Participant-
The coded message was meant for someone else (if I remember correctly he is the one whose post I was answering when I left the public key and assumed he would know how to extract the private key). It asked the person to please contact me once he decodes it. Squeak was pretending to be offended that I assumed the other person would figure it out and not him. He forgave me for that.
I honestly have no idea why they don’t want posters to contact each other in real life. It’s their website and their policy so they can enforce whatever they want. I needed to contact a poster once and they helped me with the process once I explained why and they asked the other party permission first.
There was a post about fixing an iPod on Chol Hamoed or something like that. Do a search on all my recent posts (I don’t come here that much anymore) and you should find it. If you get the reference- great!, if not, try reading through all the posts from pre 2011 and see if you can figure it out. (Hint- It was left by a moderator.)
Based on what the other poster commented on his commute, profession (we share the same one) and that he wasn’t able to notify me about the “wagons” anymore I was able to figure it out through LinkedIn. Once I saw his profile and noticed his picture I realized that I had met him at a conference and saw him around every once in a while. (He mentioned in a later post that he was the one who left the can there.)
I posted the whole story for Syag in a different thread (again- you can search by my posts). In short- I suspected that a poster on a different site was Joseph. I followed his posts until he slipped and embedded a Word (or possibly Excel) document with the metadata intact. I extracted the metadata to see his name and employer. Based on that I was able to get much more information about him and I think he was in Yeshiva with a different brother-in-law. I might be totally wrong though- If I were him and embedded documents in a post I would use phony metadata to throw people off.
Joseph originally contacted me through an email address he obtained through hacking (or social engineering) that was probably over 10 years ago. More recently he’s contacted me through the email that I left in the Limericks thread before it got removed. Sorry for the confusion.