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Comment by nicolaslem | Hacker News Reader

Without doubt Darknet Diaries, it should be a mandatory listen for anyone touching computers. It is a crash course on building secure systems by learning from the failures of others.

I highly recommend starting from episode #1 because they are almost all great and episodes often reference past topics.

https://darknetdiaries.com

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I like Darknet Diaries, but I feel it is geared towards techies and not engineers.

The concepts are high level, the details are vague and the stories take a lot of shortcuts to make the podcast accessible to more people.

True, but it's an entertaining listen which is something that can't be said for a lot of the more technical and complex podcasts. The engagement he gets has enough technical that you can jot something down and research it but the overwhelming takeaway on WHY such and such failure or vuln was a problem is more important IMO.

I listened to quite a bit of Darknet Diaries back in 2018 but he had a few episodes that were such complete misses for me that I hopped off the train. The episode about trying to get to the top of Apple's podcast charts wore my patience, but a few episodes later the content was padded out with getting up to date on some Youtuber drama or something? I figured it was just hard to keep finding content for this niche. Should I give it another chance? There's 100+ more episodes now than the lats time I looked.

It’s true, not every episode is amazing. It’s a bit of a tangent, but I feel like podcasts don’t make it easy to get started. Unlike a TV show, where you obviously should start with S1E01, lots of podcasts either get outdated over time or have hugely improved over time and starting with a recent episode is better. But then you dive in and you don’t get any of the references, get blasted by ads, and so on!

Hah, they have a link for "start at the beginning": https://darknetdiaries.com/reverse/

Could you recommend some episodes?

I started with “Jeremy From Marketing” and really liked that one

One that stuck with me was Ep 86: The LinkedIn Incident. It is about how one seemingly inconsequential device at home being compromised can lead to a massive data breach.

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