Gab tries to defend itself

By Ben Munster

When a Washington Post report concluded that a “sizeable number” of users on budding alt-right cesspit Gab "espouse anti-Semitism" and "regularly connect online to share their ideology,” Gab’s team took to, er, Gab to denounce the Post’s findings and defend its work:

"Gab.com operates according to one principal rule: if speech is allowed under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and our User Guidelines, it is allowed on our site. This is because, per Sir Stephen Sedley in the seminal English free speech case DPP v. Redmond-Bate, “freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.On a daily basis, our company uses the protection afforded by the First Amendment, federal data privacy law, and American global hegemony to provide a utility for users all over the world, wheresoever they might be, to publish their innermost thoughts and engage in open dialogue without fear of recrimination from unfriendly and repressive governments. Put another way, we structure our affairs to afford all our users the full measure of due process rights available in the United States."

TL;DR? Gab allows hatred to flourish so long as it is hatred that doesn’t break the law, whereupon the devs actively "cooperate with law enforcement to ensure our users' safety—real, physical, safety, not wishy-washy millennial ‘safe space’ safety—is secured.” Like that time they reported the guy who openly called for the death of Jews and then went and murdered 11 of them himself. Right—that never happened.

Satoshi Back? Possibly, but also probably not. But possibly.

Pseudonymous Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, after a seven-year hiatus, might be back! But because he’s pseudonymous, we can’t know—and we probably never will.

Here’s what we do “know:” Satoshi’s formerly dormant P2P profile—basically Facebook for cypherpunks—posted the cryptic phrase “nour” (quotation marks included) on November 29. The first, exciting conclusion one might draw is, “OMG Satoshi is back, and he’s telling us ‘nour'! Adoption confirmed!”

The second, more considered conclusion you might draw is: “Hmm, Satoshi is back, and he’s telling us ‘nour.’ I don’t know what that means. Oh well. Back to making love to my cat.”

The word is a possible spelling for a common name that means “light” in Arabic, among other things. One theory posited by CCN is that Satoshi’s P2P account was compromised in 2014 by an anonymous hacker, who used Satoshi’s credentials to threaten a Bitcoin mega-pundit with murder. So someone had the PW then, and is still using it now. But why now? And why “nour?”

Floyd “Civil Penalties Lawsuit” Mayweather

Moneyed boxer Floyd Mayweather and inexplicable musical sensation DJ Khaled were both fined $700,000 between them after settling charges with the SEC, which had accused the two of publicly promoting securities without declaring that they had also been sponsored for it.

It’s the first time any celebrity has been fined for such a thing. Both had promoted the so-called crypto credit card Centra—the founders of which have since been convicted of fraud—on social media and, smartly, omitted to delete the offending posts even after the SEC announced that it was investigating them.

Full story here.

In other news:

• Amazon’s new Putin-inspired blockchain

Elsewhere on Decrypt

• Airfox CEO still somewhat unclear about SEC regulations
• Nine things you didn’t know about bitcoin

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