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Comment by loganu | Hacker News Reader

"Most of the core team" anonymous. "All of the developers" being visited on LinkedIn. If it's not sloppy journalism, there's something really interesting about a multi-national company's legal team using (potentially) illegal means in tracking down developers.

"– We do not know how, but he had managed to track us. We were quite unsettled. We thought it was a scare tactic. And we were frightened. None of us were anonymous anymore. They knew where we worked, where we lived."

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"really interesting about a multi-national company's legal team using (potentially) illegal means in tracking down developers"

Whilst I'm not all about the ethics of multinationals, there is a strong presumption that those 'anonymous' members were anywhere near as thorough as they say or thought they were in not leaving breadcrumbs (witness DPR and Silk Road).

True. It's easy to slip, and it only takes one time. From my limited reading, DPR slipped often. But his case doesn't mean individuals can't obscure themselves. Look at Satoshi (Bitcoin). We don't even know 100% for sure if Satoshi is a group or individual.

There's an adage: “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”

I think kordless has a key insight here: it doesn't say the lawyers visited all of them and only them. The devs may still be fairly anonymous in a big pool of devs that was visited- a dragnet, as it were. We don't know yet.

True, but a "dragnet" across (for example) all Argentinian devs with experience in Ruby and React (substitute whatever skills make sense)would have hits outside this small group. If enough people were this scared about LinkedIn visits, they'd likely have friends or colleagues outside the PopcornTime group saying "Oh yeah, he looked at my profile too. Don't worry about it."

I'm just saying, I imagine they wouldn't be scared about it if it was a big net fishing for info. Could be sensationalism for the story though.

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