Hacker News Reader

Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

So, Ghislaine Maxwell, (edit: suspected to be) reddit power mod maxwellhill is currently being tried as an accomplice to Epstein's underage sex trafficking.

The usual conspiracy crowd however are trying to connect it to their old favourite, pizzagate, where they assume basically every left wing figure of note is involved in a satanic child sex cult operating out of a fake pizza shop in DC. They're also implying Aaron Schwartz was murdered to cover it up, rather than driven to suicide by overzealous prosecution of academic journal piracy.

When Marak deleted faker.js, he replaced everything with links to reddit conspiracy threads containing the same allegations.

View on HN

Is this the same Marak who got in trouble for setting his house on fire when his homemade explosives project went wrong? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038438)

yes

maxwellhill is suspected but not confirmed to be the same person as ghislaine.

They're also inactive for >1yr.

Important context for people who aren't going to read further.

Another important context is that maxwellhill, whoever they were, were more than just another reddit power user. They were the first user to pass 1 million upvotes, they were instrumental in promoting the site from early on, and Aaron Swartz, of course, was an early reddit dev often credited as a co-founder.

It seems unlikely the early reddit admins would not know who maxwellhill is, whether they were Ghislaine or not.

That said, it seems to me maxwellhill (again, whoever they are) did absolutely not "promote pedophilia". The worst they've been able to find is some questions about age of consent laws.

Thanks for the background. Truth really is stranger than fiction. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

I can absolutely see how people would be pulled deeply into conspiracy webs by this stuff.

That said, I wonder what the ToSs say on GitHub and NPM on basically taking over an account that pushes content they don’t personally agree with.

The right thing to do is for someone to properly fork the project and then they can spend the time and money providing a repo for the world to freeload on.

If someone can’t update references quickly, that’s a serious problem they need to fix with their own pipeline if they’re pointing to random third party libraries.

If the content wasn’t illegal the owner has every right to do what they want with it. They have no duty of care or warranty implied or otherwise on their own repo under that license. That’s the whole point! The whole point of pulling the rug out was an important protest on people freeloading on this person’s work.

To now freeload so badly that they effectively cancel the protest and takeover the account is certainly indicative of how ethically bankrupt the freeloaders truly are.

That's undesrststing it quite a bit. The activity & interests match up well, both high and low activity periods, lots of posting about age of consent, goes dark the same day she's arrested. The name may also be an allusion to her estate.

Judge for yourself: https://reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_the_...

Public forums are a goldmine for identifying people who have compromising or plain illegal perversions. A rich and diverse source for both buying and selling perversions. Of course she and Epstein and others were using deep access to this site to their advantage. Like wolves to sheep.

Speaking of conspiracy…

Data-mining 1980s/early 90s alt.sex and its subgroups would provide interesting insights. In the Wild West days of Usenet, internationally criminal explicit content was being passed along the university backbones. Epstein & Maxwell would have had excellent access to their respective university’s unfiltered Usenet feed. I think it would be relatively easy to identify communication networks in which they and their peers were involved.

Swartz not Schwartz

Thanks, the edit window on my post is expired so unfortunately I can't fix it now

Im eagerly awaiting a really interesting documentary about these things in a few years. Interesting time to be alive!

That's like the last paragraph of the story... what even is faker.js?

I guess I should do my own research.

It's an open source library for generating convincing looking mock data for demos so you have a bunch of mixed, convincing names and not just John Doe1, Jane Doe2, test@example.com

It handles about 60 types of data.

It was previously a source of controversy in the open source funding debate when Marak posted a fuck you, pay me where he refused to make any more updates until some of the corporate users started sponsoring the project, which Godaddy eventually did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com