only a moderately embarrassing footnote in my forum history.  Ten years hence, I’ll need to think hard to even remember it—“what’s ‘alia’?”  So as for my part.  Such a view can aid in clear decision-making.

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Disclosure:  I have no past, present, or immediately prospective business dealings with aTriz as an individual—also not with ALU as a quasi-entity.  I have no proximate financial interest in the outcome of this investigation.

@suchmoon, @tmfp, you make a reasonable point—but thereupon, I have a reasonable question for you:  When a good-faith party makes naïve mistakes which cause him to get backed into a corner by a criminal extortionist who obtains personally identifiable information, what is the best strategy to recover?

Having reviewed the matter carefully, I think that the best possible assumptions about aTriz are the most probable assumptions:  A naïve individual with some admitted flaws (including past gambling addiction) was acting in good faith, and got fooled worst by a “confidence artist”—one who also fooled many other people to various degrees.  And I think it’s clear that the principal question about aTriz (the vouch for the script) was in a different category than assigning blame for a leak of PII.  Really, could you hold aTriz culpable for the unforeseen consequences of having made a Paypal transaction!?

(N.b. that my assessment hereby is the polar opposite of that with Alia:  I still have some scintilla of reasonable doubt on certain points about Alia, whereas the preponderance of the evidence is against Alia.  Here, I find that the preponderance of the evidence is that aTriz acted in good faith, and did not commit any knowing wrong (here speaking to culpability, mens rea).  I am ultraconservative in matters of trust; and I am not yet more than barely acquainted with aTriz, beyond his hereto sound public reputation.  Therefore, I have been proceeding in this matter cautiously—and I mean that statement both ways.  I observe that in general principle, it would be outright horrific to see an innocent scam victim get his reputation ruined through being sucked in and dragged down by a scammer.  For my part, I would not be the unwitting executioner in such an injustice!)

Add to this certain allegations upthread as to aTriz’s age.  I do not know (and do not wish to ask) whether or not those statements be true.  But if they so be:  A relatively youthful (under-30) age is never an excuse for dishonest dealings, but is certainly an excuse for naïveté, trusting too fast, plus some awful opsec when dealing with an apparently bona fide new business counterparty.  I myself was “guilty” of all these things, at that age.  And nowadays, people who grew up with Skype and Gmail do not have the benefit some of us had of learning this Internet thing anew.  (I say this as one of Google search’s earliest addicts; that was terribly naïve of me in retrospect, but dang, it worked so much better than Altavista.)  aTriz’s mistakes in getting himself into a position to be blackmailed seem to be simply a sign of the times.

In sum:  Based on the current record, I am most inclined to help aTriz recover from this scam, and improve his operational security going forward.  If this thread concludes as I expect, then I will offer aTriz that if he desires, I will provide him some free nym.zone consulting in basic, best-practice measures to prevent this type of doxing/extortion situation in the future.  Meanwhile, I should like to continue examining the substantive questions which have been raised—in a fair manner, with appropriate sensitivity to the fact that I am asking questions of someone who is backed into a corner by a malicious threat.

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@aTriz, a further question:

Did you have any non-public communications with Alia on the date of 1 March 2018 (UTC)?  —If so, please briefly describe the nature and content of the communication.

As to my request for commitment of the SHA-256 hash of the script:

I have considered the matter carefully.  I doubt that committing a SHA-256 hash would cause you to get doxed in retaliation, for the simple reason that Alia would then lose leverage to prevent you from releasing the script itself.  Though I can’t vouch for Alia’s rationality (!), it would be ridiculously stupid for Alia to shoot her bolt at you over a hash which reveals no information about the script itself.  That would be incompetently evil.  I state this on the very reasonable presumption that the only leverage Alia has is your dox.

Wherefore, I reiterate my request that you publicly commit a SHA-256 hash of the script.

If Alia were to dox you in retaliation for that—well, then, you would have no remaining reason not to release the script itself.  Alia knows this.

I saw that.  It gave me a good chuckle.  I read every post in that thread, most of them with a smile.

But I don’t want to make this thread redundant to the one in Meta.  The purpose hereof is different:  Quickseller has stated seriously, multiple times, that I must have an old account which he characterizes as going back to 2011.  He has made some rather specific statements about this—thus leading me to believe that he must have identified an account which he would allege to be mine.  Others, including Alia, have concurred in his assessment that I must not be new here.

Thus the question is raised:  Who am I?  Or more specifically, what is the 2011-vintage username which Quickseller alleges to be mine?

Where?  This is the first thread which I’ve ever created specifically about myself.  I do have my own fan thread in Meta; but that was started by somebody else, and I rarely post there.


...says the scammer with a known history of deleting critical posts from self-moderated threads about your mathematically impossible gambling script.  Oh, my.

I’ve always been fair in handling self-moderated threads; and my policy in this thread is stated in OP.


The only two people whom I’ve seen too keenly in the subject question of this thread are you and Quickseller.  Thus I know it’s true that no sane person would do more than shrug or laugh at this thread.

My admirers have fun speculating comically over my secret identity, but that’s all in good humour:


(YuTü.Co.in has also discovered evidence that I am Satoshi and Gilligan—likely a few others, too.)


You think I’m that flexible?

This theory warrants investigation:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3086927.0

Nope, there’s no reason that someone poking around Vod’s BPIP would ever wonder how some “master-P” character got even more distrusted than Quickseller (!), or surf around trust references and forum archives to find out.

Or so I would have you believe.

Why don’t you investigate?  There is now a thread for that:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3086927.0