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It may seem like I was doing something pretty obvious: preaching to the choir. But it takes intention, effort, skill and at least some passion or anger drive mo

It may seem like I was doing something pretty obvious: preaching to the choir. But it takes intention, effort, skill and at least some passion or anger drive motivation to follow-through on something like this. It's worth saying out loud that it's an act of heroism.

sillysaurus3 10y ago
Praising this isn't necessarily a good idea. I'm the last to say something like that, but the CFAA is legitimately terrifying. To see how little tolerance people have for hackers, look at the Steubenville incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/51ot8u/activist_who_helped_expose_steubenville_rape_of_a/d7ebmwe https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/51ot8u/act... When you do something like this, a mistake -- even a minor one -- can turn you from a heroic vigilante into the hunted. The point of an indictment is to indict you, but people generally talk about accusations as if they're fact. That would give me pause before executing a plan like this, no matter how moral. For example, ta_the_gray didn't use Tor, or else their comment would be marked dead. That means they're putting a lot of faith into HN to conceal their IP address. Hopefully they used Tor -> VPN -> HN, but even then, how did they pay for the VPN? Stuff like this takes a lot of training and preparation to pull off flawlessly. Of course, if you live outside of America, your situation may be different.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  Tor->free VPN is pretty easy to set up.
- marmot777 10y ago
  I'm in the U.S. and I've never been a hero of any sort, just to clear the air on that. :-) This is my last post of the night so I don't have to time right now to read all that you mentioned and maybe it's not necessary. You're saying that making a mistake going after a cracker or scammer or other douche bag of this sort can easily backfire on you if you make a mistake? The conclusion you make then is don't do it? I'm not even disagreeing if this what you're saying. If it's truly not so much heroism as I claimed but in fact reckless stupidity then I'll concede the match on this point.

sillysaurus3 10y ago

Praising this isn't necessarily a good idea. I'm the last to say something like that, but the CFAA is legitimately terrifying. To see how little tolerance people have for hackers, look at the Steubenville incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/51ot8u/activist_who_helped_expose_steubenville_rape_of_a/d7ebmwe https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/51ot8u/act... When you do something like this, a mistake -- even a minor one -- can turn you from a heroic vigilante into the hunted. The point of an indictment is to indict you, but people generally talk about accusations as if they're fact. That would give me pause before executing a plan like this, no matter how moral. For example, ta_the_gray didn't use Tor, or else their comment would be marked dead. That means they're putting a lot of faith into HN to conceal their IP address. Hopefully they used Tor -> VPN -> HN, but even then, how did they pay for the VPN? Stuff like this takes a lot of training and preparation to pull off flawlessly. Of course, if you live outside of America, your situation may be different.

ikeboy 10y ago
Tor->free VPN is pretty easy to set up.
marmot777 10y ago
I'm in the U.S. and I've never been a hero of any sort, just to clear the air on that. :-) This is my last post of the night so I don't have to time right now to read all that you mentioned and maybe it's not necessary. You're saying that making a mistake going after a cracker or scammer or other douche bag of this sort can easily backfire on you if you make a mistake? The conclusion you make then is don't do it? I'm not even disagreeing if this what you're saying. If it's truly not so much heroism as I claimed but in fact reckless stupidity then I'll concede the match on this point.