Another important context is that maxwellhill, whoever they were, were more than just another reddit power user. They were the first user to pass 1 million upvotes, they were instrumental in promoting the site from early on, and Aaron Swartz, of course, was an early reddit dev often credited as a co-founder.
It seems unlikely the early reddit admins would not know who maxwellhill is, whether they were Ghislaine or not.
That said, it seems to me maxwellhill (again, whoever they are) did absolutely not "promote pedophilia". The worst they've been able to find is some questions about age of consent laws.
Thanks for the background. Truth really is stranger than fiction. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
I can absolutely see how people would be pulled deeply into conspiracy webs by this stuff.
That said, I wonder what the ToSs say on GitHub and NPM on basically taking over an account that pushes content they don’t personally agree with.
The right thing to do is for someone to properly fork the project and then they can spend the time and money providing a repo for the world to freeload on.
If someone can’t update references quickly, that’s a serious problem they need to fix with their own pipeline if they’re pointing to random third party libraries.
If the content wasn’t illegal the owner has every right to do what they want with it. They have no duty of care or warranty implied or otherwise on their own repo under that license. That’s the whole point! The whole point of pulling the rug out was an important protest on people freeloading on this person’s work.
To now freeload so badly that they effectively cancel the protest and takeover the account is certainly indicative of how ethically bankrupt the freeloaders truly are.
It seems unlikely the early reddit admins would not know who maxwellhill is, whether they were Ghislaine or not.
That said, it seems to me maxwellhill (again, whoever they are) did absolutely not "promote pedophilia". The worst they've been able to find is some questions about age of consent laws.