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Comment by molecule | Hacker News Reader

> US authorities say he created the Fruitfly Mac malware (Quimitchin by some AV vendors) back in 2003 and used it until 2017...

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What does "used it" mean?

The government typically makes grandiose statements that sound impressive and make the accused sound like the devil himself but reality is almost always an order of magnitude more mild.

Unless I hear otherwise I'm gonna assume it was just pinging back to some C&C infrastructure he owned or something like that.

> Court documents[0] reveal Durachinsky wasn't particularly interested in financial crime but was primarily focused on watching victims, having collected millions of images on his computer, including many of underage children.

[0] https://www.scribd.com/document/389668977/Durachinsky-Indict...

> including many of underage children

This makes him sound like a pedophile, but given that he created it at 14, he could watch "children" older than himself.

Legal system doesn't particularly care about that

To be clear, I mean that the the way US laws are enforced, to the best of my knowledge, being underage yourself doesn't mean you are off the hook for having underage material.

I'd be interested to learn if this isn't the case.

What if I'm 30 and have sexual images of my own teenage self that I myself took in the mirror, say, 15 years ago? This just seems insane

Yeah, to the best of my knowledge.

Except he continued using it until he was 28.

But now we're circling back to - what does "used it" mean?

Well the relevant thing here is that he still had the pictures on his computer. Maybe he was taking pictures of 15 year olds when he was 14 or whatever, but they arrested a 28 year old man whose hard drive was full of images of people that are at most 17 years old.

He could have deleted the pictures though. I find it hard to believe those pics would still be on a 14 year old drive.

This is a computer guy. Nobody would be surprised if he had spare hardware lying around from as far back as the 90s. If he just quick-formatted a bunch of spare drives and tossed them on a shelf years ago any forensics software would find what was on them before he formatted them. Considering that he's been collecting pictures since he was 14 I think it would be hard not to get him for possession if he's a hardware pack-rat.

Without details all we can do is speculate.

That's a good point. I would probably forget about old drives as well - I thought they found the pictures on an active drive but realise now that this was a baseless assumption.

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