I'm always reluctant to go against the forum's policy of free speech
Try saying that while thinking of Goat and Rarity and maintaining a straight face.
I think this forum should prohibit ILLEGAL activities of where the servers are hosted. Are selling stolen property knowingly illegal? Yes, and there is reasonable evidence that torac is selling hacked accounts.
Do you ban posts selling stolen credit card details?
These comments by Theymos strike me as odd.
1. Theymos acknowledged publicly and privately that accounts torac sells are likely hacked
There are good reasons to think that torac is selling hacked accounts.
2. Theymos stated that he does not think selling hacked accounts is immoral.
Selling hacked accounts is not banned by any current forum policy. Selling the accounts is not illegal as far as I know (maybe the act of hacking the accounts is illegal). I'm always reluctant to go against the forum's policy of free speech, and in this case I'm not even sure that the trades are immoral. On one hand:
- The victims probably never notice.
- If the victims do notice, they can probably get their accounts back without too much hassle.
- There is no violence or deception involved.
- torac is only selling information. Some part of me thinks that selling information can never be wrong.
3. Theymos stated that he would not object if someone hacked his own bitcointalk.org account and sold his admin credentials elsewhere.
(This is ridiculous. I do not know any admin IRL or any other person that could make that comment with a straight face and expect someone to believe them).
What boggles my mind is you would think after the cosbycoin hack of bitcointalk.org in 2011 that Theymos would not be receptive to this type of activity taking place on his own forum. I don't think Theymos would want someone selling his login credentials on another forum.
I wouldn't like it, but I'm not sure that selling the credentials would be immoral.
4. Theymos was asked directly in a private conversation, if admin of sites affected were to contact him directly would he assist them in reclaiming accounts. Theymos responded "no."
In two conversations, Theymos has shown little to no interest in assisting admin of other sites or in dealing with torac and sellers like him directly. Rather than dealing with the issue he suggested I create this thread in the meta forum and let the community decide. Per his suggestion I did that. Poll traffic, responses, and feedback were small over the first week, but they did show by 9-3 that users here objected to sales of hacked accounts. Theymos said this wasn't enough to act. I updated the thread on Saturday asking users for direct feedback; since this update we've had additional comments and 20+ more users vote in the poll. Results now indicate a similar result as last week. Users object to sales of hacked accounts. Theymos hasn't taken action against torac, nor has he indicated when or if he will act or what "community threshold" will convince him to act accordingly.
I wish this was not the case, but right now I don't know how to interpret Theymos continued actions other than an implicit advocation of sales of hacked/compromised credentials.