The AT&T hack is a perfectly good example, probably the most relevant one we have, of someone doing exactly what the GP suggested. Which undoubtedly would face much the same kind of overzealous prosecution, if not much worse given the current climate.
I do agree with GP though, and wish more researchers would be a lot less polite and well-behaved with their disclosures, sow a little more chaos even. This really was a golden opportunity to have a real national impact, and to give a huge number of non-tech people an unprecedentedly effective wake-up call.
Blogging about being a bad boy and pretending to be master of anonymous/the cyber aryan nation is his gimmick. He wishes he was david koresh, but he's completely harmless.
He demonstrated a thorough familiarity with ptmalloc internals, enough to correct someone else's remark about fastbins (meanwhile taking frighteningly large hits of whippets).
Additionally, he was the first person I had ever heard mention Rust.... wayyy back in 2012 (I'm embarrassed to say I thought he was talking about Racket and tried to correct him - I was 19 and thought I knew everything). He seemed to know quite a bit about the language even then.
He continued to discuss other topics arising from this with other hackers. One such conversation I remember more clearly was his exchange with another hacker (a quite skilled one by my estimation) where he seemed to speak rather cogently about the relative merits of a complete semantic tableaux and SMT solvers to determine "real ptr lifetime" (beyond just adhering to a set of idioms that enable a constraint solver to verify reference use).
So if he can't code PHP, then that's even more impressive.
As an aside - in person, he came across as very warm, funny, charming and even deliberately inclusive.
It feels strange now, but long ago, if you looked at him with the right shades on, he'd seem to give a nudge-and-a-wink that the "trolling", including his iconoclastic project of the time: the posthumous baptism of Muhammad's remains via becoming a Mormon deacon (of some sort??) were all intended to be thought-provoking irreverence rather than chaotic evil. No matter what was discussed he always gave the impression there was something more there, something almost hermetic.
In those intervening years my view of him has assumed a different proportion. Those weren't all harmless culturejamming tricks pulled off in the name of some Discordian spirit which lies somewhere behind the neocortex of the hacker mindset. At that time, and many years before then, there were pranks, tricks and trolls that were unimaginably cruel, purposeless and petty.
Since, prison has hardened him further into a wicked racist, who, lacking a better word, is insane.
He might know about how to pimp-out a livejournal page, but that's about it.
[0] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/the-mak...
I'd hope after years of Mr Robot larping he figured out how to install a CMS.
Any proof?
You're one person making claims that run counter to everything published about the man.
Weev just talks a good game.