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posted by martyb on Thursday March 23 2017, @11:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the worse-than-HACF dept.

Previously: Alleged Epilepsy-Triggering Troll Arrested by the FBI.

The man accused of triggering an epileptic seizure by tweeting was caught when authorities obtained phone records and access to an iCloud account:

Court documents show that a search warrant to Twitter concerning the @jew_goldstein handle provided the authorities with information that the account was created on December 11 with a "PhoneDevice." Twitter also divulged the device's phone number and said that the carrier was AT&T. Some of the direct messages to other Twitter users on the account, according to the documents, said, "I know he has epilepsy," "I hope this sends him into a seizure," and "...let's see if he dies." The Dallas authorities next obtained information from AT&T that the telephone number used to start the Twitter account was a burner SIM card with a Tracfone prepaid account "with no subscriber information." "However, a review of the AT&T toll records showed an associated Apple iPhone 6A Model 1586 (Apple iPhone)," Nathan Hopp, an FBI agent in Dallas, wrote in the criminal complaint (PDF).

The police then sent a search warrant to Apple "for the iCloud account associated to the telephone number" used to open the Twitter account. Apple provided a wealth of information that ultimately doomed Rivello. Cupertino gave the Dallas Police Department his Apple ID e-mail address, his name, home address, and registration IP address when the account was created in 2012.

John Rayne Rivello has been charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon "enhanced as a hate crime". One of the images obtained from the iCloud account included an image of Rivello posing with his driver's license. The animated GIF that Rivello allegedly tweeted was a generic one that had already been posted on places such as 4chan for years.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @05:47AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @05:47AM (#483529)

    Bitcoin should actually work, so long as you mine it on your ghost VM, and you accept that multiple expenditures by your ghost identity can be linked to each other. Mining bitcoin on CPU (VM or not) is hardly profitable, but it's not unreasonable as a way to convert dollars (spent on electric bill) to bitcoins, with good secrecy but lousy exchange ratio.

  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday March 24 2017, @04:30PM (2 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Friday March 24 2017, @04:30PM (#483732)

    Math. BTC is currently over $1000 and is 'uneconomical' to mine on standard Intel/AMD devices. Do you know how long it would take a single CPU to consume $1000USD of electricity at the $0.11 rate I pay? And finding a coin is a binary thing, you throw the electricity at it and maybe you find one and maybe you don't, it is only when you mine vast tracts of the problem space that the statistical probabilities assure you of a return on your investment. So add in a computing cluster and an upgrade to commercial power service to the cost of going ghost. And again, this is to raise funds that must always be spent online in ways with zero connection back to meat space. Impractical unless you have something to hide. The PC wars were getting hot enough I was worrying about being the target of a twitter rage mob but that problem should be abating soon, at least for a few years.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @12:19AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @12:19AM (#483944)

      Math. BTC is currently over $1000 and is 'uneconomical' to mine on standard Intel/AMD devices. Do you know how long it would take a single CPU to consume $1000USD of electricity at the $0.11 rate I pay? And finding a coin is a binary thing, you throw the electricity at it and maybe you find one and maybe you don't, it is only when you mine vast tracts of the problem space that the statistical probabilities assure you of a return on your investment.

      Yeah, but mining pools exist to solve exactly that problem, in exchange for skimming their percentage off the top.

      It's still a pretty ridiculous effort unless you have something serious to hide, but it's not completely impractical with a single powerful PC. And it still beats any other option I can think of for getting untraceable funds in the hands of a ghost identity.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @06:06AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 25 2017, @06:06AM (#484040)

        If custom ASICs beat out GPUs at mining in gigahashes/$, then the home users in the pool lose out even if they have good price-performance GPUs.