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Kevin Mitnick has died

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Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#601
post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro-tip: CFAA only applies if you cross state lines between you and the server. Otherwise, state laws applies and there are/were some states that never passed any 'anti-hacking' laws. Source: experience.

Absolutely not. Any computer connected to the internet, even behind a firewall / NAT / etc. is considered to be involved in interstate or foreign commerce and thus a "protected computer" subject to 18 USC 1030. It's not your actions that make it a protected computer. 1030(e)(2)

Yeah. I’m not a lawyer, I just know what the FBI told me when they picked me up. I was turned over to the regular police and then let go.

I was just a teen at the time, things could have changed.

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not.

"cracker" in that context is used to mean "system cracker" rather than "hacker".

There’s a longer-standing definitions from when Kevin was first called a hacker (and from before he was first put in jail)

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#603
Feel bad for the unborn child that will have to be raised without a father because his parents decided selfishly to conceive him or her due to illness.

Raising a child is more than genetics.

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#604
Pancreatic cancer really sucks. A friend of mine passed away from it a few months ago at the ripe old age of 25. She was first diagnosed with it at 20, beat it, and then nearly three years later it came back at stage 4. Like Kevin she also underwent a few different experimental treatments, the first of which worked remarkably well. (Until it didn't, which is typical of these treatments) A cure or effective treatment feels so close, and I'm sure if one comes soon I'll be having a bittersweet celebration.

I never did get to meet Kevin, but it's clear that I missed out on an amazing person. RIP Mr Mitnick.

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#605
post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the commenters expressing this bullshit sentiment will provide their children with 1% of the education, health, freedom, security, etc that Mitnick will have left for his child. We struggle our whole lives to provide, it looks like he already assured that for his family, even into perpetuity if managed well. It's not like he gave himself cancer on purpose and chose to leave a child with nothing out of spite.…

Please make your substantive points without calling names. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

You're right; I could've said that without calling it "a BS sentiment".

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#606

Mitnick was a hacker hero of mine in my youth. I think I’ve understood his role as jester prior to conviction less as I’ve grown older, but there’s something about the boyhood charm of being so divorced from the potential consequences of one’s actions that is almost unique. Mitnick had so many stories that entranced the people around him. I heard one second hand of Mitnick dealing with a bank who had early voice veri…

As a kid I ate this stuff up. In the eighth grade, I defaced my middle school website. The IT person easily figured out it was me and then tricked me into thinking I would be expelled within days. She pulled me out of class, told me such in the hallway, let me return to class where I held in tears until the end of the day. Nothing happened and the school year ended a few weeks later. Towards the end of the summer I r…

> The IT person easily figured out it was me and then tricked me into thinking I would be expelled within days.

Similar. I wrote a program to emulate a the logon text on a PDP-11 terminal in high-school in the mid-80s and steal a bunch of student passwords. Didn't do anything with them. They were like "trophies."

Nevertheless, the computer teacher found out and had mercy on me. He gave me a project to work on to help him compile stats on a student survey. He was a nice guy.

edit for clarity.

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#607

Mitnick was a hacker hero of mine in my youth. I think I’ve understood his role as jester prior to conviction less as I’ve grown older, but there’s something about the boyhood charm of being so divorced from the potential consequences of one’s actions that is almost unique. Mitnick had so many stories that entranced the people around him. I heard one second hand of Mitnick dealing with a bank who had early voice veri…

He has the CEO’s number and successfully calls him, and through some miracle gets through directly to ask this trivial question — as opposed to getting the number from the assistant who answers his phone - sure ok but then under what pretense does he then ask him to repeat his phone number? “Please repeat the phone number I just dialed.” The phone number contains all the digits needed to recreate the bank account num…

Nonsense like "silver platter", almost certainly embellished (unless a "Barnum" or "Wonka" or some shiite was running the bank). The fundamentals, totally believable.

