Last Friday the account under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto was used to post a five-word message to our social network for P2P researchers, hosted by NING (Glam Media).

We immediately proceeded to contact NING, with the purpose of gathering more information about the Nakamoto post, information that could potentially be useful in determining whether the message was legitimate or apocryphal.

We understand that disclosing private information provided by users is absolutely unacceptable. In fact, non of our questions to NING involved private information of the users. However, we do not consider that the notion of ‘private information’ includes the privacy of a hacker who is breaking illegitimately into a system, and through this very act violating the privacy of a legitimate user.

As creators of the P2P Foundation’s community site, we believe that asking to the NING operators whether the password of a user account had been recently tampered with, or whether there were any signs that could lead to think that a user’s account might or migh not have been compromised, in no way violates the privacy of the user.

Moreover, we consider that members of the community in general should be right to expect at least a minimum of investigation from us in cases where extraordinary behaviour takes place. Users should be able to rely on the expectation that they are probably communicating with who the site says they are communicating.

In sum, the least we can do for our users is to inquire about whether the integrity of the platform might have been compromised, or not, in extraordinary cases, like the one that presented itself last Friday.

That is what we did.

After a weekend-long wait, this is the reply we received from NING:

“We aren’t able provide any information (“personal” or otherwise) about this or other accounts on the Ning Platform without a subpoena, warrant, court order or other legal process. Thanks for understanding—I’m sorry we can’t be of more help here.”

What this means is that this probably the most anti-climatic of all possible updates to this story. In short: we know nothing new.

In their message, NING thanks us “for understanding”. They shouldn’t; we don’t understand.

P.S. Message to the r/bitcoin community: Apologies for promising this update in ‘a few hours’, when it actually took a few days. We assumed that we would receive the information from NING way faster than we actually did. My bad, I shouldn’t have given ourselves a time frame (‘a few hours’) so short, when the final outcome was beyond our control.

 
Now that the update is here I hope is that everyone who was waiting for this update feels like this:

…although I wouldn’t bet on it.