Doge staffer's YouTube nickname accidentally revealed his teen hacking activity

I miss VCR rentals, my cassette player and the magic of my first XT computer with MFM disks. I miss the apple //c and hopping online just to check for some information. I miss the craftsmanship of all those self made websites where you kept a list of URL’s. I miss the points where people put stuff on the internet just to share and what they made and were proud of it. I miss the trips with friends to the arcade hall where we would take turns on operation wolf. E-Mailing the friend you made during the holidays and be able to send pictures was some kind of magic.

I truely hate what the internet has become. A centralized corporate greed machine that exploits people and squeezes them for maximum profits. People are more interested in likes and retweets than in genuine contact.

I am getting old… grumpy… bitter because the thing I loved was taken from me.

I remember driving back to college both with printed directions and then with navigation on an iPhone.

Lets see, if it remains unusual, or if we all have to adopt even more drastically while we are alive.

(My biggest adoption right now is rather, that the era of peace is over)

Many, maybe most of us did stupid things, it’s part of a hacker youth. Owning it, admitting it, that’s a big part of building trust and proving to others that you’ve grown and changed.

(This assumes he wasn't just making it up)

Sounds a very familiar background.

His support of a horrendous reigime today is unrelated to his actions in his youth.

If you figure out how to hack something, and your first thought is to trash / destroy the system, thats the crime.

So personally: > "where Stanley, at 15, bragged about fucking up servers" is more damning to me then the actual hacking part.

There's always two sides to a medal. I think that the executive branches of government - across the Western world - suffer from lethargy caused because barely anyone in public service is willing to question, much less stretch or even bend, the rules in power.

A government obviously cannot be purely made out of rulebreakers and, frankly, toddlers and imbeciles. We see this in the current US administration. But it cannot be made out of "we always did it this way" people either, because that's how you end up with systems and processes that are so hopelessly fossilized that no one even understands why these systems are the way they are.

Which part exactly is "far from reality, lacks substance and objectivity"?

Though I'm counting that as future potential costs and deaths.

Ignoring the obvious opinion of the author, anybody who has ever worked on any sort of medium to large scale migration, refactoring or rewriting of a computer system knows that's a comically ridiculous timescale and when it inevitably fails there will be consequences, counted in both money and lives.

But that's a (very near) future fuck-up that he will almost certainly spin or move the goalposts for.

That you can draw a direct line to right now, not much other than all the cuts to critical infrastructure.

To be clear, I'm not arguing against cuts and efficiency initiatives, i'm saying he's an idiot who doesn't know what he's doing, so his implementation will be shoddy and dangerous.

See: The Cybertruck, The Boring Company, The Decline of X.

As you are implying though, nothing major so far, aside from USAID i suppose (or the VA), does removing systems actively (and provably) preventing deaths count?

These are systematic problems that will take a while to shake out into their inevitable consequences.

He'll probably still fail upwards though, unless he gets luigi'd or just drops dead of a ket induced heart attack or something.

(We haven’t seen the costs of slashing these materialize yet, but with PEPFAR in particular there’s a very good chance millions will die without access to the drugs provided under the program.)

That first sentence set the tone and intent of the rest of the article, and it's a failure of the article to start with what I quoted instead of making it clear what really occurred.

But let's be clear: I was not out to create a false impression, and I resent your accusation without giving benefit of the doubt.

Yeah I'm condoning it, if you're young, just doing it for fun and not causing any real damage. I think that's fairly normal among computer nerds even if it is a federal crime.

Ic someone aligns with the hacker hacktivist then that person is good. (All the Anonymous activity a decade back), if they don’t like their politics then they want to bring the weight of federal regulation down on them.

People are hypocrites.

For example, Manning, Schwartz. they are typically seen in good light.

Then there is the scourge of those who hack for money (ransomware) that just about everyone hates.

Being honest could you even have done it at 15, hard to be virtuous about not doing something you're not capable of.

I used to boast about hacking stuff to my friends at that age, couldn't actually do it though, wasn't smart enough was just teenage bravado.

What evidence do you have that DOGE (which is just USDS that everybody loved during the Obama administration) has bypassed any vetting for its employees?

"to go mask off" means to drop a façade, and show the true nature.

Here, it means they are not even trying to hide what they are doing anymore: Digging into every DOGE employee they can identify, and slandering them for political gain.

Why else would they care what a random administration employee did in this free time when he was 15 years old?

It is disgusting articles like this are what passes as "journalism" these days.

This kind of work is extremely important for making the US be seen as the "police of the world" rather than a bully, who will turn a blind eye to genocide when convenient, but will shell civilians if people who come from the same city threaten commercial routes.

For instance, the US strongly condemns the Venezuelan government. At the same time, it doesn't condemn the Saudi government, even though it is obvious for anyone to see the massive human rights infringements that happen there. The US government also doesn't condemn the Bukele government and, currently, they even give Bukele money by paying him to torture prisoners deported from the US.

Do you see a pattern here? Of course the US needs all the favorable media coverage it can get.