8 ms·
Man counterhacks paypal phisher, deletes data, warns other victims via phone
- iwwr 15y agoAnyone have a mirror?
- remi 15y agoThis is the image linked in the post: http://i.imgur.com/vNqt3.png http://i.imgur.com/vNqt3.png
- wccrawford 15y agoReddit's down. This appears to be the same thing. http://imgur.com/vNqt3 http://imgur.com/vNqt3
- Tomis 15y agoMan gets 18 years in prison for hacking account and inflicting unfathomable psychic damage, making his victim feel vulnerable in their own home.
- jasonkester 15y agoI haven't been over to Reddit in a while. Is this really what it's like now? I remember when I left, /r/programming read pretty much like HN does now, with an occasional mean comment or joke thread left alive to get in the way. The linked thread, though, has no actual discussion. It's just a bunch of people making silly jokes. Sad to see it go that way.
- cmurdock 15y agoThe link was not to /r/programming it was to /r/reddit.com. /r/programming has it's own problems, but these comments are definitely not representative of that subreddit.
- ghiculescu 15y agoThis wasn't posted in /r/programming, though; it's /r/reddit.com, a general purpose subreddit that new users are subscribed to by default, and that has double the subscribers compared to proggit. I imagine lots of new users unsubscribe from proggit but not from /r/reddit.com; anecdotally speaking, reddit's becoming very popular among my non-programmer but internet-familiar friends who like pictures of cats and rage comics. That isn't to say to that proggit isn't pretty different to HN; going on there now (having not visited it in a while) only a handful of links show as having been visited due to my seeing them on HN. The content there is different and the level of discourse is acceptable, so I like it.
- vaksel 15y agothe difference is that proggit is opt in, while reddit.com is optout....so it's selection bias for quality
- redthrowaway 15y agoProggit's in the top 10, so I'm pretty sure it's opt-out, unless they treat it like r/atheism and display it in r/all but not on the default frontpage.
- ghiculescu 15y agoJust checked; it's actually opt-in. I made a new throwaway and visited proggit and was greeted with the option to add it to my frontpage.
- redthrowaway 15y agoI guess, despite its size, they consider proggit to be niche enough that most new users won't want to frontpage it.
- starwed 15y agoI think r/programming used to be opt-out. (Wasn't it the first subreddit?) Might be wrong, though. But yeah, I only use reddit for particular subreddits these days.
- jedberg 15y agoUsually when I tell people about reddit, I tell them to skip the front page and go straight to the reddits page and find topics that interest them. The front page has too many cat pictures and crap for my taste these days. Hopefully they eventually have the time to implement one of the solutions I suggested to alleviate the problem.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoWhat solutions did you suggest? I've actually been showing up regularly at NYC's reddit events, and made quite a few friends in the community, but I don't really load up Reddit anymore - too much junk.
- nowarninglabel 15y agoWhy don't you just tell them to sign-up for only the sub-reddits they are interested in, since that will determine their front page? *Side note: Kiva would still love to know if you are interested or not (e-mailed you when you posted about looking for new opportunities).
- derleth 15y ago> Hopefully they eventually have the time to implement one of the solutions I suggested to alleviate the problem. Making the site so slow most of the users leave? No, tried it, didn't work. ;) Reddit has cat pictures and /b/ memes because most people who use sites like Reddit like that. The only corollaries you can validly derive are that any site above a certain population is going to be like that, and to prevent a site from going that way you need to keep the userbase small enough to be focused. You know, like how you cultivate that circlejerk echo-chamber hivemind everyone complains about. ;)
- beaumartinez 15y agoReddit has adopted its own culture and hive-mind—the bigger Subreddits are less focused on intellectual discussion and more on having fun (for better or for worse), but they still have a penchant for interesting articles. (There was an image that hit Reddit's front page a few months ago that illustrated how the first level of comments were intellectual amd all subsequent were merely "herp-derpery"—have a look for your self.)
- Estragon 15y ago/r/truereddit is pretty thin on discussion, but usually good for an interesting read. Edit: Also, having now read some of the thread under discussion, the top-level tree is garbage, but the subthreads after that are mostly pretty thoughtful.
- shii 15y agoTruereddit is too much of a pretentious circlejerk of uptight myopic hipsters. I would rather recommend reading and joining subreddits on topics you acctually care about or which have a bar set for discussions but allow actual dissent and discussion.
- ZoFreX 15y agoSome people enjoy frivolous chat and punnery. I particularly enjoyed the parody of Pirates of Penzance, a verse of which I sang out loud to the amusement of my coworkers. I don't understand this insistence on comparing websites to each other as if one were better than the other - I am a happy user of both HN and Reddit, they both serve separate purposes to me. Interestingly, although on Hacker News the comparison is typically drawn with Reddit, on Reddit it's generally 4chan that serves that purpose. What site do 4chan users look down on?
