Slashdot Mirror
Tor Project Confirms Sexual Misconduct By Developer Jacob Appelbaum (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Tor Project, a nonprofit known for its online anonymity software, says it has verified claims that former employee Jacob Appelbaum engaged in "sexually aggressive behavior" with people inside and outside of its organization. "We have confirmed that the events did take place as reported," Shari Steele, Tor's executive director, tells The Verge. In a blog post today, Steele says that Tor began an investigation into Appelbaum's behavior after several people came forward with allegations of misconduct in late May. In a statement made in June, he said the allegations were "entirely false." He resigned from the Tor Project in May. "I want to thank all the people who broke the silence around Jacob's behavior," Steele writes. "It is because of you that this issue has now been addressed. I am grateful you spoke up, and I acknowledge and appreciate your courage." Steele says that Tor is now implementing a new anti-harassment policy, as well as a process for submitting complaints and having them reviewed. The changes will be put in place this week. Tor also announced last month that it would replace its entire board of directors.
It isn't a coincidence that these alleged thingamajics surface right at the crux of entire board being offed.
While rest of you are having a social hard-on for and against the whole abuse scenario as per to their plan,
do we yet have answers to the actually meaningful questions?
I mean, The entire board of directors are being replaced. that's not a small thing.
what else?
OP has obviously never backpacked, where mixed gender shared rooms are common.
They don't want a court involved for the same reason no corporate or private entity wants a court involved; because the court will find the organization was in the wrong, and will find against it. The whole point of having sexual harassment policies and making them apply to everyone from the CEO to the guy that vacuums the carpet is corporate liability for sexual harassment or assault lies solely on the perpetrator. Even where a board or management has been proven to have insufficiently protected employees from sexual or other kinds of abuse, a strong response is seen as a way of assuring the corporate culture is appropriately modified.
Where I work, and I am in a senior management position now, sexual harassment, bullying and other anti-social actions are all in the company policies, and those policies constitute part of an employee's employment contract. While serious assaults would be referred to police, actions that while perhaps not criminal in nature, but still in violation of the policies surrounding the most egregious behaviors will inevitably lead to termination (with severance where we deem it inappropriate to have the individual on premises one second longer).
It sounds to me like Tor hat a right shitty organizational culture which had far too much familiarity between employees, and while I'll wager that they did have the proper policies, non-enforcement can lead to those being little more than a booklet that collects dust in everyone's office. Well, that's bad on them, but at the end of the day, in the world we live in now, at any point one party in a sexual or erotic encounter can terminate that encounter immediately, and if the other party does not comply, then the line is crossed. But really, there should be a zero tolerance for shenanigans. Managers should not be having any kind of sexual encounters with subordinates, even if it is consensual. It's disruptive, bad for general moral, and opens up the organization to significant liabilities. Frankly, if I or one of the other managers had a sexual encounter with a subordinate, and it gets found out, I'd say we'd be out the door in a pretty big hurry.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A company doesn't need to wait for formal legal proceedings to terminate someone, particularly if they have an existing set of policies surrounding sexual misconduct.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The only troublesome events I've had with other coworkers was in some of the management positions I held where I had to take some disciplinary action for tardiness or poor work. Once I had to terminate someone, and I have to say that of all the hard things I've had to do in my professional and personal life, that was just about the hardest thing I ever had to do. The individual was a very nice person, someone who I personally liked a lot, but for a lot of reasons, some of them not their fault, they just couldn't do the job, and after multiple chances, the management team decided they had to go, and I, being direct supervisor, was the lucky recipient of that task.
Now I have seen some pretty deplorable behavior between other workers. I've seen bullying, both subtle and not so subtle, and have seen two coworkers enter a sexual relationship. None of these were my supervisors, and I wasn't their's, so it did not affect me personally, but I'd say that good people and shitty people are pretty much evenly divided between men and women.
The worst boss I ever had was a man, however. A petulant, ill tempered asshole who took out his shitty marriage on his employees, to the point where, after a ten minute session of the most vile berating because she had forgot to make a new pot of coffee, she just ran out the door in tears. She came back an hour later, and actually fucking apologized to that creep, mainly because she was a single mother with a young child, and couldn't afford to be unemployed. That certainly taught me a good deal about situations of relative power and impotence, and while not sexual abuse, was a kind of hostility and abuse where I did see people stick with the job, simply because they needed to pay the bills.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"Jake's an asshole if you're not somebody. Where somebody is defined as a person whose work he can steal, someone to intoxicate and lure into bed, or someone that can enhance his reputation"
i.e. hatchet job.
