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

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

#281

Post by brassattax »

mcv wrote: post #153
wpietri wrote: post #65

This is a decent account of how much has changed, and he conveys the sense of alienation well. But what strikes me is that he talks about the whole thing like something that unaccountably happened to him. He didn't install botnets; he was arrested for installing botnets. Botnets that he somehow sees as part of the "true spirit of hacking", from the long-lost innocent age of 2009, when pure curiosity was the only moti…

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

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

#282

Post by Grimm1 »

scarface74 wrote: post #250
Grimm1 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"could have" but it didn't so it was victimless.

So it’s okay if someone shot someone and missed a vital organ where he could have killed someone but didn’t?

That analogy doesn't fit here at all. In your case they intend to cause harm to someone at the start by literally shooting someone. You are presupposing intent and harm of a person and certainly there were neither in the hacker's case.

A better analogy, that maybe is more fitting, is you blow through a stoplight and kill someone.

That's definitely negligence but there was no intent to hurt someone, the intent was to speed to a destination.

The intent here was to use computing resources to launch an attack on another hacker group, nothing that would have intently harmed a person at the clinic. They could have accidentally hurt someone though.

And if they did it would be recklessness, certainly negligent , but their intent was not to kill someone.

And this is why we in the US have different laws for different situations that take into account negligence, intent, premeditation etc.

None of them are alright but the state of mind the person committing the crime was in makes it varying degrees of bad.

Someone who accidentally kills someone and someone who plots a cold blooded murder have both taken a life but, the one who killed on accident isn't as heinous or maybe as morally reprehensible.

Life is mostly varying shades of grey and not strictly good or bad and that's why society has complex laws to dole out different punishments depending on situation.

And finally, the hacker never harmed anyone in this case arguing on what they might have done is an abuse of the system imo. I might get up right now and burn my neighborhood to the ground, but you cant condemn me of it before I actually do it. (I won't)

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

#283

Post by VLM »

wpietri wrote: post #65

This is a decent account of how much has changed, and he conveys the sense of alienation well. But what strikes me is that he talks about the whole thing like something that unaccountably happened to him. He didn't install botnets; he was arrested for installing botnets. Botnets that he somehow sees as part of the "true spirit of hacking", from the long-lost innocent age of 2009, when pure curiosity was the only moti…

What you're convicted for in a plea deal is usually a step or two down from what you actually did.

So the prosecutor office can claim a large number of successful cases in exchange for lighter punishment.

There's different stories for what you actually did, what they think you did, what they can prove you did, what they think they can convince a non-technical jury of what you did, what the DOJ/FBI traditionally self congratulatory press release claims, what the plea bargain deal was for. Usually those multiple stories are only minimally tangentially related at best.

The somewhat overly self congratulatory DOJ US attorney press release from May 14, 2010 claims the guy got himself hired as a security guard to gain partial physical access, then did all this Hollywood style breaking and entering into secured locations he wasn't authorized to be in, removed the anti-virus from at least 14 machines, downloaded a password cracker from the internet, made an "instructional" video of the process. They couldn't prove he did anything TO the HVAC controller or nurses confidential access station, so the press release is full of "could have" and "would have" but kinda imply he sorta did but nothing bad happened and they can't prove nothing so...

Now in contrast to the above, his plea deal was exactly two counts of transmitting a malicious code. No breaking and entering, the other dozen machines seem to have disappeared, nothing illegal was accessed or modified, nobody seems concerned he cracked the passwords solely what he did afterwards on two of the machines, etc.

I can see how his description of what he did vs what he did time for vs what he actually did seems a bit dissociated.

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

#284

Post by scarface74 »

Grimm1 wrote: post #282
scarface74 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it’s okay if someone shot someone and missed a vital organ where he could have killed someone but didn’t?

That analogy doesn't fit here at all. In your case they intend to cause harm to someone at the start by literally shooting someone. You are presupposing intent and harm of a person and certainly there were neither in the hacker's case. A better analogy, that maybe is more fitting, is you blow through a stoplight and kill someone. That's definitely negligence but there was no intent to hurt someone, the intent was to…

You can easily commit a traffic violation either out not paying attention or just thinking what’s the harm.

No one mindlessly hacks a utility control system.

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

#285

Post by watwut »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #78
annoyingnoob wrote: post #56

I recently had someone in a restroom ask me how to flush the toilet. The toilets had IR sensors and flushed automatically. This person had been in prison for many years and had never seen that before. I think part of the social reform that people are protesting for recently needs to extend to people in prison. Our system does nothing to rehabilitate people or to prepare them to re-enter society. We need to treat pris…

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.

> in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder.

That very much depends on what kind of murder.

