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Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#271

Post by dang »

anigbrowl wrote: post #255
dang wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent all day responding to the replies here, and then detaching them in order to save space at the top of the thread. But I just had a better idea. This is a stub comment so we have a single root to collapse the replies. This way (1) replies can stay close to their parent (the top comment) without flooding the screen with offtopicness; and (2) we can all re-experience the timeless truth of https://en.wikipedia.org…

If we end up with yet-another interchangeable flamewar about $BigTopic, that will only confirm that the flaggers were right ' No it won't. That would only be true if the flaggers were disinterested judges who never comment. You're projecting your desire for a good civil discussion onto them without considering the possibility that any of them could be flagging or commenting in bad faith, ie with a view to shaping the…

Edit: oh wait, I think I understand you now. When I said "that will only confirm that the flaggers were right", I did not mean "that will only confirm that the flaggers all had the right motive". (Obviously not all of them do, as I've explained below.) Rather, I meant "that will only confirm that this submission wasn't a good one for HN, and therefore it was good that it got flagged (even though not every flag was rightly motivated)".

-- original comment --

> That would only be true if the flaggers were disinterested judges who never comment.

I don't follow this argument. Can you rephrase it?

Flagging flamewars is an appropriate use of flagging on HN. If this thread turns into the kind of flamewar we normally want to see flagged, that's evidence in favor of the users who made that call in the first place.

> the possibility that any of them could be flagging or commenting in bad faith

Yes. I've made this point many times, including in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092): there's usually two kinds of flaggers: users who want to suppress a story because they don't like it (e.g. politically), and users who feel like the story isn't in keeping with the site guidelines and are worried about protecting HN. I assume by "bad faith" you mean the first kind.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#272

Post by chmorgan_ »

Why the security concerns now and not with the thousands of employees with potentially similar access? NOW it's a concern because the idea occurred to people that who might have access to data is important? Imo the faux outrage is so far beyond rational that it turns people away. Let's have a reasonable discussion about data access and controls, and whether they are being followed, rather than some reflexive response based on political points of view.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#273

Post by aduffy »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #109
fabian2k wrote: post #47

Ignoring the horrifying political parts, I think one aspect here about data access that is inherently worrying is that it seems like all usual controls were bypassed and the DOGE people had very low level access to systems. So there are probably copies of sensitive data now in their possession, and nobody knows exactly what was copied and where it is stored. This kind of access would be dangerous even in the hands of…

[flagged]

> He should have a future as a productive member of society, perhaps even one of its titans

...did we read the same article? It sounds like he was a failed script kiddie that registered some vanity domains, had exactly one job that he was promptly fired form.

Where are you setting the bar for "deserves to be a titan of society"?

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#274

Post by chmorgan_ »

fabian2k wrote: post #47

Ignoring the horrifying political parts, I think one aspect here about data access that is inherently worrying is that it seems like all usual controls were bypassed and the DOGE people had very low level access to systems. So there are probably copies of sensitive data now in their possession, and nobody knows exactly what was copied and where it is stored. This kind of access would be dangerous even in the hands of…

"it seems like all usual controls were bypassed". Apparently it isn't known. Let's answer this question and be impartial about it. A story about China having access to Treasury Department workstations landed a few months ago. There may be a LOT of bad practices in place. We should be pushing to improve them if so.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#275

Post by xyst »

Why this unvetted person(s) has been allowed to even touch or access critical systems speaks volumes about the state of US government.

We are at the neoliberal endgame. Billionaires and multibillion dollar corporations received massive tax cuts during the first term, and this will likely continue under the second term. He’s going all out for this billionaire donors, buddies, and of course himself. We have a kleptocracy at the federal level with the intent to dismantle it as much as possible.

End game here is federal/people control end, and “network states” (balaji) model with corporations acting as governance over land, regions, and law.

Thiel and the rest of the billionaire class are the parasites that need to be purged. Whether we will recover after 4 years remains to be seen.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#277

Post by pityJuke »

tonymet wrote: post #242
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #206

Worth noting that some of the most well-known cybersecurity experts today are former cyber criminals. It may be worth investigating his past, but a person's past is often used to attack their character when there is no other argument to make. If we were all judged solely on our past, we'd all be perpetually guilty.

That’s true. And in most other posts, the HN community is predominantly supportive of cyber criminals redeeming themselves as security experts. It’s informative that this case receives the opposite reception.

My mental comparison is someone like Marcus Hutchins [0]. He committed some relatively low-level cybercrime, redeemed himself, and served a punishment for it.

That's someone I'm absolutely OK with rejoining the real world.

But the critical thing is the community Coristine was a part of. It is legitimately classified as a child exploitation ring, and as a terror ring. That requires a lot more eyebrows before one even begins consider him rehabilitated.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Hutchins

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#278

Post by sekai »

shitter wrote: post #64
laidoffamazon wrote: post #4

This is uh, a more than a little disturbing. Is JD Vance going to say that he deserves grace too? More context [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/764_(organization)

For reference: JD Vance said that another DOGE staffer, who resigned after it was reported that he'd publicly come out in favor of racism, eugenics, and normalizing hate against Indian people on Twitter, should be rehired because it was just "stupid social media activity".

> For reference: JD Vance said that another DOGE staffer, who resigned after it was reported that he'd publicly come out in favor of racism, eugenics, and normalizing hate against Indian people on Twitter, should be rehired because it was just "stupid social media activity".

To add to this, JD Vance's wife is Indian.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#279

Post by timewizard »

9283409232 wrote: post #106

The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?

The question no one is asking is why does the federal government have so much "sensitive data" on it's citizens in the first place?

When you build a machine like this you should ask, "would I be comfortable if my political opposites had control of this?" If the answer is no, then you DON'T BUILD IT.

Meanwhile someone goes in there to try to break up this 30 year pile of technical debt and it's all lawsuits and handwaving theatrics to try to stop it.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#280

Post by mmastrac »

stainablesteel wrote: post #266
mmastrac wrote: post #236

The reason security clearances are so important, and why people are so upset about randos going through so much sensitive government information, is that things like this can be used by adversaries to lean on these employees in the future. One of these kids might have worse skeletons in their closet. Given how well-known their names are, adversaries of the USA are likely combing through their own intelligence archive…

[flagged]

Is there a real source to this? I'll humour you and try to find one. The rabbit hole leads down sketchy sites to sketchy tweets, to someone who eventually sources it as "vBulletin, Biden basement" and links to a Musk tweet with no further info. [0]

Smells a lot like "flooding the zone with shit", but I don't think anyone is pro-corruption.

Assuming this is true, and it seems like misinfo, I hope that the right has a plan to remove all the corruption they are current in the process of installing -- obviously starting at the top with a leader that launched a memecoin to fleece true believers (also quoted as saying "I love the undereducated").

[0] https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1888581827285148067

EDIT: it's even sketchier. Following the source leads to this very likely biased [1] page that estimates her net worth as approx 10M-30M based on... what? It doesn't even match the sums of the document below.

She clearly made 1M-5M as an advisor for Chamath's Social Capital, and has some decent savings before that (on the order of a few million) but this estimation of net worth and faux-outrage is laughably transparent.

[1] https://www.insidebidensbasement.org/appointees/samantha-pow...

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