311–320 of 370 posts
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That struck me too. A guy who installed botnets complaining about how "the true spirit of hacking" was lost. Botnets are a plague. Try cracking Windows 10 to make it play nicer, if you want to feel good about hacking.
he obviously hasn't seen WSL yet, or VirtualBox
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Sentencing is decided by a judge not by a prison warden. Beyond vague conspiracy theories I don’t see the connection.
I don't generally consider myself a conspiracy theorist, but I agree with the previous comment. For-profit prisons not only make money by having more prisoners staying for longer, but in many cases have actually been required to maintain a minimum number of prisoners. That creates a huge incentive to the operators of private prisons to make sure that people are sentenced to terms that are as long as possible, and to…
All prisons are required to maintain a certain minimum population to justify their operating budget.
At any rate the entire debate of public versus private prisons is laughably flawed because even public prisons are reliant upon commercial service vendors that cater specifically to the prison industry at ludicrously inflated rates to both inmates and tax payers. And both prison types are known to make use of inmates as cheap commercial labor which undervalues the inmates and robs the local economy of manual labor jobs.
Alt account for obvious reasons. In 2003 I was sentenced to 6 years in a Texas prison. The how and why isn't relevant, other than to say it was a terrible mistake I made seven years prior. At that point, I was about 5 years into my tech career. I wasn't in there for a "hacker" crime, so I was in general population, and had more freedom than the author did. As for prison conditions, not much I can add to the conversat…
What are prison games?
> Most inmates have computer access which uses a specialized access control program that allows them to email approved contacts for .05 cents a minute. Oh not this again https://slashdot.org/story/76748
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10 years ago, the iPhone had only existed for 3 years... society was much different.
Ten years ago "looking at a cellphone" was still universal shorthand for "is a dick" in fiction. So was "talking to no-one" (bluetooth headset) which carried a further meaning of "business douche" ("carries a cellphone at all" was shorthand for this for most of the 90s—see the movie Hook for an early example). Both are normal and common now. Ten years ago much of the population still considered paying any attention w…
This has pretty much been normalized as more and more people expect immediate response to whatever trivial whine they have.
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Even if no one died, there were victims: the owners of the hacked devices.
In the context that people have been talking about is did he physically harm someone, the answer is no, in that sense there was no victim. I don't sympathize with him but he didn't cause physical harm to anyone and besides what it cost to remove the botnet from the clinic's machines he doesn't seem to have done any real economic harm here either. There was no patient information stolen, no damage to the clinic's repu…
A more reasonable sentence would have been 2-3x the cost of the cleanup—and details on the systems that were compromised—plus a certain amount of (extrajudicial) social ostracism along the lines of ISPs not being willing to sell him Internet access based on his past history of abusing such privileges.
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FWIW, the rest of the world considers prison sentences in the US to be absurdly long. This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder.
> This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder. Both of those things are problematic, IMHO. As for US sentences being absurdly long, I attribute that to the privatized (profit-incentivized) prison system here. Abolishing that concept would be a good starting point, I think, because it would eliminate a very large chunk of the humanitarian problems in one fell sw…
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> I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessive for most non-violent crimes. you miss the point. prisons are a massive industry with serious lobbying clout. Putting lots of people in prison for a long time isn't a punishment to the prisoner, it's a gift to the prison system. The "punishment" is just a side effect, and the longer it lasts, the richer the people in power…
I understand there is some truth to that claim, but how real is it? Sentences are delivered by judges. There have been prominent examples of judges bribed by prison systems to deliver harsh sentences, but that doesn't seem to be the norm. Am I naive thinking that most judges deliver the sentence they believe is just, and that if something needs to be reformed, it's their perception of justice and not just the prison…
DDoS with "some" computers?
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There are problably plenty of dictatorships that punish harsher than the US, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find democratic, freedom-loving countries that punish harsher than the US does. Except maybe when it comes to crimes by rich/important people with good connections.
Us has the highest verified incarceration per capita in the world and the largest number of total prisoners. So at least by verified numbers it's not really even close, the US is by far the worst. Are the numbers accurate for China or other oppressive regimes? Who knows and North Korea doesn't release numbers but they're thought to be close to or slightly higher than the US' per capita numbers. https://www.prisonstud…
https://www.statista.com/chart/3848/the-us-murder-rate-compa...