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Homicide victim found in burnt-out SUV ID'd as man behind spam-email empire
- daenz 6y agoWhat a colorful life: a jewish chess prodigy who becomes a notorious neo-nazi and email spammer, ruffles a lot of feathers as a con man, turns into a nomad and travels under the radar around North America, finally shot to death and found in a burning SUV. There seems to be a specific rare phenotype for these tech high-risk takers (thinking of John McAfee also).
- ojnabieoot 6y agoI think calling an email spammer a technologist, and a technological risk-taker, is a bit much - as is the comparison to McAfee. Maybe in temperament but nowhere close in ability or accomplishment. Hawke was just a con artist with some computer skills.
- Judgmentality 6y agoI mean, AirBnB got off to a similar start. Before they brought on the infamous spammer as a cofounder it was basically failing to gain any traction, and then he broke the craiglist TOS to scrape their listings. Yes, there is more to the story, but I don't see how AirBnB could've ever become what it is today (even if it's doing poorly now because of covid and other factors) without some unethical "growth hacking." In my experience, very few successful tech founders are what I would consider admirable people (obviously anecdotal and subjective). In addition to people like Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley attracts straight up con (wo)men like Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/26/airbnb-co-founder-nathan-blecharczyk-spam-pioneer-says-book.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/26/airbnb-co-founder-nathan-ble... https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-co-founders-freshman-roommate-says-hes-a-spammy-scumbag-2011-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-co-founders-freshman-...
- m3kw9 6y agoScraping a site breaking a TOS isn’t too difficult, you don’t need to be a super spammer to do these things
- mmm_grayons 6y agoYeah, I've even done that for personal project before. Courts have been pretty clear that this isn't illegal; the worst a site could do is try to ban you. http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/09/09/17-16783.pdf http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2019/09/09/17...
- ojnabieoot 6y agoAgain: bad people with modest tech skills (Hawke, the AirBnB founders) are not the same thing as bad people who are actual technologists (McAfee, Gates, Musk), or even bad people with modest tech skills who lead actual technology companies (Zuckerberg). In particular AirBnB is really not a tech company, it’s a rental company that uses fairly standard commercial/open source tech. I think the comparison you are making, and asserting that this is a “phenotype” common in tech leaders, is baseless and silly.
- TaylorGood 6y agoWhat makes the AirBNB guys bad people?
- bluedevil2k 6y agoIn what way is Bill Gates or Musk a bad person?? Grouping them with McAfee is really kind of dumb...blasphemous really.
- h0l0cube 6y agoMore to that, good and bad isn't necessarily immutable. Bill Gates was seemingly as callous at his anti-trust depositions as Zuckerberg, but I believe he's redeemed himself in his philanthropic contributions that have had real outcomes in some of the poorest part of the world. Blanket 'good' and 'bad' designations are often a little reductive for what are complicated human beings who do both 'good' and 'bad' things across their lifetimes.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 29athrowaway 6y agoMcAfee antivirus consumes more computer power than bitcoin. If everyone used Folding at home instead of McAfee, we would have cured cancer 10 times.
- the_only_law 6y agoHonestly at this point, I consider AV software more of a nuisance than much malware at this point.
- onetimemanytime 6y agoMcAffee apparently hyped a lot of crappy ICOs, causing people to lose millions. When you do that, odds are that you've other bad things and will do even worst things when things are tight. It works, until you do it to the wrong guy. Some people can order a murder by pros just by wiping out a drug debt or a favor.
- swivelmaster 6y agoYou kind of have to wonder what went so terribly wrong in childhood that led to this behavior. McAfee is clearly a brilliant but very disturbed person. What a sad waste of that talent and intellect.
- arkitaip 6y agoMcAfee's problems are due to his insane drug experimentation. That he is alive is something of a miracle. Read and despair: https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/8utitu/john_mcafee_this_might_be_the_craziest_bath_salt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/8utitu/john_mcafe...
- bigbubba 6y agoSort of a catch-22 isn't it? Maybe those experimental drugs could make a man crazy, but he'd have to be crazy already to take those drugs in the first place.
- foolmeonce 6y agoIt's also pretty clear that his problems caused him to leave the US, so his crazy drug experiments could not be the source of his initial problems, though they seem very related to his current problems.
- porknubbins 6y agoThat was a wild read, wow. I get the feeling that even apart from the drug stuff McAfee is brilliant but lacking any moral restraint or respect for societal order. I mean apart from the drug stuff all he made millions shilling junk ICOs in 2017 and brazenly declared he wasn’t filing taxes.
- vmurthy 6y agoObligatory "old" style reddit URL -> https://old.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/8utitu/john_mcafee_this_might_be_the_craziest_bath_salt/ https://old.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/8utitu/john_mcafe... The new reddit makes my eyes bleed :(
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoSounds like a 21st century version of Bobby Fischer.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoAnd owner of half-wolf dogs.
