Comment by ahofmann | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahofmann | Hacker News Reader

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Brian Krebs regularly publishes articles in which he reveals people's private data. I don't think that's okay either, but Brian is often celebrated for it and will continue to do so. I used to enjoy reading krebsonsecurity.com, but since I realized that he is blatantly vigilante with these articles, I avoid the site. His argumentation is that he would only doxx criminals. However, this is not true, a few years ago he doxxed the developer of a large German imageboard and many volunteers of the imageboard, who wanted to remain anonymous for good reason. The criticized software of the developer had nothing to do with the imageboard and the developer also communicated that with Brian, but he didn't care about all that. The main thing was to sell the story well for him.

Brian Krebs, if you read this: a hearty "fuck you" from me for this action! You started something, that in the end destroyed one of the last places on the Internet, where one could still talk undisturbed. In my opinion, you are the biggest scum of all.

Which image board?

Here's the Krebs story: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/03/who-and-what-is-coinhive...

The board was "pr0gramm". In Krebs' words, "Multiple longtime pr0gramm members have remarked that since cha0s departed as administrator, the forum has become overrun by individuals with populist far-right political leanings."

He also justifies the "dox" because:

"So I set about trying to figure out who’s running pr0gramm. It wasn’t easy, but in the end all of the information needed to determine that was freely available online.

Let me be crystal clear on this point: All of the data I gathered (and presented in the detailed ‘mind map’ below) was derived from either public Web site WHOIS domain name registration records or from information posted to various social media networks by the pr0gramm administrators themselves. In other words, there is nothing in this research that was not put online by the pr0gramm administrators themselves."

I remember that! Thousands of pr0gramm users started donating money to the German cancer fund and other charities with the subject line "Krebs ist Scheiße" (Krebs is German for cancer). They made headlines with that. Lots of people outside pr0gramm started donating a bit later because of the articles. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of Euros in donations iirc.

They do this annually and are raising around 200k € every year for help against cancer. One could see this as a good outcome, but they made donations before the krebs story. They just started to talk about it after the story and that was something that was they didn't want to. One rule of pr0 is that you don't talk about the pr0. That was a good rule. Pr0 was like the internet was around 1999. A place to be together and having fun. A place to talk about everything. A social place, not those cancerous monsters that call themselves social networks these days. Now they have to worry about what outsiders think about them and that slowly kills everything that was great about it.

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