Hacker News Reader

Comment by wildmXranat | Hacker News Reader

>Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox ...

If that is true, online account operators, email providers could link this type of behavior to one of their members quite quickly.

View on HN

I don't know... what came to mind after reading "deletes every email in her inbox" was POP, which pretty much always deletes your remote mail once it's been retrieved. How many millions of people still use POP over IMAP or webmail? Quite a few I would guess.

For 5+ years, I've been downloading my email with fetchmail, which deletes the message on the server. Once a minute. I don't like the thought of my emails sitting in the cloud for too long.

Not to mention that she gave a lot of personal history surrounding her parents and family history. That might not uniquely identify her, but it does narrow the search considerably. My guess: if he/she is even a single real person, much of this is fabricated.

I think it reeks of fabrication. It's probably some geek living out their alter ego or something.

Though getting it into Forbes is quite brilliant especially if it all revolves around a real person.

Someone is having quite a blast at the moment, unless Forbes made the whole thing up.

That is what I was thinking. Ya know, you probably don't want to disclose your operational security procedures because well, they aren't common and not being common, their trackable.

And then I was thinking about how the police sometimes "leak" that the suspect in some crime is weak, pathetic, individual which nobody really cares about, in hopes that they will offend the real suspect who will then self identify in defense of their honor. If you thought the Anonymous ring leader on the HBGary hack was some teenage guy then the best way to provoke a response would be to either call him gay or a girl it seems.

I wonder how well the E-book Ars put out is selling. And more importantly, if its really successful I wonder if these people who did this are comfortable with someone getting rich off their exploits?

You see? The twisted depths to which you go if you start down these paths. Sheesh.

> how the police sometimes "leak" that the suspect in some crime is weak, pathetic, individual

Except that the "you just got hacked by a 16-year old girl" taunt was apparently started in Anonymous circles soon sfter the attack. Not to say any of this is true or not fabricated, just that its not likely being fabricated from outside for those kinds of reasons.

Yeah, no mention of encryption, even. This doesn't smell right.

I figure that such setups could employ a number of cron scripts to spread out actions and/or generate noise. E.g. every <random_range> minutes delete a random email out of a set of everything older than 24 hours. Adjust the constants to match the volume of information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com