Live data from Hacker News

Elite Hacker Barnaby Jack 'overdosed on drugs'

bbc.co.uk

51–57 of 57 posts

Re: Elite Hacker Barnaby Jack 'overdosed on drugs'

#51
post #10

Having your (accidental, maybe stupid, very unfortunate) death picked apart like this has been, in front of lots of people who knew you, must be really bad. (well, I mean, you're dead, but knowing that this kind of thing might happen to you sucks while you're alive)

It can't be nice for the family.

It does remind me to leave a "i am dead" package with deletion instructions for some things and passwords for other things. A list of accounts that need to be shutdown or that people might want to download stuff from.

Re: Elite Hacker Barnaby Jack 'overdosed on drugs'

#52
post #49

Don't know if he travels a lot, but that's generally when people get overdoses. So much tolerance is psychological - a person readies their drugs with the same ritual in the same room - that their body doesn't have the same tolerance when it's taken another way. I think foul play

Tolerance isn't psychological. People may be using drugs of unknown strength or may be preparing them in different ways but they don't have heart attacks from psychological tolerance. I agree that suspicion of foul play is premature. Hope he gets a good autopsy.

> Tolerance isn't psychological.

Are you just speculating?

I haven't really studied psychology but have an interest in it. My understanding is that in a familiar setting the body starts compensating before the drugs are ingested.

From http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1384078

> These rituals produced drug-opposite physiological responses which resulted in an attenuation of the effects of the drug. Thus, tolerance was observed when the subjects injected the opiate, but not when the same dose was received by un-signaled intravenous infusion. These results are consistent with a conditioning explanation for the observed drug tolerance.

Re: Elite Hacker Barnaby Jack 'overdosed on drugs'

#53
post #51
post #10

Having your (accidental, maybe stupid, very unfortunate) death picked apart like this has been, in front of lots of people who knew you, must be really bad. (well, I mean, you're dead, but knowing that this kind of thing might happen to you sucks while you're alive)

It can't be nice for the family. It does remind me to leave a "i am dead" package with deletion instructions for some things and passwords for other things. A list of accounts that need to be shutdown or that people might want to download stuff from.

Back when I was much more likely to end up kidnapped or in a gun battle/IED and dead, I had all that stuff set up automatically (much easier since it was all on my own systems). (and went so far as to take down all web content beforehand, just to buy myself a few more hours after being kidnapped for JSOC pipe-hitting services to arrive). When I upgraded, I didn't transition it to the new systems.

It's a bit harder with web services to do it automatically, as they end up breaking the login process, adding 2fa, etc. frequently enough that unless you test the whole system frequently, it probably wouldn't actually work. I guess 99% of the value is from mail, twitter, and facebook, though.

Re: Elite Hacker Barnaby Jack 'overdosed on drugs'

#54
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't he have been surreptitiously poisoned? Put even a small dose of heroin in his drink and he's not going to be putting up much resistance.

Hanlon's Razor applies: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. The combination of drugs is not new: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese_(drug)

I like this one as a counter:

“The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

-- Bertrand Russell

Re: Elite Hacker Barnaby Jack 'overdosed on drugs'

#55

His physical symptoms indicated an accidental overdose of heroin, cocaine, and prescription drugs. The report said Mr Jack's girlfriend had found him lying in bed unresponsive, with "multiple bottles of beer and champagne in the garbage can". Mr Jack's death occurred shortly before he was due to demonstrate how heart implants could be hacked at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. This is an awful tragedy,…

Not saying that there was foul play involved, but don't you think that if a "professional" was hired to kill him, he'd be more than aware of the various things left in the crime scene and on the body that could point to signs of foul play? Also, this reminds me of an episode of House of Cards.

According to the coroner's report [1], both his girlfriend and his friend told the police he had a history if opiate and cocaine use.

[1] http://cdn2.sbnation.com/assets/3803095/barnaby_jack_autopsy...

Re: Elite Hacker Barnaby Jack 'overdosed on drugs'

#56
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't he have been surreptitiously poisoned? Put even a small dose of heroin in his drink and he's not going to be putting up much resistance.

Hanlon's Razor applies: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. The combination of drugs is not new: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese_(drug)

What are you talking about? Cheese is not a drug. As a heroin user, I can tell you that the APAP is only mixed in as to make black tar heroin snortable, as black tar is the only kind of heroin commonly found outside of the east coast.

Moreover, APAP is not mentioned in the article at all.

Re: Elite Hacker Barnaby Jack 'overdosed on drugs'

#57
post #4

Heroine, cocaine _and_ a cocktail of other drugs? And the guy is a top notch hacker about to embarrass some pretty powerful conglomerates? Sorry but I don't care how many bottles of champagne were in the room trash bin. This has MURDER written all over. For the curious, here is an interesting story which might, or might not, be relevant: http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/suspicious_deaths_scie...

You obviously haven't done drugs or been around drug users before.

The only people who think this is murder are clueless.

Post reply on HN