Kevin Mitnick has died

The way I read u/ecohen16's telling is that Mitnick first beat apathy and bureaucracy just to have a shot at mitigating a disease, thereby postponed the inevitable.

I've lived it. Late 80s, I had a terminal diagnosis. Lucky me, my doc found a clinical trial, and fought like hell to get my HMO to pay. Justification was for org to use me to learn about emerging treatment (stem cell transplant is current variation).

A few years ago, my buddy got a terminal diagnosis. Apparent chronic sports related injury turned out to be a late stage tumor, which had spread. Prognosis was 3 - 6 months. None of his care providers were interested in escalating, only talking about palliative care and hospice. He did exactly as Mitnick. Managed to get enrolled in a clinical trial using immunotherapy for his precise diagnosis. Timing wise, a few weeks either way and he'd be dead. Dumb luck.

I can give a few more examples. (And 100s of counter examples.)

Do patients beat cancer?

Of course not. Among the survivors I know, disease (like cancer) is part of life and you deal with it. Or not.

But, some times, if we're really stubborn, and have sufficient resources and support and dumb luck, we can do things to live a little bit longer.

> that did not "Fight hard enough"

Sometimes the patient, family, and especially the care providers don't fight hard enough. For all sorts of reasons. Probably because awareness of mortality made humans neurotic and we're all just winging it. Probably because everything is russian dolls of triage.

Any way, it's just a metaphor. Chose the one that works for you.

Just like I refuse to victim blame/shame, I'm not going to judge another person's coping mechanisms.

He was so meticulous is setting up new identities and moving to random places around the country to avoid the authorities. But would then log back into his previously compromised systems in a way that would expose his current geographic location. It always seemed like such a glaring hole in his otherwise well thought out personal opsec. I'm sure the story was more complicated than what appeared in the press at the time, or in the 2600 knock-off zines that were going around at the time, or in his books. It always confused me. I could never figure out if that was an oversight, or he just wasn't aware he was being watched.

I think I share a similar pendulum swinging feelings about km as other folks here, especially as his story unfolded across many different phases of my life: from adulation as a teen, to realizing that he was just another a*hole who would lie to your face to get what they want. Recently it has swung waaay back the other way -- especially as more of our access to customer service for critical aspects of our lives get buried behind obstructionist systems -- to understanding that we always need people who can tear any system apart.

As an addendum...I think the term hacker should be handed to the sys admin that started was instrumental in getting km located by (If my foggy mind remembers correcly) by emailing logs or log stats to himself and noticing that size was shrinking so someone was deleting them -- that blew my mind at the time.

He will be missed.

For instance, part of the tracroute from my house to Google looks like this:

6 be-33112-cs01.doraville.ga.ibone.comcast.net (96.110.43.81) 19.602 ms

7 be-33142-cs04.doraville.ga.ibone.comcast.net (96.110.43.93) 22.738 ms

8 be-302-cr13.56marietta.ga.ibone.comcast.net (96.110.39.49) 23.202 ms

You can see these hostnames are obviously meant to encode some geographic data -- strictly for the convenience of the provider, it doesn't mean anything else -- but you, as the user, cannot tell from these records that these routers are actually where you think they are, based on the host names.

Another issue is the server you're communicating with might take a completely different path to get back to you, and you'd have no real way of knowing that.