Information Arbitrageur (InfoSec, OSINT, SOCMINT, Alternative Data, FinTech) and OG cypherpunk.
Greater Chicagoland Area
Joined June 2008
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William Knowles retweeted
On this day in 2008, Satoshi published the Bitcoin white paper.
Two months earlier, Satoshi emailed @adam3us to ask how to cite Hashcash. Bitcoin builds on its proof-of-work so no one has to be in charge.
Eighteen years on, Bitcoin is still the best place to build.
🤖 Made with AI
William Knowles retweeted
Secret Service walked this guy out of the event after he gave this interview. Free speech absolutism strikes again!
thehandbasket.co/p/tom-hoyle…
William Knowles retweeted
"If Trump wants the credit, he must also take the blame," writes @CatoFP's @Doug_Bandow in @amconmag.
Read the full article here:
cato.org/commentary/presiden…
William Knowles retweeted
If Jeffrey Epstein was alive today, he would endorse the entirety of the Republican Party.
This ad should play on every TV channel for the next three days.
If you want answers and accountability vote Democrat.
William Knowles retweeted
"Hey claude, launder $6B for me, make no mistakes"
Our investigators are observing never-seen-before laundering patterns with the stolen funds from the Binance exploit. Thousands of transactions in a short period suggest that the attackers are using automation to obscure the trail of funds. Rather than simply moving funds onward, they repeatedly circulate them among addresses, often sending funds back to addresses involved earlier in the sequence.
Read more: chainalysis.com/blog/binance…
William Knowles retweeted
Yesterday, I received a security notification from Apple warning me that my iPhone had been targeted by a sophisticated mercenary spyware attack, involving technology of the kind developed by companies such as NSO Group, the Israeli firm behind the notorious Pegasus spyware.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of Apple’s warning was its confirmation that such attacks target specific individuals “because of who you are or what you do.”
This is not the first time I have been targeted by spyware. I was previously targeted with Pegasus in both 2017 and 2021.
I do not yet know who is behind this latest attack, or whether it is connected to my investigative documentary, The Trap, which I directed and co-produced. The film, available on Al Jazeera 360, exposed the details of the September 2024 pager explosions in Lebanon.
What is certain, however, is that the targeting of journalists with sophisticated spyware poses a grave threat to press freedom, the confidentiality of journalistic sources, and the very foundations of independent investigative journalism.
William Knowles retweeted
Reminder: this is how Vivek got rich. He bought a worthless drug, had HIS MOM run a bogus trial on the drug, then went on CNBC and lied about it.
The drug never worked. Investors lost all their money. But Vivek had already cashed out.
William Knowles retweeted
The Bitcoin white paper turns 18 today. Pull the metadata from the copy at bitcoin.org and you get a small opsec lesson from an author who has stayed anonymous ever since.
Creator: Writer
Producer: OpenOffice.org 2.4
Language: en-GB
CreationDate: 2009-03-24 11:33:15 at UTC-6
That file is the March 2009 revision. The draft announced on Oct 31, 2008 was created Oct 3, 2008 at UTC-7. People have spent years trying to place Satoshi with those offsets. Once you account for daylight saving time, no single US time zone fits both, so they prove very little.
That may be the point. A language setting in a word processor and a system clock set to a different time zone are enough to send years of sleuthing in different directions. No special tools, just knowing which defaults your software writes into every file.
The lesson isn't to strip everything. It's to know what the systems and applications you use reveal out of the box, and which settings you can change to make that work for you instead of against you.
William Knowles retweeted
The guy who compared a Trump rally to Jonestown on live Fox News was invited by the Trump campaign. They called his work phone on Monday and asked him to come.
His name is Tom Hoyle. He's 57 and runs a small custom printing shop in Charlotte called MadPark Designs with his business partner. He's hated Trump since 1989, back when he was a sophomore in college. And he really, really doesn't like getting sales calls on the shop line, from anybody.
So when the rally people called, he said yes. He even signed up with his real name and contact info, because he wanted it on the record that they invited him.
Then he had to get through the door. A private security guy asked him straight up if he was a Trump supporter. Tom told him he supports the Constitution, then started talking about his shirt, which was for an old death metal band called Death. He kept going about the history of Florida death metal until the guard gave up and let him in.
His plan going in was honestly pretty juvenile. He and a buddy he grew up with figured he'd wait a few minutes into the speech and yell something filthy.
Then a Fox News reporter, Lucas Tomlinson, found him standing off by himself and asked if he could interview him live. Tom thinks a white guy with a big beard and a ball cap was pretty much exactly what they were looking for.
He told himself he wasn't going to cuss on national TV, so he made it up on the spot. He says the first line and then just waits. The reporter goes "Wait, the Jonestown Massacre?" and that's when he finishes it.
He told The Handbasket he picked that up from Billy Crystal, who said on Letterman back in the '80s that you always let the other guy set up your punchline. Tomlinson set it up for him perfectly.
A few minutes later some men who said they were Secret Service pulled him aside. He asked if this was about the concession stand, because it closed early and he was starving. They didn't love that and walked him out. On his way out he passed the guard from the front door and told him, hey man, you didn't vet me too well.
Think about how many people had a shot at stopping this. The campaign's call list found him. The signup form had his name. A guard questioned him to his face. A Fox crew put him on live TV. Every one of them took one look at the beard and the hat and filled in the rest.
That's how almost all of this screening works. Asking somebody what they actually believe takes time, and looking at them takes a second, so everybody just looks.
The one check that actually caught him came after he'd already said it on national TV.
