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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1403 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet

Fuck Marcus Hutchins, fuck the "hacker community" and fuck wired.

The reason the Internet is so fucked up is the people who fuck around with it all day have a universal code of relative morality - "I don't care what society thinks a crime is, I'm drawing the line at bank fraud... and then I'm going to get paid to help criminals commit bank fraud." And then, of course, when you accidentally fix something, you get to claim total credit for it because yay you "saved the internet."

If this choad had worked at Ace True Value and someone said "hey, kid, I'll give you five thousand dollars to copy this 'do not duplicate' key" there is no one anywhere ever who would say “We are all morally complex people." Little shit broke the law again and again and again and again and again, for money, for prestige, for points, and only stopped doing it when he found someone willing to give him more money.

    Then he followed up with a more earnest tweet, intended to dispel an easy story to tell about his past immorality: that the sort of whitehat work he'd done was only possible because of his blackhat education

My father ran honeypots for the DOE. "nuclear secrets" behind layers of false firewalls. I've followed this stuff from the dudes-in-black-SUVs side of things for decades and look into my eyes: it's total bullshit. What you've got is the ruthless praying on the weak and then when they accidentally do something moral they go "see look all that shady shit I did for the past ten years ONLY served to prepare me to save the day!"

    I point out that perhaps this, now, is that confession. That he's cataloged his deeds and misdeeds over more than 12 hours of interviews; when the results are published—and people reach the end of this article—that account will finally be out in the open.

Yeah the lesson is you can fuck people over for years but if you accidentally make things better everyone is too stupid to understand your motivations and you can fucking get away with it.



user-inactivated  ·  1403 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.
kleinbl00  ·  1403 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Aaron Schwartz died is what happened. While he was alive no one had anything nice to say about him. The Reddit folx went out of their way to disavow him, disavow that he had anything to do with Reddit, disavow that he had ever done anything of any substance. Soon as he was dead he was everyone's hero, the fuckin' Internet's Own Boy (gag).

The problem is, nobody considers anything computer in the terms of things that are noncomputer. It's this null space in our collective conscious where we are both stupidly lax (you wouldn't download a car!) and stupidly strict (Jammie Thomas and her $1.9m penalty for 24 songs).

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