Hi.
That was some sort of joke, JYA style. At least we have some explanations in plain english from JYA himself on the Cypherpunks Mailing List whose message was posted on Cryptome.
1 - Explanation link here:
https://cryptome.org/cryptome-sale-parody.pdf
2 - Message pasted herein in full:
Cryptome for sale with access log files from 1996 for $50, 000, 000
John Young
jya@pipeline.com
Fri Oct 16 06:21:43 EDT 2015
Cryptome's offer to sell itself and logs for the amount Omidyar is tax writing off at The Intercept, and skying the donation for its archive to the weekly stipend of top Snowden exploiters, is a parody of what highly-profitable web sites like e-Bay, ISPs, equipment, program and cybersecurity peddlers, and net operators and overseers are doing.
Access, traffic and transaction logs are ginned, sorted, stored, munged, manipulated, sold, stolen, and more, all along the many packeting, hops, boosts, diversions, conversions, hand-offs to various devices of the route from user to destination. End point of user and the destination is merely one bit of data, well, two bits, with gobs of bits quietly being gobbled elsewhere, camouflaged by the delusion of privacy policies, anonymization, and website log deletion or never ginning logs.
Cryptome has no logs, never has. Its various ISPs have copious logs of many kinds (not just the simplistic access logs meant to delude website operators), along with all the other transceivers of visitor activities and transaction metadata and metametadata.
Cryptome has never run a server, just buy the service. We do track our ISPs' activities and through them the ganglia of the Internet to see what happens to our files.
Voracious bots have always been the heaviest users of Cryptome, siphoning files hourly, daily, monthly, then providing them to users at other locations to gin their own families of data for sale to govs, coms, edus, banks, investigators, investors.
Google, Bing, Internet Archive, Torrent, drops, govs, spies, academics, researchers, cyberseckers, take, steal actually (as do we), Internet files for their own use which is primarily to gather data on users, the precious jewels of the Internet which underwrite its so-called free service.
Public benefit aggregators like Internet Archive, Wikipedia, Google docs, universities, NGOs, are the prime abusers of visitor data, both to their websites and by special privilege of advising visitors on how to protect their privacy while being pickpocketed of personal data.
Cybersecurity con artists are as bad by deluding their visitors and customers about how to protect themselves with encryption, Tor, anonymization, OTR, secret chats, deep web, blah, blah. All these con artists gin their own logs of trusting-users data, then either hand it over to authorities, sell it covertly, share with cohorts and standards orgs, write papers and give speeches soliciting customers, testify in Congress and courts, inform grand juries, cut plea bargains, brag about resisting NSLs, set up warrant canaries, share tips with donors and investors, yadda, yadda, do donate generously, but best, generate taxable income, tax write-offs, never-ending war, paranoia and FUD.
Cryptome has no privacy or security policy to deceive visitors, and periodically announce that, and warn not to trust us or any other website, especially those which advocate HTTPS, anonymization, privacy, security and crow about civil liberties and public benefit.
At 03:31 AM 10/16/2015, you wrote:
>
On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 11:23:37PM -0700, Shelley wrote:
>
>
>
> It's not funny, and it's not right. From what I've heard, a bunch
>
> of us would really appreciate an explanation from John - in plain
>
> English.
>
>
>
>
I am not JYA's lawyer.
>
>
I strongly suspect JYA didn't sell any logs from this offer and never
>
will at price of current value of $50M since the logs almost surely
>
might be owned for a small fraction of this.
>
>
IMHO it was made for one or more of following: joke, sarcasm, warning.
>
>
As someone already wrote at least twice:
>
NSA almost surely have all these logs.
Previous message:
[cryptome] Cryptome for sale with access log files from 1996 for $50, 000, 000
