[ale] OT interesting interview with owner of Lavabit

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi all,

I just wanted to give you an update.  Later in the podcast, they 
mentioned another method to donate to Ladar Levison if you wish to.  I 
still don't know if the paypal option will work or not.  I sent an 
inquiry to support at lavabit.com and it cannot be delivered, or at least 
it hasn't been in a couple of days.  Ladar mentioned this as an alternative:

https://rally.org/lavabit

If you are using something like Noscript to block scripting, you'll have 
to trust rally.org.  You'll also have to trust (at least temporarily) 
cloudfront.net.  They probably use that to track you but you can untrust 
it and erase any cookies later.

If you want to see the video that Ladar put there, you'll have to trust 
youtube.com and ytimg.com.

Sincerely,

Ron


On 11/1/2013 3:57 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Here is a very interesting interview with the owner of Lavabit, Ladar Levison.  The interview occurred on the Triangulation podcast that Leo Laporte puts on.  This is very interesting and highly recommended.
>
> Lavabit was a secure email service that was essentially forced out of business by the federal government when they demanded his SSL keys, which would compromise the security of 400,000 clients.  Ladar initially refused.  He eventually had to give up the keys, which he did as several pages of 4 point type on printed paper.  Then he shut down the business.  GoDaddy later revoked the keys and Ladar took all the data of his customers and put it on encrypted hard drives, wiped the servers, and shut them down.
>
> He's now in the middle of a serious legal battle with the government, and is facing $ 100 K in legal bills, and $ 10 K in fines from the govt.  He has raised enough money to cover that, but is also trying to raise another $ 200 K to open source all the custom email server code that he had developed, so people can run their own "Lavabit" systems.
>
> He has a paypal link on his site for support, but when I clicked that, I got an error.
>
> He said you can paypal to support at lavabit.com, but since I got the error on the link that went to paypal, I don't know if that would work either.
>
> Anyway, it's worth a listen.  I'd think twice or thrice about operating a US based security business.
>
> http://twit.tv/show/triangulation - triangulation podcast site
> http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/125 - Ladar Levison show
> http://lavabit.com/ - Lavabit site
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Ron
>
>    


-- 

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Ron Frazier
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