Having worked at Texas.Net before it became DataFoundry, and being one of the people who built up the original Sun E450s that were used as the Usenet servers when the separate Giganews product was developed, I find this hilarious.
I know a good number of the GN/DF employees mentioned in the article, and think this sounds more like a disgruntled ex-employee trying to badmouth his former employer.
As for the "gigauth" file - how else are you going to run a subscription Usenet service without logging authenticated users?
Disclaimer: I worked for Texas.Net from 1996 to late 1998 and was one of the people involved in moving their HQ from their San Antonio location to 823 Congress in Austin.
Edit: BTW, here's pics of my tubby self at work in the GREEN TSHIRT THEY MADE ME WEAR! (hey, free clothing is free clothing, I loved not having to worry about what I was going to wear to work every day..)
I have nothing but respect for Ron Y. and his family - he and his wife invited me to spend Thanksgiving dinner in '96 with them since I'd just moved to Austin and had nowhere else to go. I will never forget that kindness.
Overall, this doesn't seem credible. FBI detectives will not be doing run of the mill OS installs and what not. Also there isn't a need for fake identities just to be a system administrator in a usenet company. This sounds like delusions from a paranoid schizophrenic.
A friend of mine said "I knew it! You're a Mason too, what other secret organizations are you part of that you haven't told us about?"
Yeah, how was this guy going to go back to working at the same company under a fake identity, if everyone there already knew him? "Oh no, I'm not Bob, I'm his twin brother Jim"?
> FBI detectives will not be doing run of the mill OS installs and what not.
Why not? The only cyber security SAs I've met would not consider an OS installation to be run-of-the-mill work. (I guess their heavy education requirements leave little time for computers?)
I'm even more inclined to think that such work is not beneath them if, as implied, there were some kind of secret sauce being added to the recipe.
NB I'm only picking at a subset of your comment; I don't have an opinion about the rest.
I just looked at all of the "leaked" files and realized he dumped the personal contact info of all the employees. NOT COOL. It was bad enough when I had an unlisted phone number in 1996 and got phone calls at 3am from IRC script kiddies.
As for the "gigauth" file - how else are you going to run a subscription Usenet service without logging authenticated users?
Not that I disbelieve the rest of your post, but log minimization is a thing. There is a lot of room for sophistry and misleading statements to be made on the topic of logging. But, I would have assumed that anyone running binary usenet services understands their customers are pirates and would want to hold onto the bare minimum amount of data necessary to allow the service to function.
I know a good number of the GN/DF employees mentioned in the article, and think this sounds more like a disgruntled ex-employee trying to badmouth his former employer.
As for the "gigauth" file - how else are you going to run a subscription Usenet service without logging authenticated users?
Disclaimer: I worked for Texas.Net from 1996 to late 1998 and was one of the people involved in moving their HQ from their San Antonio location to 823 Congress in Austin.
Edit: BTW, here's pics of my tubby self at work in the GREEN TSHIRT THEY MADE ME WEAR! (hey, free clothing is free clothing, I loved not having to worry about what I was going to wear to work every day..)
http://www.mrbill.net/texasnet/
I have nothing but respect for Ron Y. and his family - he and his wife invited me to spend Thanksgiving dinner in '96 with them since I'd just moved to Austin and had nowhere else to go. I will never forget that kindness.