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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

#301

Post by nybble41 »

ddrt wrote: post #228
throwablePie wrote: post #87

> "Caging me for a decade is not rehabilitating. I may be making excuses for myself, though there is a lesson that could have been learned with the same amount of value for justice if the sentence was 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, even 6 years." From the article at: https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-hacker-ghostexodus-severi... I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessiv…

The better question is has it abated the act of these crimes to a significant level? If a 10 year sentence crime is commonplace then that’s a dark mark on the police and judges. If it’s a crime not often committed how can we correlate the punishment to the practice? The incarceration is a punishment for the one who commits the crime, but is also there to set an example. If the example isn’t made then the loop continu…

> also there to set an example

Imposing a disproportionate punishment "to set an example" makes you more dangerous to society than the person you're punishing. I'm not saying that actions which harm others should not result in repercussions, but the punishment must fit the crime for the law to be legitimate. Even if that occasionally means that some people weigh the risk of getting caught and decide that the odds against being punished are low enough to make the risk worthwhile.

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

#302

Post by nybble41 »

Grimm1 wrote: post #229
scarface74 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He hacked central control systems used by utility companies. This could have caused all sorts of disruptions including to traffic lights and hospitals. This was definitely not a "victimless crime".

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

Even if no one died, there were victims: the owners of the hacked devices.

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

#303

Post by bigbob2 »

jlawson wrote: post #260
karlkatzke wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my coworkers met a guy on the bus the other morning who had been imprisoned in the mid 90s and was just released. (Assault charge plus drugs.) He hadn’t seen a smart phone in person yet and was astounded that you could look up bus schedules on it. Besides the tech astonishment and the sheer length of the 25 year prison sentence (that’s tangential), it was a bit inhumane how they treated released prisoners. Thi…

How sure are you that this wasn't a practiced sob story designed to extract money from passerby? I've heard many such stories just like this. Criminal beggars will A/B test and refine their story over years to optimize results.

I would think a "criminal beggar" as you call it could come up with an equally convincing sob story which doesn't involve revealing a "criminal" background. In my anecdotal experiences, random strangers asking for money almost always give the excuse that their church bus full of children broke down 10 blocks away in the bad part of town, etc.

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

#304

Post by jandrese »

seb314 wrote: post #32
tasogare wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SecureBoot.

as far as I remember, Ubuntu works with secureboot, doesn't it? Ubuntu wiki seems to say so too https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot

If you install to the HDD and don't use any binary drivers it works fine. If you're trying to boot from USB you usually have to disable SecureBoot in the BIOS.

I usually disable SecureBoot when I install a machine. The extra protections aren't worth losing the ability to run VirtualBox.

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

#305

Post by jandrese »

3pt14159 wrote: post #290
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.

Prisoners don't vote, politicians don't give a shit about them. 125F cells may even been seen as desirable by people who consider prison as purely for punishment or sequestering undesirables from society.

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

#306

Post by jonny_eh »

fsloth wrote: post #271
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…

All of his hacker ethos feels very superficial to me. I.e. get this or that gizmo under control etc. There does not seem to be a deep curiosity for CS or maths as such, rather a childish joy in opening other peoples locks and taking other peoples hardware under control. That was cool in the 70's when telecoms infrastructure wasn't commoditized. I understand how enticing it is to hack big co telephone networks, for ex…

These days it's more interesting, and justified, to hack into your own hardware, that you legally bought and own.

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

#307

Post by Grimm1 »

nybble41 wrote: post #302
Grimm1 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 reputation and no permanent damage to their systems.

10 years is egregious and heavily punitive. The prosecutor that speculated that he "could of caused harm" and that was what the entire punishment was predicated on. Our legal system is entirely draconian when it comes to computer crimes.

This should have been criminally probation or a few months in jail and a civil suit brought by the client for any actual damages.

I'm not saying there was no wrong doing but you're not going to convince me that the minor damages were worth 10 years of this guys life.

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

#308

Post by fsloth »

jonny_eh wrote: post #306
fsloth wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of his hacker ethos feels very superficial to me. I.e. get this or that gizmo under control etc. There does not seem to be a deep curiosity for CS or maths as such, rather a childish joy in opening other peoples locks and taking other peoples hardware under control. That was cool in the 70's when telecoms infrastructure wasn't commoditized. I understand how enticing it is to hack big co telephone networks, for ex…

These days it's more interesting, and justified, to hack into your own hardware, that you legally bought and own.

Yes. The direct analogue is trying to pick your own lock, versus picking a lock in someone else's property just for kicks.

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

#309

Post by cl3misch »

nihil75 wrote: post #111
indigochill wrote: post #16

>The only solution to making me happy again would seem to download Ubuntu, mount it to a USB thumb drive, and get it installed. Had I known that Windows 10 doesn’t utilize BIOS, but has replaced it with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), which is a secure boot option that validates programs before giving them permission to run, I wouldn’t have wasted two more days of my life trying to install my favorite o…

It's both SecureBoot and UEFI. He's probably preparing the thumbdrive the old-fashion way, jusr dd'ing the iso into it. You need a modern prep tool that's UEFI-compatible for it to boot on new hardware.

Maybe I'm missing something, but (apart from Secure Boot) I used dd to create bootable Linux USBs and booted into UEFI just fine. At least on recent Ubuntu images.

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

#310

Post by mcv »

jlawson wrote: post #264
mcv wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. If you want to reduce crime, it is paramount that convicted criminals become honest citizens. Excluding them from society does not accomplish that. Guidance on how to function normally in society might. Criminal organisations would probably gladly welcome someone with proven criminal experience. If we make it too hard for criminals to rehabilitate, they are very likely to return to crime, because tha…

The other way is to just keep criminals in prison until they age enough that their hormones change and they no longer feel the urge to violence. The good thing about this is that it works very consistently and predictably. If he's in prison, he can't rape, murder, or brutalize anyone else (prison crime notwithstanding). Human males naturally enter their criminal phase around age 16 and exit it around 30-35. The facto…

I still doubt that's going to help if they don't get opportunities to make an honest living. And it might not be necessary if they can rehabilitate sooner than that.
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