😼 “Ceci n’est pas un chat,”
— or —
“Cette-ci n’est pas une chatte.” — ?
— We will never know. —

French pedants, I really, surreally do know that “ ‘cette-ci’ n’existe pas. ”
It is the point of this artistry!

The following unrestrained rant came up on a thread about privacy. In pertinent part, with some minimal context, I think that it belongs here:

With some small text made normal, and one missing word added for clarity:

Quote from: nullius on October 28, 2020, 01:37:35 PM

What about non-“official” criminals: From behind Tor, I have sometimes angered people who claimed to have actual mafia connections. That was probably just stupid empty bragging by them, but—why should I take that risk? Over the years, on the Internet, I have also sometimes been treated to death threats—and to lurid and graphic fantasies about what somebody out there wanted to do to my real or imaginary wife/girlfriend/children (none of your business if I have these things or don’t), my mother (sorry, she’s dead), my dog (no, he will bite you in half!), etc., etc. Why should I take the risk that any of them could be serious?

All of the above was written on or about 2 October, and stuck in my local drafts directory with many other things that get posted late or never. It seems eerie, reading it now.

[...]

Quote from: https://blog.lopp.net/reflections-upon-a-swatting/

I drove back to the entrance and told the patrol officer that his captain wanted to speak with me, so he waved me through. Upon entering the mobile command unit, the first thing I was asked was

Quote

“Sir, do you have any enemies?”

To which I replied:

[...]

More more criminals: What about armed robbers, kidnappers, extortionists, murderers...? Here is a choice selection from Lopp’s list of these; do you want to bet your or your family’s lives that these types of thugs could never obtain your information from a domain registrar!?

Quote from: https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks

[—see the post; everybody should see the context here—]

	Date	Victim	Location	Description
	...	very	long	list ...

Lauda is on my mind. That is what reminded me of this unfinished post. Why the fuck do some criminal-minded punks around here get off on gloating over the unwarranted assumption that she got the cops after her?

I don’t know what happened to her; and I have been very reluctant to talk about this. I do not want to feed the rumour mill with speculation that is, on my part, negligibly better-informed than anyone else’s—for all practical purposes, uninformed guessing. But this has obviously been on my mind, the unanswerable questions.

To my knowledge, she never did anything illegal—and it was not in her character, either; although that is no guarantee against “legal” trouble, depending under what régime you live, which I do not know in her case. What I do know is that (0) it is publicly known that she was trusted to handle business transactions involving significant BTC many times over the years, and (1) Lauda had a fucking ton of enemies!

The vibe I got, which may be coloured by my own subjective adversarial mindset, was that “somebody apparently got the drop on him/her”, as mocacinno put it—and that that “somebody” was not the law. My thoughts have also run through many other plausible explanations—from family things causing a desire for peaceful private retirement from the Internet (we think alike there, V8s!), to “terminal” illness (I know she would probably never tell anyone, if that—not even nobody—it’s just the way she was), to the nagging feeling that she was preparing to commit suicide (which would be not my place to interfere with—if it was that, I just wish that she had told me so we could say a proper goodbye). It has kept coming back to, Does she have enemies? LOL.

I DO NOT KNOW what happened. All I know is that she very explicitly wanted her privacy. There is nothing that I can do about it now, save to respect her privacy—and to tell dumb nasty forum trolls with zero real achievements to shut their filthy lying mouths, for their speculation is assuredly as ~~uninformed~~ misinformed as it is patently malicious.

All of the below, except for the link that I just added, was written on or about 2 October, and stuck in my local drafts directory with many other things that get posted late or never. It seems eerie, reading it now.

What about...? I could continue, but I think that I have made my point.

This is not a cat, and this not-a-cat is not not-unsurprised:

“nullius” is now retired. This has been contemplated before; and now, it should surprise nobody. I will note it here because it does not need its own thread, and does not need discussion at all.

I am “retired”, not “as if dead”. It remains possible to contact me. I am still involved in a few threads, such as my charity bet with theymos; and I may otherwise pop up here and there. Of course, I will still attend my duties to Laudatory Lore as needed. I am just winding down my forum involvement.

My e-mail address has been “changed”. It is public, so you can see that it is “changed” to an address that has been on my PGP key for years, at a domain that I am well-known to control. The old address is deprecated, but it still works; if it ceases to function for any reason, then I will revoke the PGP userid for it, without further comment. A similar proviso applies if I change my e-mail address again in the future, as I plan to do if I ever provision nullian.com with proper services. Always heed my PGP userids. My certification primary key lives on an airgap machine, and is the peremptory single root of trust for my identity.

* nullius is 0xC2E91CD74A4C57A105F6C21B5A00591B2F307E0C. This is important.

Quote from: nullius on February 14, 2020, 11:58:09 PM

Quote from: nullius on February 14, 2020, 08:40:45 PM

I am 0xC2E91CD74A4C57A105F6C21B5A00591B2F307E0C; 0xC2E91CD74A4C57A105F6C21B5A00591B2F307E0C is me; and if you want to authenticate my identity, I explicitly request that you verify digital signatures rooted in 0xC2E91CD74A4C57A105F6C21B5A00591B2F307E0C.

If existence exists, I still exist—in the Nullian void, as always and ever.

Aye, I dream, AI dreams of nonexistent cats:

Free images of Lauda!