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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Back in the 90’s before the days of Windows 3.0 I had to debug a memory manager written by a brilliant but somewhat odd guy. Among other thing I stumbled across:

    • A temporary variable called “handy” because it was useful in a number of situations.
    • Another one called son_of_handy, used in conjunction with handy.
    • Blocks of memory were referred to as cookies.
    • Cookies had a flag called shit_cookie_corrupt that would get set if the block of memory was suspected of being corrupt.
    • Each time a cookie was found to be corrupt then the function OhShit() was called.
    • If too many cookies were corrupt then the function OhShitOhShitOhShit() was called, which would terminate everything.









  • Well OPSEC is the stated cause. Who knows how the person was initially identified and tracked. For all we know he was quickly identified through some sort of Tor backdoor that the feds have figured out, but they used that to watch for an unrelated OPSEC mistake they could take advantage of. That way the Tor backdoor remains protected.


  • Exactly. Tor was originally created so that people in repressive countries could access otherwise blocked content in a way it couldn’t be easily traced back to them.

    It wasn’t designed to protect the illegal activities of people in first world countries that have teams of computer forensics experts at dozens of law enforcement agencies that have demonstrated experience in tracking down users of services like Tor, bitcoin, etc.