He was claimed to have molested a woman at a party who was in distress. She says she was in distress because she'd lost her bag, it was mutual fondling. i.e. your hearsay claim of someone elses hearsay claim contradicts the ACTUAL VICTIM'S statement.
You claim to be a friend of one of the claimants involved. But we have the claims outlined in detail on a website (in Jacobs name)! We can read them! We don't need to you paraphrase, misrepresent them as "sexual predator" the hatchet job is there in detail!
He had a "budding romance" (as she put it) with him, he tried to coax her into the bath, she finally agrees, but only if she keeps her clothes on. He tries to wash her, that would be really romantic. Yet she's presents it as abuse. Tell me that's not JTRIG honeytrap?
Another woman slept with him voluntarily, he tries to initiate sex, she rejects, he stops. ..... oooo what an abuser he is! Luring her into bed.... oh wait she invited him there. FFS. How obvious can you make it!?
Another woman they were cuddling and touching, and someone claims she looked distressed (I look into the witness guy's background, he has UK security clearance FFS! He's spook!), and that it was abuse. SHE says no, it was mutual. Yet you continue to present the false hearsay claim as more valid than the actual 'victim'???
"Whether or not Tor is backdoored or otherwise compromised is a totally different issue. As for something new made by trustable people, Jacob doesn't have the technical ability to do a project like this on his own, he's a charming SOCIOPATH that WORMS his way into the circles of people that can. Good for Tor to give him the boot and cleaning house of the people who turned a blind eye to his misconduct."
Hatchet man, your hatchet is so obvious. Tor has received a bunch of volunteers who have backdoored the product, done JTRIG style attacks on the staff and you have today an anonymous network that isn't anonymous.
Jacob needs to fix it. It's your duty Jacob, no matter what shit they try to throw at you.
Did anybody wonder if there is something funny with Shari Steele? - her husband is working with the NSA. and probably works/worked for the NSA: https://bvass.wordpress.com/ta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Tor is now shit, because the good people were chased away.
Complete bollocks. Name some of these "good people" who have left. The project founders and all the major technical contributors are still there, as well as many new ones.
Indeed. Methinks that there is a PsyOps campaign running to make people go to less secure alternatives. If you cannot break it, try to make everybody believe it is broken instead.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Tor is secure. Where people have been located, it was due to bugs on the bundled browser and not following best security practices like disabling Javascript and not using a maximized browser window (to thwart canvas based fingerprinting). But the underlying network itself is secure.
That or share too much information about yourself or your other online activity or download malicious content. It doesn't even have to be malware as such but say an MP3 where your media player tries to download cover art, any kind of functionality that could lead to non-TOR traffic. Or socially engineer you to visit a popular YouTube video in your ordinary browser using a special URL. It could be they have a exploit on core TOR, but in that case I'm guessing it's in the NSA vaults along with the AES backdoor.
People don't understand the power of profiling and combinatorics. For example say you look at my posting history, I've probably casually mentioned my age a few times - let's say you have my birthday pinned down to a month even though I never said when it was. My sex too in some context, I presume. And I've at one point mentioned my country, my hometown (>150k) and that I used to live in the capital (>600k). If you have a post saying "I'm moving back home soon" that's enough to pinpoint me, if you have access to the right registry.
How does that work? Well you have ~145k registered domestic moves. Only ~49k are between different parts of the country. In total there's about ~9k for my hometown, those are all public statistics. So about (49/145)*9k = 3k long-distance moves to my town, for argument we'll assume all are from the capital. If average lifespan is 80, my month is roughly 1/(80*12) of the total population so ~3 moves of people my age and ~1.5 if you add sex. If soon means the coming month you're down to 1.5/12 = ~1/8. Even with some non-uniformity and whatnot it'll probably be one, at most two.
People don't stop to think about these things, particularly when it appears to happen in "private", but services get compromised. Or are honeypots to begin with. And even if you use PGP or some other secure channel, what used to be a buddy today can be compromised tomorrow. And this gets more and more important as we leave more and more "real world" electronic traces, like that concert you were at - were you also tagged on Facebook? In the past it would have been almost useless information, today a few such tidbits of information can easily lead to just having a handful of suspects to investigate closer.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
i say that to girls all the time. It works *amazingly* well at getting them to be the aggressors. "Now look, just because I'm letting you sleep over doesn't mean we're going to have sex!" I have yet to meet one who hasn't taken that as a challenge.
Anyway, yes, it's a double standard. You can either try to change the nature of women, or just go with it. I'll let you figure out which works better.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere