The World's Most Dangerous Geek | Hacker News Reader

The World's Most Dangerous Geek

rollingstone.com

37 pointsmuriithi9 comments

Blech, I hate this style of journalism. I gave up reading while slogging through the guy's entire personal history. I never even got to the meat of the article. (I suppose the style works for bio-centric publications like Rolling Stone, though.)

Could anyone post a synopsis of why the guy is supposedly dangerous?

AOL paid him $100 million for winamp, and he refused to sell out to the point of placing a desktop icon for aol during the install. Version 3.0 became bloated, and so v2.9 was released as a more stream lined version. Some other projects like gnutella were announced but AOL as a corporation dragged their feet and he released the packages on his own, which caused them no end of pain.

Hmm... gnutella was dangerous, I suppose, but certainly not "most dangerous". Sounds like it must have just been a PR puff piece to promote his latest software. (Not that Rolling Stone would ever become the tool of a press agent.)

I think that the guys who were able to hack into cardiac pacemakers would be a lot more dangerous:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/...

yeah, but when I posted that link it only got one vote.

Frankel's latest project: the Reaper multitrack recording software. www.cockos.com

2004?

I too am curious why this was posted being that it's 4 years old.

"The Most Dangerous Geek in the World" ?!?! Where did they get that from? Free spirited? Sure. But how is he dangerous in the slightest?

While I admire his free spirited nature I don't admire his hypocracy. If AOL was that much of an idea crusher/non-innovator why didn't he leave and launch his ideas? Instead he chooses a manner that is disrespectful and possibly illegal.

I couldn't disagree more.

He worked for a company that was / is clearly floundering. He told them clearly that they needed to change things. And they ignored him. They labelled him a troublemaker.

He tried to help the company, and they declined that help. He tried to push the company, and they ignored that as well. The way I see it, this is the demise of AOL in a nutshell.

4 years old or not, this is a good story.

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