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Comment by RyJones | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a place where our internet was bad, but not that bad. We were coming up to a release and things were fubar. I asked the network guy to find what was up - a guy that reported to me was torrenting child porn.

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I worked at a place where, one morning, the guy in the next office over got swarmed by company security and the police. He was trafficking in child porn on the company network. He was a super smart, super dumb guy who lost everything over it, his wife, custody of his kids, friends and a very high-paying career. His car sat in the company garage for weeks.

I worked on a secure project a very long time ago. A very smart guy (he was working on the operating system for a military avionics computer) printed out some child porn photos on a company color printer. (This was long enough ago that good quality color printers were very expensive, not like now when you can buy a color printer for less than $100.)

He got walked out. I don't know what other consequences he suffered. Being smart doesn't mean you can't do something really stupid.

I worked somewhere that had that happen. The FBI showed up with Yahoo messenger logs from our IP address, they wanted to take our file servers etc (he didn’t save anything on our network, but was signing into those sites while at work)

They ended up having to come back the next day with a new warrant because he was at a branch office but their internet was from a point to point connected to the main office.

They took his pc and I provided them with a months worth of squid logs. We had just spent like $4500 on a new CAD workstation for him.

He’s still in prison.

See "The Rise and Fall of Patrick Naughton" https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-rise-and-fall-of-patrick-n...

His wikipedia entry ends with:

> He ended up serving no prison time, in exchange for working for the FBI for free for a year.

~~~

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Naughton#Sex_crime_arr...

He ended up serving no prison time, in exchange for working for the FBI for free for a year.

~~~

I remember that well. Didn't know the guy but I knew several who did know him before the bust but, oddly enough, very few after.

That was so brief... Nowadays articles like this are 10 times as long and detailed.

Smart != Wise

When I read stories like this I always wonder if they are setups. Like, it feels too stupid.

I knew him well and he was well-liked and professionally well-regarded throughout at least my division of the company. He was a high-energy, tireless guy with great ideas and worked nearly daily with senior-level management, often traveling with them all over the world.

I, along with a whole lot of others, were absolutely dumbstruck by his profound fall from grace.

Ye I guess seeming like a nice person doesn't prove or disprove anything, but lets not dive to far into your colocated worker's case, but generally.

I had a malware once that distributed (legal) porn. Since then I have had that in the back of my head when reading about child porn. I mean, what more effective way to ruin someones life by framing without having to involve yourself physically by planting drugs etc. It doesn't even have to be a specific target that is framed, but a target.

I really hope that the police have the technical knowledge to judge the evidence in these cases. Even if a framed person is cleared his reputation might be ruined anyway.

It's possible. I remember reading about forums on the dark net a while ago where some hackers were advertising their services where you pay them bitcoin and they plant child porn on any target's computer. Then presumably you report them to the FBI or whatever and they are arrested. You know the rest.

If hackers can encrypt your entire hard drive holding it ransom without you knowing, this attack seems even easier.

They don't have the technical knowledge, and they don't want it unless it gives them access to a bigger bust of the framer.

But there's usually a lot more evidence then one hacked machine, if someone is mentally ill enough to think downloading child porn is a good idea.

Ye, there are actual perpetrators too of course. And I agree from news I have read that many seem to have some other pathalogical condition, like hoarding.

Hopefully the police is aware of the risk for hacking and are looking for other clues too.

Professor in the next office came back from vacation a few years ago and started noticing his unix workstation was doing a great deal of disk access. Disks also seemed to have a lot less space than he remembered. Worked with IT and found out a porn server had been stood up on his system while he was gone. It happens.

> I mean, what more effective way to ruin someones life by framing without having to involve yourself physically by planting drugs etc. It doesn't even have to be a specific target that is framed, but a target.

There’s a subplot where this happens in the comic 100 Bullets.

Is there some reason you thought I was going to "dive further?"

No I just meant that I spoke in general.

Jesus, do you not wonder if maybe he was framed? I guess it’s a bit of a roundabout way to frame someone, and unlikely to work on anyone who keeps an eye on their running processes... but damn.

> and unlikely to work on anyone who keeps an eye on their running processes

Rootkits are a thing. It would be perfectly reasonable for a criminal to intentionally use one to hide a process doing illicit things on their own computer from prying eyes.

On the other hand, people with that kind of evil inside of them don't go around letting everyone know. They keep it secret and hide it well. Most of the time. So it's not entirely surprising that when that happens to someone you never would have expected it.

Reading stories like this makes people think that all pedophiles are stupid, but then again, as with any other crime, it's only the stupid ones who get caught...

An estimated 1% of men are pedophiles. It's kind of like finding gays in Saudi Arabia. They don't advertise their presence. I heard from an old lady that there were no gays in the Soviet Union until they got infected by the west when it collapsed.

>An estimated 1% of men are pedophiles.

I really wanna see how they made those estimations. How many percent of Woman's are pedophiles then?

Jesus, is that some sort of proven statistic? Because if it's accurate that's orders of magnitude more than what I expected. No wonder they seem to come out of the woodwork lately, but still, kind of chilling.

In Hollywood's high-circles it's probably more like 15% (estimated)

Estimated 42% of hacker news users work in the tech industry.

True...nice to see that other peoples are in the Bigdata-oracle-thingi too, still i think it's 42.8% ;)

I don't think they're stupid, but I do think they're like addicts. They can't control their compulsion, or they would.

One of the reasons most criminals get caught, is because they think they are smarter than all other criminals, and only the stupid ones get caught. No criminal thinks they are stupid.

The ones that don't get caught are typically full on psychopaths, because they are random and don't have an MO that identifies them.

Most criminals definetely dont get caught. Look at drug consumption for example: it never ever went down in history.

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