After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

All of his hacker ethos feels very superficial to me. I.e. get this or that gizmo under control etc. There does not seem to be a deep curiosity for CS or maths as such, rather a childish joy in opening other peoples locks and taking other peoples hardware under control.

That was cool in the 70's when telecoms infrastructure wasn't commoditized. I understand how enticing it is to hack big co telephone networks, for example. Big, big machines with very strict access rights.

2009. Computing and communications infrastructure is commoditized. The world is literally swimming in computers. There is no unusual computing or telecoms capability you can harness by breaking into another system. It just means you want to break into the system instead of actually using your own.

It's pedestrian and rude, like stealing someone's umbrella.

Plus, he breached the implicit trust in him as an employer.

10 years is a lot, though, for bad taste and disappointing social graces.

Israel is soft on crime if the victims are outside Israel. The "binary options" industry depended on this.[1] At one point, 40% of the Israeli financial sector was binary options scams. Only after heavy foreign pressure and arrests in the US and EU was there a weak crackdown. The Times of Israel ran a long series of articles and finally broke up that racket. Their first story, "The Wolves of Tel Aviv"[2], blew open the scale of the scams. Amazingly, it was legal at the time to scam people outside Israel.

Times of Israel:

"The binary options industry, which is estimated to have employed more than 10,000 people, was outlawed by the Knesset in October 2017 largely as a result of The Times of Israel’s reporting, beginning with a March 2016 article entitled “The Wolves of Tel Aviv.”"

"But the industry has not gone away. Many of its operatives have reinvented themselves as “blockchain,” “fintech,” or “cannabis” entrepreneurs, while some of the call centers offering fraudulent investments have moved abroad and now offer fraudulent forex, cryptocurrencies or other investments from such cities as Kyiv, Sofia and Tbilisi."

"The binary options industry operated in Israel with impunity for a decade, stealing billions of dollars from millions of people around the world. While US law enforcement continues to tackle the fraud, and has convicted several Israelis and indicted others, Israel has yet to prosecute any of its orchestrators or operatives."

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/dont-let-israel-become-the-pro...

[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels...

While I sympathize with the OP and try to imagine what it would be like, I have to wonder whether there /really/ is that much of change if we are speaking strictly about linux, the internet and programming in general since the last 10 years.

I know for sure that it isn't hard to get back to it based on the experience of a friend of mine.

She was a sysadmin back in the 90s. A proper one. As geeky as any other linux geek running Red Hat 6.2 with window maker as the desktop environment as her main computing environment. At the turn of the millennium, she quit her job, got married and had a couple of kids. After quitting her job she barely ever kept in touch with computers. Of course, she browsed the web, used email shopped online but I'm willing to bet she didn't ever open up a command prompt. Her personal laptop ran windows and the house had one other computer (a mac, IIRC). Everything in her life revolved around her family and kids. She indulged in her other more satisfying interests of books and music if she ever had any free time -- which was very very rare.

3 months ago, now that the kids are old enough to not fuss and worry about, she decided to install linux and get back into everything with the intention of getting a job.

Last week she gave her first online talk for beginners (kids/teens). It was about container fundamentals. She introduced container concepts, docker and k8s.

By what I described it is perhaps hard to imagine just how disconnected she was from what 'we'[1] call tech but she really was -- she quit tech when Ubuntu was not even a thing !! ...and yet she was able to ramp up fairly quickly.

[1] I'm acutely aware that for non-tech people tech chops could also mean being able to use keyboard shortcuts where most people would use a mouse

The normalization of this behavior makes me incredibly salty.

Likely the same people that denigrated nerds for liking tech are now glued to their device while others are talking to them _in real life_.

> If you knew you could hurt others when you intentionally messed up

Not many people are locked up for a few years for a traffic violation