Man, this is a complicated story. The strategy of protesting Krebs' writing by donating to an German anti-cancer website (Krebs = cancer in German) is definitely interesting.<p>At the surface level, it's an attack on Krebs, but there's a secondary thing going on here.<p>Krebs' main investigation was on Coinhive, a group which embeds Monero mining scripts in pages which run on page visitors' machines. But in his criticism of Coinhive and its association with Pr0gramm, it seems he may have cast too wide a net, doxxing and accusing Pr0gramm users who may not have anything to do with Coinhive. Instead of apologizing for this, he doubled down on it, typifying Pr0gramm users as basement dwellers who anonymously post nastygrams and threaten journalists with death.<p>Donating to cancer research is a direct response to <i>that</i>: it shows that Pr0gramm users are at least not <i>only</i> bad--they also do things generally considered altruistic, like donating to cancer research.<p>Both sides have definitely dirtied their hands: at least <i>some</i> Pr0gramm users <i>are</i> mining cryptocurrency on other people's machines through Coinhive, and Krebs has definitely made the false insinuation that Monero's anonymity is only useful for criminal activity. The open question is whether this behavior is typical of Pr0gramm or Krebs has actually accused Pr0gramm users who weren't involved in Coinhive.<p>I don't know who is in the right here--I simply don't have enough information to know. What information I do have comes from sources which are clearly biased. But it's interesting to see how even at this level, security cases are being tried in the court of public opinion.
I think uncovering the person / company behind Coinhive is not a bad idea. However, in doing so, Brian Krebs did several extremely questionable decisions and moves:<p>- publishing material by users he knew had trolled him to further the agenda that this is a right-wing site (it is not, the site has a huge fan base of Bernie Sanders and other leftist politicians)<p>- look at his tweets and headlines (on Vice Motherboard for example) that are used to promote the story: They are almost exclusively focusing the the Mathias Moench part, which is completely irrelevant to pr0gramm, Coinhive, and even the mindmap.<p>Given that, his whole article reeks of sensationalism, not journalism. This is fake news.
Seeing reporters report about a thing you know well instills me with me with dread about how I believe their articles about the things I don't know well. I lost all the respect I had for Mr. Krebs work, and I am one step closer to losing respect for all journalists. Which isn't a bad thing, being aware how biased and badly researched publications are is not a bad thing.<p>€dit: typos
From the article:<p><i>Am Abend änderte sich die Auseinandersetzung dann, nachdem ein Nutzer, "BassT87", einen Screenshot als Beleg für eine 25-Euro-Spende an die Krebshilfe postete. "Ich habe den Rummel um Herrn Krebs mal zum Anlass genommen, meinen Teil gegen Krebs beizutragen. Vielleicht macht der ein oder andere es ja (statt dem drölftausendsten Meme) ja nach...".</i><p>In english:<p><i>In the evening, the dispute changed after a user, "BassT87", posted a screenshot as proof of a 25 euro donation to Krebshilfe. "I took the hype about Mr. Krebs as an opportunity to do my part against cancer[Krebs]. Maybe one or the other will (instead of the thrwelvethousandth meme) imitate it...".</i><p>This is really the kind of absurd humour I like...<p>(Edit: format)
Krebs = Cancer in german<p>This is apparently in protest of this article by Krebs: <a href="https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/03/who-and-what-is-coinhive/" rel="nofollow">https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/03/who-and-what-is-coinhive...</a><p>Which according to some screenshots on pr0gramm also contains bullshit users fed to Krebs in an attempt to toll him. [0]<p>But the obvious problem here is the unnecessary doxing of people, just because Brian doesn't believe someone can compile a CPU miner with emscripten as one single person.<p>[0] <a href="http://img.pr0gramm.com/2018/03/28/b99c8ddc182d29f0.png" rel="nofollow">http://img.pr0gramm.com/2018/03/28/b99c8ddc182d29f0.png</a>
Following the doxxing of the people behind pr0gramm.com the community knew that retaliation by ddos or other bad methods would not work for Brian Krebs, who enjoys DDOS protection by google.
So they started a donation raid on the German Cancer Help Foundation, because Krebs literally tranlates to cancer in german.
The raid is ongoing and unconfirmed sources talk about 11k donations.
The avarage ammount seems to be > 15€ with at least one single donation of 10k€<p>rel. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16678536" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16678536</a>