“Takedown notice” sent to Defense Distributed was fraudulent, from Slovakia | Hacker News Reader

“Takedown notice” sent to Defense Distributed was fraudulent, from Slovakia

arstechnica.com

45 pointszymhan4 comments

>Using the open source tool IPlocation.net, "I learned that the IP address resides in the Slovak Republic," Madrone writes. "Using other open source tools, I confirmed that the geo-location was the Slovak Republic. Also, I confirmed that this IP address is reserved for that provider based in the Slovak Republic. Based upon this investigation, as well as my training and experience, the complaint sent to Cloudflare regarding CodeIsFreeSpeech.com did not originate from the New Jersey Office of Attorney General or its Division of Criminal Justice."

Does "open source" mean something completely different in this context? iplocation.net doesn't seem to be remotely open source...

It's an "open source" of information, I think is the usage here.

The "open source" here has the same meaning like "open source" in "Open Source Intelligence" (OSINT). It's a technical term used by the intelligence community (just like SIGINT or HUMINT), and recently also by the infosec people who have studied the same topic. It refers to all information from public available source.

It has nothing to do with open source software. To make the things a little bit more confusing, some infosec researchers and digital-rights activists who study OSINT do have a background of developing free and open source software, and some even have developed open source software to gather open source intelligence...

So, if an intelligent agency is gathering intelligence from public-available information about open source software, it would be "open source open source software intelligence", or OSOSSINT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence

Something troubling about this is the potential for lost forensics when cloudflare hands off takedown requests. It’s only because of the legal escalation that cloudflare shared the IP address. Would I get this as a end user if I requested it?

Also, it’s pretty surprising that the origin ip was so egregiously wrong. This is a really easy thing to fake, or at least put a smoke screen on.

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