The scams of Arturas Rosenbacher

Just when you think he vanished off the stage…

So, as most of you will most likely be aware, TouchID was broken. Very quickly. And there was a reward for it. For those not familiar with the reward thing, quite a few people had pledged a reward for the first person to successfully break TouchID. And one of those people was Arturas Rosenbacher, now apparently owning a company named I/O Capital Partners.

And he has refused to pay up.

Now, let’s get a bit of context here. To some within Anonymous and the Occupy movement, Arturas Rosenbacher is a familiar name. He has pulled off multiple deceptions and scams under many names, one of the most notable ones of which was probably the RefRef scam back in 2011. RefRef was supposedly a DDoS tool that was under development by a few Anons, and that would be massively more powerful than LOIC, HOIC, and other tools that had been used until then. The technical claims made were dubious from the start, and there were several indications that the supposed RefRef testing attack on Pastebin wasn’t actually RefRef.

Donations for RefRef were collected, but it never materialized.

What did materialize was a lot of media coverage and a Perl script named refref.pl – however, this was just a basic DoS script pulled off a random script kiddie forum, with the name changed. The real RefRef never appeared, and most likely never existed in the first place. The end result was that the supposed ‘creator’ of RefRef ran off with the donations, effectively turning this into a giant scam.

And guess who perpetrated it? Arturas Rosenbacher.

Aside from RefRef, there was, around roughly the same time, a spree of Twitter accounts – impersonating people and groups within Anon, and frequently claiming to be a “member of LulzSec”. Of course, all of these claims were false. One of the tactics used was registering lookalike usernames that were only slightly different from the real username of a particular individual or group, and gaining a significant follower base that way.

And again, it was Arturas Rosenbacher.

He has also been repeatedly accused of stealing donations for Occupy Chicago, has claimed to many people that he works for Wikileaks in order to gain trust, and has quite a bunch of other very questionable behaviour on his name, which is mostly described in the article that I’ve linked twice before.

It therefore comes as no surprise that once again, he has made promises – gaining some significant attention and media exposure for his “company” in the process, of course – and backs out at the last moment. And, of course, per his usual modus operandi… the Tweet with his pledge has been removed.

Update: Looks like ZDNet also wrote about this.

Another update: It also seems like Arturas tried to weasel his way out of it by defining his own ridiculous terms and conditions for pay-out.

Redesigning society: Introduction

It’s time for change.

But not just any kind of change, real change. As time goes on, more and more often it turns out that corruption is everywhere, no entity can be trusted, and – quite frankly – all of society is literally hanging by a thread.

Economic systems about to collapse or already in the process of doing so, governments spying on and attacking their citizens, people being unjustly imprisoned, the environment being utterly destroyed for commercial gain, people losing their homes, unemployment and therefore poverty rising, increasing ignorance amongst the population… it appears that pretty much every aspect of society is broken in some way or other, with no reliable fix in sight.

For the past few years, I have been fleshing out quite a few ideas, that together make up a proposal for redesigning society as a whole. I’ve been discussing these ideas with a lot of people, and made quite some changes and improvements to them as a result. In this series of blog posts, I will be describing these ideas, and how to implement them in reality. New posts will appear on an irregular schedule, as I find the time and inspiration to put these ideas into words.

There are, it appears, a few basic pillars of society:

1. Government: Quite literally “governing people” to prevent conflict and harm.
2. Economy: Means of trade, designed to mitigate the effects of scarcity.
3. Education: The means for people to learn new skills and techniques.
4. Work: Creativity, production, and other efforts that contribute to society or parts thereof.

These ‘pillars’ together are necessary – or at least, perceived to be necessary – to keep society running smoothly, and to keep people from harm. For each of these pillars, I will be writing one post that explains the problems with the current model, and my redesigned proposal for that pillar.

I do have to ask that you do not make a judgment until the entire series of posts has been completed. These pillars of society are all very strongly interwoven, and you need to see each pillar in the context of the other pillars. This also means that, if you try to take one of the posts and apply it to current society, it will appear to be a failure. In the current model of society, all pillars also depend on each other, and changing just one of them won’t work.

I’ll also warn that this series will contain quite a few unusual concepts and ideas. They work very differently from how most societies work today, and will take some time to take in. Additionally, it would be unreasonable to expect an overnight transition to the redesign I am proposing, even if it does work well – people tend to be set in their ways, and it would be very hard to instantly change how things work.

And that is what the fifth post in this series will be about; a model for introducing these ideas to the world in a gradual fashion, requiring little cooperation from current society. It will be a model that not only introduces the idea to ‘society’ at large, but also tests its feasibility in the process.

Finally, I’d like to say this: the redesign I am proposing is not centered around a certain culture. It is designed around human instincts and logical ‘defaults’, not around the history or bias of a certain population. If this proposed model does indeed work, there is no reason for it not to work in specific places in the world.

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