The man who hacked Hollywood | Hacker News Reader

The man who hacked Hollywood

gq.com

70 pointscyphersanctus41 comments

One thing that strikes me as sad about this is that he very obviously had some level of talent, drive and ability; and if we as a society had found a way to channel that productively we would all be better off.

And before you go all "lol, cracking password resets is not technical skill"; think about this for a bit. If you were raised in a context like his (parents separated early, bad schools, no mentors etc.) would you necessarily have turned out better?

Who knows; if he'd had a better math teacher in junior high school who'd gotten him interested in programming early, he might have wound up working at a startup in Silicon Valley.

It all comes down to choice.

Unfortunatly one's options are not always clear.

Most people don't pick the option of stealing massive amounts of personal data in a manner that is obviously unethical and almost certainly illegal.

Blaming society for his choice sounds like crazy talk to me. What happened to personal responsibility?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not excusing his moral choices, although I do think his education in that area was obviously lacking. But the guy was unemployed for two years and well; boredom plus opportunity for mischief equals trouble.

Would he have been able to do something useful with his life if he'd learned better coping skills early on?

I can't imagine the sad self-loathing low point you'd have to be at where reading strangers personal email for fun seems like a good way to spend your nights and days. But, I can see the forces at work on this guy and it does make me sad to see someone ruin his life like that.

If he he took half the time he spent on mischief and directed it at learning an employable skill he would have been successful. White middle-class Jacksonville isn't exactly the type of rough upbringing necessary to excuse self inflicted damage in my books.

You don't choose the circumstances of your upbringing.

> Who knows; if he'd had a better math teacher in junior high school who'd gotten him interested in programming early, he might have wound up working at a startup in Silicon Valley.

Yeah, but then we'd be reading what his blog post instead of this more fabulous article, and it'd be yet another piece about Raspberry Pi.

I always wanted to see a marketplace for valuable information. Think of all the leaks that we hear about and think about all the ones that we don't hear about.

You would go on it. List your information for sale and then blogs, newspapers and/or whoever may be interested can purchase it from you.

I suppose the issue preventing the existence of such a marketplace is fraud (bad/misleading information). But many publishers don't seem to have a problem selling BS anyways right?

All marketplaces a fraud issue. You can always solve it via reputation points and/or proof.

Even in the media they always say "Reliable source". With this marketplace the "source" can provide information to anyone.

Sounds like a great weekend project. Relatively simple to code, would definitely be covered by some tech blogs.

Would be simple to code, but a marketplace is definitely not a weekend project. Getting enough supply-side information would be the big challenge.

Very true. With this particular project, the actual substance is what is very difficult to find. It will also be very difficult to project the right sense of security to the seller of the info.

> "One reporter on television called him 'creepy,' " she continues. "It's not right." Hearing this, Chaney looked up from his grilled cheese. The paparazzi just caught him on a bad day, he figures. "I hadn't shaved in a while," he tells his mom. "I kind of looked like a creep."

Is it possible that not only his mum, but he himself, doesn't realise that reading private conversations and looking at private (sometimes nude) photos belonging to others, without their permission or knowledge, is "creepy"?

I'm a bit surprised so many people would put real information as answer to their secret question, and I'm surprised a lot of websites offer this alternative to log in without knowing the password, it seems like a big security hole to me.

Well, I remember once needing to use that function to recover a password I had forgotten. If i hadn't put real information as an answer to the question, I'm not sure how I would have been capable of answering it..

I make up a single fake answer for every secret question out there and always use that one.

Hehe do you lose your passwords quite often? Perhaps you could try remembering Them..

No I don't but just in case. The point is to have something secret that only you know and other people can't google or guess it (dob, first school, etc..)

Ill start doing that. Just in case.

I like obscure spiritual questions and answers myself.

And now that I've said this on a public forum (a little googling is all it takes to identify me) I will have to change it to something more obscure...

This will not help you if a si8te storing your secret answer in plain text is hacked (most likely setup if a phone call can reset your password). Then the attacker will have your secret answer for every site you use.

I used to make up answers.. and was bit by not knowing.

Now I associate a friend I grew up with the site and fill it out as if I was them. Now I can say "ING -> Mike" and I know which Mike and what their info is but it doesn't mean anything to anyone else.

"faces sixty years in prison and $2.25 million in fines."

Stories like this make me think there would be a market for low-volume, high-security email services. For example, a service that only accepts logins from pre-authorized devices, where any access pattern out of the ordinary is immediately vetted by a human with extensive experience. A sort of concierge email / instant-message / voice-mail service.

Does anyone here point me to such a service?

Indeed, there's definitely a market for such an email service. Then again who knows how much they'd be willing to pay for it. To have a manned service like that might be difficult to bootstrap.

It would also be difficult to insure. If you're providing any Service Level Agreement, or something where you are taking money and selling based on a quality like security; you are going to fail at some point and get sued as a result; so your upfront costs and pricing structure have to reflect that.

Gmail can be free because it's a free service and you get what you pay for. To provide something of an equivalent service level for money with an additional guarantee of watchdog security services; you'd probably have to start around $10,000 USD per customer/year. And who's going to pay $10K for an email account?

Sixty years? Shouldn't a sentence of that length be reserved for rapists, murderers and repeat offenders?

Time to recode email password retrieval.

"You feel like you've seen something that the rest of the world wanted to see." Really?

If you think about how much money is made by selling gossip I think it is a fair statement.

True, though he probably meant it in a sarcastic way, like "clearly everyone wanted to see a naked Scarlett."

That is not sarcastic, I bet most Americans would like to see her naked, for curiosity or/and hormonal predisposition. Maybe the word you were looking for was "comical".

Haha "hormonal predisposition". Suave.. Heh

aka horney bastards!

Is it possible for a single website to make $50,000 a day with banner ads? That seems a bit exaggerated.

that's "only" $18mm a year, so yes and a whole lot more

Its definitely possible. Though usually that kind of massive traffic can be monetized in different, more creative ways than general banner ads.

With a CPM of $10 that would only be 5 million banners, so maybe 2-3 million pageviews - very doable. Even if that CPM shrinks it's doable.

anyone else disappointed by what the article turned out to be about? i was expecting someone who had found ingenious new ways to deal with some entrenched hollywood practices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com