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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

If I open a paid Wordpress.com account using my real e-mail address and a credit card registered to my home, and post a $10 reward for revealing my identity, the fact that I strongly doubt anyone will claim the reward is not proof of Wordpress.com's perfect safeguarding of my identity, just that their systems are secure enough to not be trivially hackable and that nobody cared enough to find a way to obtain a court order to compel WP.com to hand over my info.

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He'd probably even send $10 to SDF if they could find him. It would be somewhat more trivial for a Wordpress employee if the site was at voidnull.wordpress.com.

The difference seems to be that he doesn't want to have trust anybody, whereas you'd be happy trusting organizations such as Wordpress and the US legal system.

Actually, I think mseebach's point was the opposite: that this challenge, even if nobody claims the prize, does not prove that tor + sdf-shell-paid-by-mail is secure against leaking your identity.

Oh, I see. Yeah, I think you're right. Actually, the $10 cash prize matches Bruce Schneier's Security Snake Oil Warning Sign #9: Cracking contests.

https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9902.html

Well then if you want you can say that Keccak/SHA-3 matches snake oil in the same way. They were giving away chocolates for crypto results!

voidnull is trying to prove that SDF is NOT a perfect safeguard.

I don't think he's trying to prove anything, just providing a fun game of wit and a challenge. He will surely be delighted if he gets a postcard.

It also helps SDF to know about possible vulnerabilities. And, there's also the stated reason: to get Tor and SDF some publicity.

There's no proof here maybe just an experiment. To see if SDF is truly secure or can he still be tracked. I would wager as long he doesn't use that handle anywhere else he is safe.

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