Hacker News

I had a phone call with him in about 2000, because he was then publishing a lot of material about DRM (and attacks on DRM), and I was also into anti-DRM stuff and was thinking of going to an industry meeting related to it. I wanted to know if he would publish whatever documents I might obtain there.

I remember that he said I could make a business card (!) saying that I was a special representative or special agent or journalist or whatever I wanted for Cryptome.

I said something like "wait, really?" and he said something like "well, who I am to say who does or doesn't work for Cryptome?" or "why should anyone believe you when you say you do or don't work for Cryptome? people should never believe each other!" or something like that.

He also warned me to watch out for people messing with my laptop in the hotel.

I didn't end up making the business card (I thought it would make people more suspicious of me rather than less, which was probably right), but I think I did send him a couple of documents, in retrospect probably very boring ones.

I met him briefly in person once, ironically at the announcement lecture for Wikileaks at HOPE in New York. I remember being confused because I assumed he would get along well with the Wikileaks people, but he was already kind of skeptical or cynical somehow.

He was also famous for posting extremely cynical takes to mailing lists.

John seemingly felt that power had already corrupted everyone or was always on the verge of corrupting everyone, and that one should be extremely reluctant to believe in anyone's stated motives for anything. I don't know if he thought there was some way out of that scenario or that that was just human nature. He always reminded me of the epigraph of Illuminatus!, attributed to Ishmael Reed: "The history of the world is the history of the warfare between secret societies."

I definitely admired his courage and independence.

Before Assange it was pretty out there to expect to be arrested for publishing secret documents in the US (conditional on you not being the one to leak them in the first place). The Pentagon Papers and The Progressive cases appeared to provide clear precedent in favor of freedom of the press.

Indeed, I love opening it now and then and it is easy to see these people do work of monumental importance. Once gets the feeling of being on a website which actually matters, and has ever kept the spirit of 90s web activism.

John was used by Wikileaks, registered the original Wikileaks domain, was blacklisted by Wikileaks insiders when he started questioning their financial (and "other") irregularities, and ended up cryptome'ing Wikileaks.

His site was not Wikileaks, he operated with morals and integrity. An example of this is how he had questions about how Wikileaks was publicized as a non-profit, when it was a project of The Sunshine Press-- a for-profit Icelandic corporation. Then the Wau Holland audit lies, selective releases, excessive and unaccounted-for spending, and obsession with money and publicity were all targets of his criticism.

John could smell the rot from a thousand miles away.

https://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak.htm

"Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy." -John Young, on Wikileaks

John was a G. The O.G. His "Eyeball" series was the beginning of web-based OSINT.

i found this on btdig, supposedly 1 seeder:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:6d80e6bbc579f156a0f64432b27ad4bcc33e1e6d

Have you tried https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2024 ?

There's also a much smaller one labeled 2016: https://ddosecrets.com/article/cryptome-archive-2016

Wow, I had no idea he had died. This undersells what a critical influence he had in the direction the early internet took by setting a bar on what you could just post online (as an American.) Wikileaks got a lot of publicity, but Cryptome probably was much more important. If tech companies had more John Youngs and less sales people eager to sell censorship machines to dictators we would be living in an utterly different world today...

I think the way to suggest a black band on HN is to email [email protected] ASAP, with a link to the pertinent post.

agree