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

#286

Post by VLM »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #78
annoyingnoob wrote: post #56

I recently had someone in a restroom ask me how to flush the toilet. The toilets had IR sensors and flushed automatically. This person had been in prison for many years and had never seen that before. I think part of the social reform that people are protesting for recently needs to extend to people in prison. Our system does nothing to rehabilitate people or to prepare them to re-enter society. We need to treat pris…

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.

Plea bargaining, for better or worse, is a uniquely American invention the rest of the world does not share.

Committing naughtiness level 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 crime in "EU" and in "USA" and you'll get a punishment of X years for a level 5 conviction in EU. In the USA you'll get a plea bargain offer of X years for agreeing to be guilty of a level 3 crime, or you can take your chances at a trial for a level 5 crime (with admittedly draconian punishment). About 90% to 98% of criminals take the plea.

The widely advertised injustice is that on paper, a level 5 crime in EU has the same punishment as a level 3 crime in the USA so the USA is draconian.

The actual real world injustice is if you're innocent and demand your right to trial, we give level 8 punishments for level 5 crimes to encourage guilty pleas and "save money". Because we value saving money over justice and fairness. Or maybe we take a weird statistical approach to injustice; yeah it would suck to do time for a level 5 crime but a level 1 punishment might not be worth the 10% odds of success.

This has a weird and horrible interaction with mandatory minimum sentences. Without mandatory mins, "yeah he probably didn't do it but he's pleading out to a lessor charge" can result in a very fair punishment like mere probation. But with mandatory mins you have to throw the guy in the slammer for decades or let him walk and thats kinda messy. OR being messy, does it encourage higher levels of care and research?

If you commit involuntary manslaughter in Germany, like in a fight in a bar off an army base like a case I know of (I'm not even tangentially involved in other than being in the Army at the same time), yeah, you'll get like 3 years at most. And if you get convicted of manslaughter in the USA you'll get like 8 or so years. That seems terrible.

The difference is you get convicted of manslaughter in the USA by doing actual first degree intentional homicide and its plea'd down to involuntary manslaughter. In Germany the laws are different but vaguely comparable to first degree would get you 15 years minimum, which is actually more draconian than the punishment you'd likely get in the USA due to overcrowding.

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

#287

Post by watwut »

devalgo wrote: post #180
mcv wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And then you have countries that execute much higher amount of people, cut their hands or whip them. Incarceration rates are not the only thing in play.

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

#288

Post by Grimm1 »

scarface74 wrote: post #284
Grimm1 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That analogy doesn't fit here at all. In your case they intend to cause harm to someone at the start by literally shooting someone. You are presupposing intent and harm of a person and certainly there were neither in the hacker's case. A better analogy, that maybe is more fitting, is you blow through a stoplight and kill someone. That's definitely negligence but there was no intent to hurt someone, the intent was to…

You can easily commit a traffic violation either out not paying attention or just thinking what’s the harm. No one mindlessly hacks a utility control system.

I'm going to believe you are willfully missing the point here and leave you to your own devices.

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

#289

Post by pdonis »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #232
risyachka wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know what will happen in the future. Prison time at least ensures this won't happen for multiple years, and gives you a chance to think it over. If medical systems he hacked could have hurt people then this is basically conscious intention to hurt others, and it doesn't matter that he didn't. So in this particular case its really hard to stand on his side. If we were talking about some credit card scam - tha…

I think you're missing the point of the conversation. I'm not excusing or justifying what he did at all. The point of this is, other than our sense of justice and desire to punish someone for doing something bad, what is prison supposed to achieve? I'd like prison to achieve the kind of justice that yes, does provide some sense of justice to victims, but aims to reform criminals and reduce crime. Now, independent of…

> other than our sense of justice and desire to punish someone for doing something bad, what is prison supposed to achieve?

To keep a person from doing something harmful again when we don't know any other way to make them not do it and we aren't willing to risk more harm.

Sure, if we could magically change the person so they would see what they did before as bad and never do it again, we wouldn't have to keep them in prison. But we don't have any way of doing that. What techniques we do have for "rehabilitating" people are simply not very reliable, so there's a limit to how much we are willing to depend on them as an alternative to incarceration.

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

#290

Post by 3pt14159 »

jaybeeayyy wrote: post #195

> That summer the temperature inside my cell reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit. I hope people understand common this is in jails and prisons around the US. The prison I worked at was the same way. We were told to lie about the temperatures in the pods because the thermometers were broken but the common areas would reach up to 100 degrees. Hell, even the control rooms would get 115+ because they wouldn't fix our air cond…

People should go to prison for covering things like this up. 125F / 50C is absolutely fucking ridiculous.
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