I am among the people who met him at a conference (CCC 2006 for me) and at the after party. I remember he was super friendly. I'm very sad to hear that news. RIP
Dan Kaminsky has died
191–200 of 216 posts
Re: Dan Kaminsky has died
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just wanted to say I agree with you and I don’t know why you were downvoted. This seems to me a well-intentioned and quite reasonable request.
You are simply upvoting to say “this submission is important”.
Are you telling me why I upvoted, or (by implication) why his original post was downvoted by others? Because yes, I’d argue it was important. (I’m sorry if I’m not familiar with the rules here quite yet.)
Re: Dan Kaminsky has died
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless he was killed by a bear and that bear is still on the loose, or something like that, then I think we can probably wait a few days for his family to be informed. There are a lot of people here making very high-minded comments about how it’s deeply important to the sum total of human knowledge that we learn the cause of his death so that we can reflect on our mortality, and so on and so forth. I can’t help but f…
> It’s morbid curiosity I guess it's the caveman in all of us who really needs to know what happened to his buddy so that he can avoid it. And I guess those without this curiosity in their DNA died out rather soon... So it might not be insincerity but genetics.
This is certainly an inventive argument! But I would argue in response that your odds of being killed by whatever killed Dan Kaminsky, in the next 24 hours or so, purely because you weren't told soon enough how he died, are rather low!
May you live until tomorrow and may your genes prosper to fight another day ;)
Re: Dan Kaminsky has died
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don’t need to do anything. People aren’t morally entitled to demand information from a grieving family just because it would sate their curiosity.
Which is precisely what I said: "I don't mind them not giving facts." I demanded nothing. I simply pointed out that lack of information will always produce curiosity. If they don't want people curious, they have it in their power to stop them from being curious. Or they can be silent and leave people curious. Perhaps I've missed the actual point of their request. As I think about it further, I wonder if they are simp…
Oh I see, you mean you were just making the descriptive statement that people will speculate if they are not given information? I took you to be saying that they (the family or whoever has the right to give out that information) were actually obliged to tell people.
In that case, sorry about the misunderstanding. I agree with you in that descriptive sense, that people will speculate.
I also think they ought not to speculate or demand information, and that it's quite l̶u̶r̶i̶d̶ [edit: morbid, rather] of them to do so. I understand the psychology behind it, because generally information is transparent and accessible by default these days. And generally that's a good thing. But people may not want to share certain information when grieving a loved one's death - and when they may still need to tell people who were close to him, rather than letting them find out from a trending Twitter topic. They may even never want the manner of their loved one's death to be an open fact on Wikipedia, like for instance David Carradine's family might have wished. I'm sympathetic in either case. I think we internet people as a whole really ought to be sympathetic too. Some of the comments on this thread are appalling in their sense of entitlement to know this information.
Re: Dan Kaminsky has died
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parent comment was written early into my reaction to the news and I think I was a bit histrionic in my commentary about the security industry. People are helping, and that's commendable. It can be difficult when it appears that we are building and deploying so much more software than we are maintaining and securing. I don't know exactly what mindset will win out - either an assumption that information always leak…
Maybe you weren't histrionic enough? I couldn't name one class of software or hardware, nor one layer in the 'stack' that hasn't been compromised. The only conclusion is to admit failure (as an industry) and rebuild everything from the ground up.
We always have to do compromises designing these things. Either we don't have the talents, we disagree on the methods, we ignored a chunk of the problem, we don't have the ressources, we deliberately degrade to please the senders of a letter-we-cant-talk-about... I prefer the approach where we solve problems incrementaly as we discover them because in the long term it addresses all of those shortcomings eventually.
Re: Dan Kaminsky has died
#196I remember attending Dan Kaminsky’s talk at DEFCON 12 and being blown away by it. Three years later, I went on the original “Hackers on a Plane” trip and ended up seated next to Dan on one of the flights. We quickly became friends. His mentorship over the years had an enormous impact on me. We both went back to CCCamp in 2011. I excitedly told him about a reverse DNS scanning project (0.0.0.0/0 in 12 hours on AWS for…
> It’ll be okay.
That's just terrific. Thank you for sharing.
I'm sorry for your loss.
Re: Dan Kaminsky has died
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
or you could respect the families wishes, instead of prioritizing your curiosity.
Families choose to hide AND lie about suicide and addiction deaths. I know from multiple first hand experiences. THIS IS BAD FOR EVERYONE! Yes, it's embarrassing for the family (though it shouldn't be) because they feel like they can do more. But, it the prevalence needs to made public so we treat these things like the crisis they are! And worse, in this case, people are even drawing ties to the vaccine!?!? What an i…
This is a complete non sequitur as a reply. The commenter you're replying to asked people to prioritise his grieving family's wishes over your own curiosity. He/she was absolutely right to do so.
Your reply talks about other families who lie and state a false cause of death, which would be morally wrong but in this case is completely irrelevant because that's not what's happened.
The one bit of your comment which is relevant, I think, is wrong: namely "the prevalence needs to made public so we treat these things like the crisis they are". We have anonymised statistics on suicide and overdose deaths. That is not the same as demanding a specific person's cause of death - and the sense of generalised academic interest you're alluding to is plainly not the reason for which people are curious about how he died. I wish we would get a grip on ourselves here, because it must be upsetting for anyone who knew him and is reading these comments, as surely some of those people are.
Edit: I died of a heroin overdose, briefly, before I was resuscitated. If I'd died permanently, my family may well have wanted to keep that information off the record permanently (easier in my case of course because I'm not a public figure). It's easy to think in the age of Wikipedia that all information is in the public domain and belongs to everyone. It's not, and it doesn't.
Re: Dan Kaminsky has died
#198Re: Dan Kaminsky has died
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tweet specifically asks us not to speculate and the parent article makes mention that the conditions of his death have not been made public. I’m not sure how others feel, personally I am conflicted: respect the death of an icon and not pry (even if others are speaking on his behalf) or satisfy my curiosity. I’m going to go with the former, for now.
Asking for facts is not speculating, it might be the opposite. I'd like to know what happened to my friend, who was himself always in pursuit of the truth.
https://twitter.com/dakami/status/1171643896750755840 - he was diabetic, not that it was a cause but it is a complication in covid.
Re: Dan Kaminsky has died
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was. Well, his Defcon version is an identical talk given the same week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pp72gUYx00
Thanks for the link; would you like to submit that as a separate HN submission as well, including [video] in the title? (I think that'd be within the site guidelines[1]) Might post it myself if you'd prefer not to; I figured it might make sense for you to claim the credit/karma. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Feel free.