Haha I was sure this was going to be about PLR. Alright, story time.
Around 2007, when I was in undergrad, I started getting really interested in cryptography. At the time TrueCrypt was a very popular project in crypto circles, and I spent a lot of time hanging out on the TC forums, soaking up as much information as I could.
As a journalism major, the extreme secrecy of crypto-geeks naturally piqued my curiosity. I started digging into who ran TrueCrypt and its forums. After a bit of googling and whois, I hit a brick wall in the form of LLCs in the Cayman Islands. I therefore did what anybody in my position would do: I just asked people on the TC forums what was going on.
Within minutes, a very popular poster whose handle was `plr` reached out to me, essentially saying "yeah... that is weird! What do you know?". I told him everything, which wasn't much, but he still seemed super interested. We exchanged messages for a few weeks and followed up on a few leads. After a while, plr stopped replying to me. I figured he got bored.
Around 2007, when I was in undergrad, I started getting really interested in cryptography. At the time TrueCrypt was a very popular project in crypto circles, and I spent a lot of time hanging out on the TC forums, soaking up as much information as I could.
As a journalism major, the extreme secrecy of crypto-geeks naturally piqued my curiosity. I started digging into who ran TrueCrypt and its forums. After a bit of googling and whois, I hit a brick wall in the form of LLCs in the Cayman Islands. I therefore did what anybody in my position would do: I just asked people on the TC forums what was going on.
Within minutes, a very popular poster whose handle was `plr` reached out to me, essentially saying "yeah... that is weird! What do you know?". I told him everything, which wasn't much, but he still seemed super interested. We exchanged messages for a few weeks and followed up on a few leads. After a while, plr stopped replying to me. I figured he got bored.
Years later (= 2016, I think), this came out: https://magazine.atavist.com/he-always-had-a-dark-side
tl;dr: I was internet friends with Paul Le Roux.