It's incredibly easy (still) to do certain kinds of "social engineering". Terms like "psychological sleight-of-hand" can sometimes make it a little clearer how humans just have blind spots - ways our perception works and doesn't. And, people who are used to being VERY "in control", intelligent / experienced (compared to others in room), etc., can sometimes be the easiest to manipulate in certain ways.

But, really, it boils down, sometimes, to something as simple as "how long can you keep a person talking?" Mitnick was probably in a good position to do these sorts of things - assuming the story is from after he "turned White Hat". And, in this case, the even simpler deal with the numbers is something like "oh, shoot, I had a misprint on old cards, did I give you the right one? What's the phone number on it?" Drop something abruptly like that, at some random point in a conversation, most people wouldn't think twice... Even if their current context involves a heavy dose of thinking about voices and numbers. They might easily enough realize in the morning, but, too late, by then. Further, getting bank account numbers is not necessarily hard either. Could even be as simple as "dumpster diving", back then. Did the CEO always shred every single document, with a "secure shredder" (as much as that's possible) when home? Or maybe burn everything, always?

And, in any case, you're even mixing up aspects of the story. The phone number isn't the bank account digits, it's just all the numbers from 0 through 9 (you can even get one twice, for a 10-digit [w/ area code] number).

I propose that your sureness in dismissing this story, misapprehensions about it, etc., make you an unwittingly "good mark."

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the commenters expressing this bullshit sentiment will provide their children with 1% of the education, health, freedom, security, etc that Mitnick will have left for his child. We struggle our whole lives to provide, it looks like he already assured that for his family, even into perpetuity if managed well. It's not like he gave himself cancer on purpose and chose to leave a child with nothing out of spite.…

He decided to have a child knowing that an average man had decent chance he would be dead before they entered college. Being in remission from one of the more deadly and rapid forms of cancer meant he knew or should have known that the child would likely grow up without a father. That does not seem like support to me. And Warren Buffet will tell you that you want to give your kids enough money so that they can do any…

I'm not trying to attack you, just the idea. (I saw the same sentiment from several commenters) I'm just saying I strongly disagree with publicly questioning a dead man's decision to have kids when the kid still has at least one parent and financial stability. There's plenty worse you can do and not a lot better. If he'd lived to 80 would it have been "perfect"? We can't all achieve perfection.

It's virtually always impossible for almost everyone to be able to simultaneously 1] have kids while you're still young 2] wait until you have "enough" money.

Warren Buffet's quote doesn't make sense, because both "anything" and "nothing" are relative. You can "do nothing" with extraordinarily little money. You can also not be able to do "anything" even with billions of dollars (start an asteroid mining company?).

If you give your kids the moon, you just have to make sure they still have motivation and character, it's still possible. Not everyone who inherits money is a layabout.

I can stop now though, I think we just fundamentally have different opinions on this and probably won't budge much.

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#609

Mitnick was a hacker hero of mine in my youth. I think I’ve understood his role as jester prior to conviction less as I’ve grown older, but there’s something about the boyhood charm of being so divorced from the potential consequences of one’s actions that is almost unique. Mitnick had so many stories that entranced the people around him. I heard one second hand of Mitnick dealing with a bank who had early voice veri…

> Mitnick was a hacker hero of mine in my youth. I think I’ve understood his role as jester prior to conviction less as I’ve grown older, but there’s something about the boyhood charm of being so divorced from the potential consequences of one’s actions that is almost unique.

Yeah, I remember watching "Freedom Downtime" as a teenager and thinking how ludicrous it was that he was sentenced to prison for computer hacking, but now that I think about it as an adult of course he should have been. Sure solitary confinment, the specifics of his sentence, etc. may have been extreme and I'd like to think that the court system has progressed in their knowledge of computer security since then, but what he did was still a breach of corporate security. He knew at the time it was illegal, and he just thought he was too smart to get caught.

That idea that we had at the time that it was a "victimless crime" or something was very immature.

Re: Kevin Mitnick has died

#610
post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please make your substantive points without calling names. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

You're right; I could've said that without calling it "a BS sentiment".

Thanks for the kind reply. We got emails saying I was off base on this one so clearly it wasn't an obvious call!
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