> Last year, Libgen also told users that it's primarily funded through Google advertising. In the video, Libgen was warning users that while admins are difficult to unmask, "Google gets informed of every download, and if a user has ever registered with Google, then Google knows exactly who they are, what they've downloaded, and when they downloaded it."
This seems like... a bad plan if your goal is to run a website whose primary purpose is not entirely legal.
How are they even able to stay anonymous if they're using google ads? I assume they have to provide a bank account to get paid, and with all the KYC laws it's not exactly trivial to hide your identity.
Sure, but how do you even keep it sustainable? All most useful things in the world are kinda fundamentally non-monetizable, illegal, or both. Wikipedia is the only thing that succeeded, and even that I'm starting to have some doubts about, because of how heavily politically influenced it is.
The biggest vulnerability for hackers has always been trying to get normie clout for our actions. Whether back in the day from pure social bragging, or now from trying to tie in to contemporary surveillance media. It's painful to watch, but if they had been more reserved you likely wouldn't hearing about them in the first place.
Really depends. Worst thing you can do as a hacker is have a brand. Anything more than "that guy who did X" is putting you as a flight risk for corporate.
You can't put a face or even handle on yourself, ideally. But that's all social media is these days.
While I see googletagmanager embedded on the .li site I don't think they can tell if you click the download link or just viewed the page for a book, at least.
The people running Tor for intel don’t give a damn about you downloading “C Structures for the Down and Out” or “Horus Lupercal, Saint or Savior—Another Take”, they have bigger fish to fry and don’t need that distraction
I mean, the latter seems to be a bit heretical. In fact, inquisitors have been dispatched to get rid of that. The Emperor Protects!
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But that is a good point. It's doubtful that the intelligence community would care too much about people downloading books in the TOR Network. Or if they did get an interest in that, it works have to be a very special book, indeed.
TOR doesn't man in the middle your traffic. An exit node could snoop your traffic if it's unencrypted, but no TOR nodes can see into a encrypted TLS stream, for example.
So the distinction is, using bittorrent is not illegal (yet). It's just a protocol for sharing files. But using it as a tool for illegal activity is illegal, because youre doing something illegal.
This seems like... a bad plan if your goal is to run a website whose primary purpose is not entirely legal.