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> Nine days after Aaron’s death, his familiar Skype avatar popped up on my computer screen. Somewhere, somebody—probably a family member—had booted up his compu
by d23 13y ago
> Nine days after Aaron’s death, his familiar Skype avatar popped up on my computer screen. Somewhere, somebody—probably a family member—had booted up his computer. I fought the irrational urge to click on the icon and resume our conversation. Then he vanished from my screen again.
Holy shit, that ending. Chilling.
- stephengillie 13y agoGhost in the machine. Edit: http://xkcd.com/686/ http://xkcd.com/686/
- idm 13y agoI love xkcd, and this one is the spookiest of them all. The logic of that comic leads to a challenging existential proposition.
- jccc 13y agoI'd sincerely like to hear what people think about the contrast between Poulsen's behavior and sentiment toward Swartz and (separately) Adrian Lamo vs. his behavior and sentiment toward, say, Bradley Manning: http://www.salon.com/2010/06/18/wikileaks_3/ http://www.salon.com/2010/06/18/wikileaks_3/ Maybe what impresses him most is a person's hacking chops and not so much the scale and morality of the actions that got a person into trouble.
- mpyne 13y agoIt makes sense to me. What Manning did was fairly awful from a dispassionate standpoint. Of course, few people are dispassionate about it, especially around here. :) If Manning had war crimes on file he could have revealed those and only those. What he did instead is at best reckless, and at worst could be said to be the instigator for the onset of the Arab Spring, and the follow-on violence that continues to this day, not to mention the Afghani and Pakistani families affected by the data leaks. On the other hand Swartz can be said pretty universally to be pursuing a noble goal (even those who disagree with some of his specific actions would tend to agree with that), and at worst gained unauthorized network access and downloaded a bunch of files...
- cwb71 13y agoIt is chilling—but is it true? My immediate reaction when reading that paragraph was that someone as security-minded as Aaron would probably not leave his password saved in a Skype client.
- breakyerself 13y agoIsn't that safer than typing it every time? A key logger could get it then. Has anyone ever extracted a password stored in a client like that?
- eli 13y agoI don't know anything about Skype but yes, people have definitely extracted passwords saved in IM clients like that.
- jeffasinger 13y agoThere's no way he would have set things up to go from boot to skype without at least one password.
- billybob255 13y agoThere's the possibility that the person knew the password to log into his computer and Skype was a startup program.
- byerley 13y agoThere's a difference between being security-minded and being a crypto-nut. If you're proud of the work you're doing and it's not secretive, why bother encrypting the hard-drive? Similarly, he wouldn't have been caught in the first place if he had been security-nutty about the process, but he didn't think he was doing anything immoral.