Leave no trace: how a teenage hacker lost himself online

These are all things that normal people volunteer to do, even spend hundreds of dollars of their own money to do (graffiti removal is not just time consuming but also expensive, particularly cleaning up trees/rocks in nature).

This is exactly the type of work that community service programs should target. We're not talking about for-profit chicken farms in the US or something.

> Some of these could be more social than Edwin would have wanted, and could also have been (relatively) physicially demanding.

Honestly? Good. He was clearly depressed and mentally unhealthy long before his run-in with the law. Forcing some socialization and physical exercise might've saved Edwin's life. And it's pretty clear to me that he was headed nowhere good even prior to his legal troubles.

But suggestion with psychiatric care is likely right.

I have heard of this multiple times, mostly in social conversations.

It's likely not great not being touched as a baby, but I wonder if there's is actual science around the topic?

For example, there's bound to be some nurture vs nature aspect to this.

My guess that if you look at the vast majority of security incidents it is not due to negligence on the part of an IT Worker but instead due the business choices to prioritize some new feature, or performance, or anything else over security.

If you put the liability on the head if the IT guy/gal who has been saying "hey that system is insecure" only to be ignored by the business well that is a real good way worsen the shortage in qualified people.

I sure as hell am not going to assume legal liability over systems I do not really have control over.

There's a few big differences here: (1) the "someone" is a company with $7B/yr in revenue and dedicated security resources, also (2) with millions of users relying on their doing an Ok job securing the "home", and (3) which is connected to a network immediately accessible to anyone from bored teenagers all over the world to organized criminals and nation states looking to harm their users' interests. If a random script kiddie can find this hole by accident, how many determined teams with even minor budgets were accessing their network? Spooking KPN's security team into action was a mitzvah all around, even if he did not with whole heart and mind intend it as such [1].

More generally, the story this reminded me of most is that of Aaron Schwartz -- it's a true sadness that our societies deal so poorly with analytically developed folks' efforts being even slightly mis-applied by some fiendish letter-of-the-law measure and otherwise "good" people entrusted to exhibit moral judgement seem to go into a frothing-at-the-mouth attack against those who literally did no harm to groups that are supposedly being protected (scientific publishing / ISP users). I'm not sure if there is a theory of law by which a more-global net-good can completely outweigh more-local crimes, but it seems a society that were to allow for that would be both more successful and just.

1. https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/28579/do-you-get...

If you have an isolated network that is truly airgapped from any other network then and only then is it remotely acceptable to “leave your doors unlocked”. This doesn’t absolve the criminals who deface/destroy/steal your PII/data but rather you’ve got to adapt to the times.

The infrastructure can be a danger to others, to employees, etc.

So yes, it's a mandatory duty for organization owners to secure their infrastructure.

There's a problem with the reaction to security issues in most of the countries.

"Hacking" isn't the same as "breaking in". Breaking into somewhere is usually destructive, dangerous, can be done b anyone and reveals no poor security (how did they forget to protect their vault door from a drill and plastic explosives??). A DDoS attack falls into this same category - a boring zero-skill brute force attack that can only be interpreted as malicious.

"Real hacking", however, isn't any of those things. If I put on an orange jumper and walk right into the back of my local bank and straight down to the vault without so much as a confused glance from a guard, they will, as they should, be more concerned with firing their guards for dangerous incompetence than prosecuting me for walking past an "employees only" sign. Especially if I, after arriving at the vault, called the bank manager and explained how bad their security is.

Scape goating video games, or "the internet" for these types of things is a long disproven trope.

There are more factors in criminality that just playing a violent game or having computer supplied to you by your parents. Putting the blame on these things however is easier that looking at other more human causes.

Just because we like computers and they did good to us does not mean having 100% access to one for him was right decision. In fact, it did caused massive issues.

The kid who leaves his room for socialization only is an issue. The kid who spends too much of his time playing video games is an issue. Some amount of playing is fine. Some amount of being alone is perfectly fine. The "out of room only for food and never going outside" is not fine.

If there is anything that harms young men, it that the above is normalized instead of being seen as sign the kid is loosing ability to cope with both real life and computer. And then, when they are alone, depressed or bursting angry, everything and everyone is blamed. Parents should be even more understanding, the girls should have go out of their way to meet guys in their rooms, the teachers are horrible for not tolerating them mistreating other kids and so on and so forth.

Except that saying that having kids socialization primary online, purely in gaming and hacking communities is a bad idea, because those can be quite atrocious.

No, it's not—at least not for more than a few moments. This is really obviously not a useful red flag to worry about. Violent video games are very widely popular, and have been for many years now. It's still quite rare for their users to turn into criminals.

Highlighting things like playing violent video games is merely shining a spotlight on something we already know won't help anyone identify future criminals. That spotlight should instead be focused on traits and behaviors that aren't very common in the general population.

A lot of the critics of the general category of violent video games are people who wish to censor them, without any real evidence that a social good would result. These parents—or at least the journalist reporting on them—have lumped themselves in with the would-be censors by presuming that the son's video game preferences were a warning sign they should have been paying attention to.

No. Society was a threat to this non-violent minor. Whatever "ugly nihilism" a teenager entertains is trivial next to the adult nihilism -- our nihilism -- that destroys empathy, that destroys human lives, discards them in cages.

(By the way, the incomplete capacity to comprehend the negative consequences of actions isn't "nihilism" -- it is "innocence").

No, it's usually the same reason that causes such people to do nothing but play video games in the first place.

> Maybe if he took the time to work out in a gym and keep on top of his game this all wouldn't have happened

I've been in a situation where playing games and neglecting everything else was kind of my thing. From that perspective this sentence sounds a bit like "just stop being sad". At some point going to the gym is simply not possible, as easy as it may sound. Games are a highly effective distraction from life and everything that comes with it. At least until the day that stops working, at which point it is a good idea to be near people that care and aren't blind to a red flag parade.

I am one of those people. I knew YUI as a kid, I logged into those KPN computers too. I'd always thought he'd moved on, I never found out about his death until now, or perhaps someone told me and I assumed they were kidding. Now, I can't help but wonder how many other friends who I thought to be retired are actually dead?

Despite - or perhaps because of - my experiences I couldn't help but agree with you more. I found it deeply disturbing to see all the comments here berating his grieving family for wondering if they'd made a mistake letting him on the computer.

I know my parents must have thought the same every time the cops came to our home, they would've been entirely justified in that.

I turned out okay, but as far as I can tell most of us didn't.

> They let him do whatever he wanted. If he felt like gaming, he’d boot up Windows. But more often he chose Linux, his go-to operating system.

Why is this important? This is exactly what I do. I also frequently use a VPN, yet it's treated in the article as if the use of such technologies automatically labels you as some sort of nefarious hacker.

Maybe the translation is the reason that I don't get the feeling he is quite at home with a computer.

I do agree that as a society in the US anyway we are losing the idea of pluralism, more and more people are being forced to conform to a given sociopolitical ideology largely split on "left" and "right", if you do not conform with the orthodoxy of one or the other you are cast as any number of things other than a free thinking nuanced individual.

It sounds to me like you were not, so I will give your unsubstantiated opinion the benefit of the doubt of not understanding the context or implications of Phrack and aforementioned Hacker Manifesto.