How can people be so good at making money, but yet so clueless about OPSEC?
> But after the police knocked on the door on the weatherboard home in June, McIvor handed them the key codes to unlock more than $6m worth of various cryptocurrencies.
Ummm, why would he do that? Was he perhaps hoping that they'd go away if he just gave them the money?
> Detective Senior Sergeant Keith Kay, the head of the Asset Recovery Unit in the Waikato, said his team became involved after a tip from the Inland [sic] Revenue Service in the United States.
> The IRS had received "Suspicious Activity Reports" from PayPal, the online payment service, which tax officials traced to McIvor in New Zealand.
> ...
> The money was allegedly deposited into his bank accounts from international wire transfers, PayPal, and another online payment service called Stripe.
I can't imagine how anyone could think that would work out well.
NZ seems to have a high number of pirates per capita (N=2). Could be the excellent fibre internet.
Also, this is an example of why a criminal should spend ill-gotten funds. What was the point of all the effort to profit from piracy? The money is all gone now and he’s going to jail. He has actually incriminated himself more by having all the money sitting there.
There is a history of it being very difficult access to TV and movies legitimately with only a few channels and shows often never coming or coming years later. This drove a lot of demand for piracy in NZ over the years.
I think it's because historically NZ had terrible access to media. Often you wouldn't even be able to buy movies or TV series even if you wanted to, and TV shows would air 6 months to a year behind the USA, now it's usually within the same week. I remember sometimes even torrenting DVD rips for movies before they were even in the cinema.
> But after the police knocked on the door on the weatherboard home in June, McIvor handed them the key codes to unlock more than $6m worth of various cryptocurrencies.
Why in God's name would he give them the wallet keys? I'd be like, what wallets?
What are you basing any of that on? There are a lot of places to go and a lot of ways to use cryptocurrency. Why would someone be 'watching their back'?
Well I sure hope, for his sake, that wasn’t all of it...
Wouldn’t you have to be pretty stupid to have that much crypto at a single point of failure?
Just like why you don’t keep all your cash in a mattress. Keep some private keys in a safe in the cellar at grandma’s ranch, or encode them in a picture of yourself hanging on her wall.
Is steganography a thing with real-world works of art? I know that with digital photos, it's simply a matter of interspersing the information in its bits, but I'm not sure how that would translate with an actual physical copy.
How would that work? Take a picture of the picture and hash it? Wouldn't that just make the picture you took the source of entropy not the physical one?
You might have something in the image that you could interpret as 1s and 0s. Say, heights of trees in a line. If the next one is bigger, 1, if it's smaller, 0, etc.
If you can reliably produce the same hash from the painting over and over again[1], you can use the painting as the source, and throw away the picture.
There is no method for consumers to validate copyright status of digital files. It would be interesting if someone started selling drm-free high quality downloads for copyrighted videos while (falsely) advertising as being legal and fully licensed for sharing copies with friends.
I'd pay 0.05 per movie for plausible deniability (in addition to quality and reliability): would be much harder for movie studios to bring a case against you if every file came with a license for which there is no consumer mechanism to validate - ideally spliced in as a preroll. Something like "This copy of $moviename is licensed for unlimited sharing and copying by $studioname". Would be incredibly cheap to automate with ffmpeg, and would plausibly reduce prosecution risk for everyone downstream.
> But after the police knocked on the door on the weatherboard home in June, McIvor handed them the key codes to unlock more than $6m worth of various cryptocurrencies.
Ummm, why would he do that? Was he perhaps hoping that they'd go away if he just gave them the money?
> Detective Senior Sergeant Keith Kay, the head of the Asset Recovery Unit in the Waikato, said his team became involved after a tip from the Inland [sic] Revenue Service in the United States.
> The IRS had received "Suspicious Activity Reports" from PayPal, the online payment service, which tax officials traced to McIvor in New Zealand.
> ...
> The money was allegedly deposited into his bank accounts from international wire transfers, PayPal, and another online payment service called Stripe.
I can't imagine how anyone could think that would work out well.