The other comments had me rolling my eyes. But far as Tor and Appelbaum, remember that Appelbaum was the public face of Tor and defender of Wikileaks for many people. Also did lots of work on these issues. Was the fieldguy in many countries deploying the tech. Justifies a specific interest in Appelbaum over others where some, including me, were wondering if aomeone missed a writeup somewhere about why he left and what's his next plans.

All this other stuff seems tabloid. Not what we need on HN.

Evangelist. Not developer.

"did lots of work on these issues" is misleading. He was an imposter and that was precisely his official role in the tor project.

I didn't say developer. So, dont correct it. I also addressed broader issues than merely Tor code. He did lots of outreach plus helped deploy Tor in a lot of rough areas. Post Snowden, he took a role both informing and being an evangelist.

You can't unroll years of video presentations and writeups by one comment. So, please cite reputable sources saying all that was a hoax in his official job duty on Tor to hoax people.

ok. I am neither a fan nor a foe of jake.

His role was evangelism, he was successful with it, but it does not affect the technology in any way. Just as the death of your car salesman would affect your customer experience but not the way Ford builds cars for you.

I have no idea what "deploying Tor" means, but apparently it means loading an installation package on a machine. So come one, you could impress non-techies with that but...

Nope.

I just think that the submission's merit is independent of the page full of awful comments it generated. The submission itself seems about as HN worthy as other "X leaves Y" submissions. IMO, the comments are a problem in the HN community, not a problem in the submission.

Pragmatically though, flagging the story and getting whatever this comment section off the front page probably makes sense.

Yeah, I agree. Unfortunately, I think the comments inflict more harm than the good the story logline provides.

People are posting related info they've found. Seems entirely valid to me (especially given that the media botches a lot of stories, like the last two revelations of "the real Satoshi").

This thread is just plain bizarre and probably the lowest quality content I've seen on hacker news. Glad you flagged it.