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Comment by rogers18445 | Hacker News Reader

They apparently caught him because he logged into a wiretapped gmail with a VPN. It's not difficult to segment your network such that some software does not use a VPN tunnel. On Linux, it can even be made fool-proof with network namespaces.

You can even render the default network namespace barren such that any accidentally launched software has no network of any kind.

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I interpreted it differently - I'm assuming what "pen register" means in relation to GMail is that they get the metadata (i.e. who he is sending/receiving email from) and saw that he used his email to sign up for a VPN.

If true, is that actually a breach of bail conditions? How did they prove that he actually used the VPN rather than just, for the sake of argument, signing up to NordVPN to support his favourite YouTube creator?

It is not a breach of bail conditions (at least not currently). The prosecution is arguing that VPN use makes SBF more of a flight risk, and is asking the court to make the bail conditions more strict because of it.

> You can even render the default network namespace barren such that any accidentally launched software has no network of any kind.

This sounds extremely appealing. Do you have any quick-start resources for this, or do we just have to read the complete documentation for Linux namespaces?

It's just a few commands using the ip tool. You can read about it here: https://www.wireguard.com/netns/

Wireguard is special in that after creating a wg0 interface you can move it to another namespace and its [encrypted] packets would be teleported into the namespace it started in. The link above has the wg0 being moved into the default/init namespace but you can move it anywhere.

Using an anonymization software to access a service which directly identifies you... yeah, who would have guessed this is not a good idea.

"Your honor I shared my gmail password with someone else before the bail conditions were set."

The classic "I didn't do it" defense.

a defense that gets stronger and more likely as human automation becomes more prevalent.

checking your email earlier on in history meant more as a signal than it does now when 20 devices check an account 200 times a day automatically.

(not to defend SBF, but I think a fair amount of us are checking our email a lot more often than when we actually touch a device.)

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