- redthrowaway 15y ago>What site do 4chan users look down on? All of them. With the caveat that when most people refer to 4chan they're referring to /b/, and that that isn't accurate, there really aren't many sites that /b/tards like. They tend to believe (rightly, imho) that every site takes itself too seriously and every community has an unwarranted sense of self-importance. That was generally the motivation behind most of the raids they did. At least, it used to be. It's summer right now so average quality is expected to be low, but a perusal of /b/ really does leave the impression that there aren't many original /b/tards left. The sites /b/tards hate most: -reddit (although there's a huge overlap in users, many /b/tards see it as a "sanitized" /b/ where funny things are reposted without anyone doing the work of making them in the first place) -ebaumsworld (back in the day) -knowyourmeme/icanhazcheezburger/all the other sites capitalizing off /b/'s memes -facebook/myspace/deviantart/twitter/every other site whose primary use case seems to be people stroking their ego
- synnik 15y agoResponding to one illegal action with another illegal action is not exactly praiseworthy in my book.
- lambersley 15y agoExactly what would you have done had you come across that situation?
- 3pt14159 15y agoYou Lawful - Good people really need to check out how life is in this Chaotic - Good corner. We're living life to the fullest over here.
- masklinn 15y ago> You Lawful - Good people I don't think GP is lawful-good. lawful-neutral as best, potentially lawful-evil. A lawful-good character would not do nothing when facing evil, and would not chide others for acting.
- dolphenstein 15y agoCommenting on an aggregator to a link to an aggregator with a link. Feels like Inception. Someone should post this on digg and go to the 3rd level.
- yaix 15y agoI was a little surprised that the legality of this was questioned, so looked it up. In Roman Law tradition this kind of action would apparently be called "periculum in mora". An example would be that you enter another person's apartment without consent, because you noticed a strong smell of gas on the other side of the door. The OP in the linked article had strong reasons to believe that the people who submitted their credit card data were in imminent danger of large financial damages if he did not stop the fraud quickly. Apparently (and to my surprise), in the US the idea of "periculum in mora" only applies to law enforcement agents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance_in_United_States_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance_in_United_...), though. Does that mean you would have to let the apartment explode if the police is too slow to show up and stop the gas leak?
- sliverstorm 15y agoKnowing the US, yes, you'd have to let it explode. And then get sued for letting it explode. Of course, the alternative is to intervene, and get sued.
- ebzlo 15y agoIf you were to intervene and it still exploded, then God help you.
- seabee 15y agoOn the plus side, at least you won't get sued.
- sliverstorm 15y agoDon't be so sure. Death doesn't always stop them.
- Zak 15y agoIn the US, the legal concept of necessity applies. To oversimplify, you can do something otherwise illegal to prevent a worse outcome than the results of your act.
- darklajid 15y agoWhen did "found out that an FTP password is 'password'" start to be something that is a 'counterhack'? Except in Hollywood movies? Replace the headline with 'Guy that seeks naive people for his phishing site is too dumb to use his own software'.
- LXicon 15y agoas i understand it: 1) the bad guys found a website who's owner had the password as 'password' and set it up to receive phishing scam data. 2) the good guy found the phishing site and using the same 'password' he changed the phishing HTML, personally called the people who had been scammed so far and then deleted the data. if you call #1 a hack then #2 has to be a counterhack
- thaumaturgy 15y agoHmm. I wonder if I could do a Fermi estimate on the amount of time wasted by this pointless discussion? Let's call this Rob's Fermi Hack on Hacking "Hack": - We'll start with a semi-reasonable approximation of the number of forums in which people have discussed the word "hack": usenet threads, mailing lists, social news sites. I like 100,000 for this number. Do you think that's too high? I'm thinking that we have to count everything that's been around since, oh, 1995 or so -- since hackers didn't really seem to care about the definition of the word before then. - Then we need the mean number of times that this discussion has taken place on those forums. According to my semi-private little search engine for HN, the query `comments with "hack"` returns 45,000+ results, going back to 2008. Amusingly, the oldest result is about exactly this same debate. So let's use 100 for this value, because why not? - Next we need the mean number of replies generated each time this comes up on one of these forums. Let's say "3". I like "3", because my comment here is the third in the thread started by your comment, and I expect my comment to so dazzle readers with its brilliance that nobody else will bother responding. So, 3. - Finally, we need some kind of time estimate for time-blown-masturbating-about-"hack"-per-comment-per-forum. I'm skewing the curve a bit here with my comment, but that's because I'm a sucker for meaningless gratification. Anyway, let's say 2 minutes for this, because I haven't used the number "2" yet. (I think Fermi is now spinning at relativistic speeds in his grave.) So we get: 100,000 * 100 * 3 * 2, for 60,000,000 minutes, or 1 million hours, which would probably be enough to write and polish an entirely new operating system from the ground up. And that would be a neat hack. (FWIW: I agree with you, especially when the word "hack" found its way into all kinds of silly little timesaving tricks -- "hack your breakfast routine by using paper bowls!" -- but, at this point, seeing someone mention that they disagree with its usage every single time it's used is even more annoying. That battle was lost. The horse is dead. It's time to stop beating it and move on.)