- inopinatus 6y agoMaybe they're just cat owners⁽¹⁾. ⁽¹⁾ Presence of Toxoplasma gondii infection in brain as a potential cause of risky behavior: a report of 102 autopsy cases. Samojłowicz, Twarowska-Małczyńska, Borowska-Solonynko et al. Eur J Clin Microbiol Infect Dis 38, 305–317 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10096-018-3427-z https://doi.org/10.1007/s10096-018-3427-z
- akiselev 6y agoThe CDC estimates a tenth of the US over the age of six has taxoplasmosis [1]. It's so prevalent, it's hardly specific to tech. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/toxoplasmosis/epi.html#:~:text=Toxoplasmosis%20is%20caused%20by%20the,have%20been%20infected%20with%20Toxoplasma https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/toxoplasmosis/epi.html#:~:text....
- casefields 6y agoI feel like everything and nothing has been attributed to it at some point.
- CamperBob2 6y agoThe notion that T. gondii is the only behavior-altering parasitic organism out there is, of course, completely unsupported. It would be an "extraordinary claim" in its own right.
- inopinatus 6y agoSure, sure. That is just what someone whose brain is parasitically subjugated by their cat would say.
- s5300 6y agoHookworm is a hell of a drug https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-south-a-bad-name/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-so... Feel free to give this some amplification outside of HN if you've never seen it before. I think it's... quite important to be aware of.
- myself248 6y agoIncluding fleeing to Belize, apparently.
- octoberfranklin 6y ago> There seems to be a specific rare phenotype for these tech high-risk takers (thinking of John McAfee also). McAfee's "phenotype" is called bath salts.
- eganist 6y agoEthan Hawke would play him pretty well on screen.
- RileyJames 6y agoDefinitely, holds some similarities to Taking Lives: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364045/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364045/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vecinu 6y agoI hope this doesn't sound strange but I'm glad to finally get closure on this. I remember the news article from 3 years ago that came out about this and there was speculation that this was just a random attack on a regular hiker. People started becoming paranoid that hikers and innocent people were being targeted on the side of the road. I realize logically every life counts but there's something about random attacks that scare me so much more than people that commit crimes and start getting targeted.
- yeetman21 6y agoRandom attacks do happen, but most attacks are done by someone the person already knows (for rape atleast)
- DoreenMichele 6y agoGenerally holds true for murder as well.
- moltar 6y agoBut did we get closure? I read the article, and it doesn’t state that it was or wasn’t a random attack. They just identified the victim. It could still be a random attack.
- xwdv 6y agoUnlikely. Case closed.
- parsimo2010 6y agoIt could be random, but a neo-nazi troll with his level of notoriety makes it more believable that someone followed and killed him. Like if OJ Simpson turns up dead with a knife in his back, it’s possible that he was the unlucky victim of a random killer, but it’s more likely he was targeted.
- magicnubs 6y agoIt could also be both; not because someone recognized him, but still because of who he is (non-random). Maybe he was just said some neo-nazi shit to the wrong person.
- buryat 6y agoGood
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- afrojack123 6y agoAlways more to these type of people that they don't tell you about. They just try and make them look as bad as possible to justify their actions.
- solinent 6y agoHe's Jewish. What a twist, looks like hate doesn't come from a race but rather a face. edit: it also comes from individuals who harbor hateful downvotes. My poetry is probably unclear. I just mean that a Jewish person being a neo-nazi means that you can get hateful people of all races--ultimately hate is not partaken by individuals in some group, but rather it seems that every group has some similar distribution of hateful people. Thought it had some significant insight, but I guess poetry isn't really for hackers, huh?
- runawaybottle 6y agoDo teeth burn? Did he not have dental records that they couldn’t identify him for years?
- tzs 6y agoI don't know about Canada (where the body was found), but in the US (where he was from) there is no registry of dental records. To identify someone from dental records they have to find that person's dentist(s) and ask for the records. That works great when you've got a list of missing persons and a body that you think might be one of them, or when you've got a bunch of bodies such as from a plane crash and you know who they are but just need to sort them out to return to their families for burial. But when you've just got a body with no idea who it was? Generally dental records won't be much use. You might be able to get DNA from the pulp and use that to help identify the person, but the pulp can be damaged by fire.
- rv-de 6y agowho lives by the spam, dies like a spam.
- pvaldes 6y agoThey did found dogs or dog remains in the car? If they are dogs in the car will be more than one bullet to look for. If not, he could had been killed in another place and moved later. Finding dog corpses or dogs hurt in a different place could signal the real crime scene.
- nigerian1981 6y agoJudging by that moustache I guess he was also a big Charlie Chaplin fan