Forging IRC Logs and Impersonating Professors: the Lengths to Which Anti-Free Software Militants Would Go
We're dealing with criminals and thugs here, those are not ordinary people
THE last part of this weekly series spoke of impersonations, forgery, and intentionally false information (disinformation) being fed by sockpuppets, operated by lunatics and extremists (with documents to prove their insanity and extremism). We also posted a teaser last Tuesday, dropping a few hints in advance.
Just to be clear, we're going to show their misconduct for another half a year to come. There's plenty left to show.
We suggest that people (newcomers in particular) familiarise themselves with prior parts, especially the past four. It's all connected. In those 4 prior parts we showed how a sockpuppet and multi-headed imposter abused a reporting mechanism in an effort at Denial of Service, abused authors, and muddied the water some more. This is the work of deranged militants who don't mind the Rule of Law. They hide behind Tor and VPN. They hope that identity is obfuscated sufficiently for denial of the crime, or for plausible deniability through doubt/uncertainty. Unfortunately for them, they keep incriminating and unmasking themselves, so it becomes simple to show who they are, based on their own words (open, albeit accidental, admissions). We'll show some examples of this next year, but for now we'll keep the series nameless, not personifying the matter but instead focusing on the attack patterns (those very same people also attack Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen, the people behind the GPL, or copyleft at large, and GNU). A a reminder, GNU was essential for Linux and Linus Torvalds admits it. Torvalds explained many times in the past why he fancies the GPL. It was essential, even crucial, to the popularity and fast growth of GNU/Linux, not just at the expense of Windows but also UNIX/BSD.
Some weeks ago I received an unwanted message with an attachment, wherein the sender is forging or impersonating de Icaza, Ryan Farmer, Matthew J. Garrett, among others.
Impersonating people in IRC, in real-time, was done too (but we'll cover this separately in the future).
This was the body of the message:
Anonops IRC - Techrights discussion
Aye Mate
I was in Anonops IRC when these blocks were talking about techrights.
Myself, I've been a fan for years and thought you should see these people pulling wool over your eyes.
-Duncan
No, it was totally fake. This is no "fan".
There are many more examples like that; they tend to recycle their sockpuppets and target many people with the same "sock", even to abuse legal processes by filing with fake names (sockpuppets). There are legal ramifications when resorts to this and we've considered taking legal action. What complicates it, among other things, is that suing an autistic person can be difficult in practice.
We'll spare readers the old hypothesis that corporations fancy rallying or weaponising a bunch of crazies. They can do so by telling fake stories in social control media, inciting small brains in very large numbers.
In my view, the people who are doing all this (especially the rallying, i.e. the ringleaders, "command and control" so to speak) belong in a prison somewhere, but their government chooses alternatives for them, having basically realised they're hopeless and there's no prospect of redemption. The laws are lax, especially when it comes to enforcement, as soon as mental disability is brought up (the appropriate box gets ticked). There's a reason why many violent criminals are urged by their lawyers to "plead crazy" as their preferred defence strategy. It's a very powerful strategy, even if pretence is immoral and creates a stigma.
Among the other fakes we've received lately:
- Someone faking a source.
- Faking doctors and professors, maybe to "collect" information based on false pretences.
Let's just take an example of the latter. The following is almost certainly fake, so we've redacted names:
> Dear Dr Schestowitz, > > I came across your articles while researching the case of Prof Eben > Moglen, for which one explanation could be character assassination > and resource binding stratagems aimed at controlling the free > software movement. > > My name is ██████████ ██████████, currently I am professor for █████████████ > in ███████████, I have a public profile that is easily visible to you if > you'd like to. > > I have recently left the UK after my open source activities there > came under serious coordinated attack by parties not yet fully > identified. > > I believe I have also spotted patterns of "honeypot resource > wasters" attracting likely open source activists (in the true sense > of the word) in order to keep them busy, e.g., well-paying but > ultimately meaningless jobs, or entanglement in legal proceedings > fueled by personal injury, exploiting then exhausting those involved > emotionally and financially, ultimately leading to destroying - by > preventing - effective resource devoted to building anything that > could successfully compete on the market with common commercial > business models. > > Based on your writings, I think Sirius Open Source could fit the > pattern, and might even be intentionally constructed for the purpose > of controlling parts of the GNU/Linux community in the UK, by > entangling them in gaslighting, court cases, public controversy, > protracted quests for justice and such. > > Would you be open for a discussion? > > While I clearly do not align with everything you say in your > articles, such as interpretation of motives or appraisal of facts - > being subjected to actual conspiracies can push one to jump to > conclusions too early too often - I feel the similarities are > striking enough to exchange stories. > > I would also ask you to keep this email confidential at least until > we have spoken. I am of course fully aware that this is not the same > thing as privacy with regards to the entities already having a path > of access to this conversation, but I do not mind playing with > partially open cards here. > > Best Regards > ██████████████ ████████████████
This imposter later added, writing to another E-mail address of mine (a private one):
> Not urgent, but hoping to reduce the risk of spam filtering and such.
I was somewhat sceptical. Why was this sent from a Google account?
I replied: "I am trying to first identify that this is indeed your email address, as we were approached by imposters recently. Is there a public page with this GMail account?"
Well, two weeks have gone by without a reply.
I then sent two messages to a verifiable address of the person in question (university address), plus another address, which had become outdated.
Guess what happened.
Anyway, if somebody is spying by means of social engineering of impersonation (of high authority), pretending to be an important person and bait the target into speaking out (based on false pretences), what would be the consequences? It depends on the country of the perpetrator, the bait, and the target.
I've looked up the relevant laws. It doesn't look good. Is someone going to be back in jail/bail/probation?
There are more examples, but these ought to suffice for now. Next Monday we'll progress to other aspects of online abuse, which in some cases breach the law.
It should be absolutely apparent that whether the criminals operate online or offline does not matter.
If I phone someone up, claiming to be the police or tax authorities (even as a "prank"), I can get in very serious trouble.
As a side note, I still need to unsubscribe from dozens of lists that the perpetrators subscribed me to a few days ago. This too is something that was done months ago; they aren't stopping because it seems I became one of their punchbags. They think they can just bombard my inbox with spam and the police won't care. Well, the police does care. It all adds up.
Eventually someone might get locked up. It doesn't matter if it's a women's prison or men's prison, it'll be tons of trouble inside a cell.
Why would those people resort to so many criminal activities? How desperate are they?
Is Microsoft playing a role in all this? Microsoft is connected to several of the perpetrators. We can easily prove this.
One associate told me that "the failure of Microsoft ChatGPT annoys them" and "the over-provisioning and under use of Azure annoys them" (almost nobody talks about this except us).
It also seems to annoy them that someone stands up and defends their other attack targets, which include Stallman and Moglen (as noted above). No, I'm nowhere near their stature, but I guess I should be flattered to be in the same "target list" as them. █