Before Sibyl, Marcelo Goncalves ran file sharing sites for anime. His crew went through a lot of sites since they’d eventually get into trouble with their hosting provider.
On January 16, 2016, Marcelo moved his anime file sharing operation to nekko.io. At this time he would have been around 15 years old.
As the FAQ page below indicates, Miao required court orders to remove DMCA requests or illegal content.
At the end of this post we have a copy of the sites canary page. The term “warrant canary” is a digital nod to the old coal mining tradition where a bird’s silence signaled immediate danger. In the modern landscape of internet privacy, it serves as a clever legal loophole designed to circumvent government gag orders. When intelligence agencies serve a company with a secret subpoena—such as a National Security Letter demanding user data—that company is legally forbidden from telling anyone, including the users being targeted, that the request exists.
To maintain transparency without breaking the law, companies utilize a strategy based on negative affirmation. They publish a recurring statement in their transparency reports declaring, “We have not received any secret government requests for user data.” As long as that statement appears, users can assume their data has not been secretly subpoenaed by the government.
The warning system relies on silence to speak volumes. If a company is eventually forced to hand over data, they cannot explicitly warn their users. Instead, they simply remove the warrant canary statement from their website. By deleting the sentence, they are no longer lying to the public, nor are they actively violating the gag order. The sudden absence of the statement acts as the alarm, subtly signaling to the watchful public that the company’s data has been compromised.
The Twitter link opens a Marcelo Goncalves Miao account
https://web.archive.org/web/20160229003524/https://twitter.com/Miaoooww
----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
Status: All good
Period: January 1 to March 31, 2016
As of today, Thursday, January 16th, 2016, neither I, nor nekko.io have received a
national security letter, a FISA order, or any other classified request for user
information. No logs are kept to be turned over to any party, and I will shut
down the site before I comply with any such request to log personally
identifying information. This canary is valid through March 16th, 2016. If you
have not received an update, assume the site is compromised.
Miao~
HostMaster
Nekko.io
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Marcelo’s Canary page
