Hacker News Reader

Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

>didn’t think of a lot of angles to this.

I'm not saying it wasn't thought about. If anything, I'm saying the opposite.

When you think about it long enough, you realize that many of the 'little lies' carry more risk than they are worth. Lying about being "linux capable" falls into that category.

>And to your point about the difficulty of maintaining trivial deceptions long term, well Len passed pretty soon after the initial years.

I was speaking more generally about opsec and lies which aren't worth the trouble and increased risk.

Specific to your comment: If Len knew they would die soon after, there is less incentive to lie about little things like linux capability. If they didn't know they would die soon after, they would care about the long-term opsec.

View on HN

All interesting points. I think I disagree with the last part due to my original post - nobody knew how this would turn out, but those involved knew projects like this consistently attracted serious State attention.

B/t protect the protocol by trying every possible angle against this sort of “adversary” (which, here in 2024, seems to have worked), versus cutting corners, the comprehensive nature of SN’s opsec seems to imply it’d show up in a lot of small ways like lying about Linux. Analysis of the codebase also had similar findings about attention to detail (“thought of everything” sort of difficulty regarding appsec).

Overall, there’s a good write up on Len as SN worth digging into if the topic is interesting. I also think the ‘11 New Yorker piece got close to the truth.

>versus cutting corners, the comprehensive nature of SN’s opsec seems to imply it’d show up in a lot of small ways like lying about Linux.

I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself poorly, or if we're maybe just speaking past each other, or I'm not understanding you.

You're saying that not lying about linux capability would be "cutting corners".

I'm saying that not lying (in this specific situation) would be the better opsec, and that anyone serious about opsec against government-level adversaries would not bother lying about such a mundane detail because it is all risk with no benefit to opsec. This concept was taught to me at a previous job where the adversaries were of the same magnitude as governments, and I'm confident that anyone seriously into the opsec/prviacy "scene" would concur.

Satoshi was, obviously, careful about opsec. Therefor I do not think they would lie about such a trivial and vague detail such as saying someone else is more linux capable than they are, because it would be a risk to lie about it compared to not lying.

I presume you won't say, but now I'm wondering about who has similar intelligence capabilities to governments...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com