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Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

> Nine days after Aaron’s death, his familiar Skype avatar popped up on my computer screen. Somewhere, somebody—probably a family member—had booted up his computer. I fought the irrational urge to click on the icon and resume our conversation. Then he vanished from my screen again.

Holy shit, that ending. Chilling.

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Ghost in the machine.

Edit: http://xkcd.com/686/

I love xkcd, and this one is the spookiest of them all. The logic of that comic leads to a challenging existential proposition.

I'd sincerely like to hear what people think about the contrast between Poulsen's behavior and sentiment toward Swartz and (separately) Adrian Lamo vs. his behavior and sentiment toward, say, Bradley Manning: http://www.salon.com/2010/06/18/wikileaks_3/

Maybe what impresses him most is a person's hacking chops and not so much the scale and morality of the actions that got a person into trouble.

It makes sense to me. What Manning did was fairly awful from a dispassionate standpoint. Of course, few people are dispassionate about it, especially around here. :)

If Manning had war crimes on file he could have revealed those and only those. What he did instead is at best reckless, and at worst could be said to be the instigator for the onset of the Arab Spring, and the follow-on violence that continues to this day, not to mention the Afghani and Pakistani families affected by the data leaks.

On the other hand Swartz can be said pretty universally to be pursuing a noble goal (even those who disagree with some of his specific actions would tend to agree with that), and at worst gained unauthorized network access and downloaded a bunch of files...

It is chilling—but is it true?

My immediate reaction when reading that paragraph was that someone as security-minded as Aaron would probably not leave his password saved in a Skype client.

Isn't that safer than typing it every time? A key logger could get it then. Has anyone ever extracted a password stored in a client like that?

I don't know anything about Skype but yes, people have definitely extracted passwords saved in IM clients like that.

There's no way he would have set things up to go from boot to skype without at least one password.

There's the possibility that the person knew the password to log into his computer and Skype was a startup program.

There's a difference between being security-minded and being a crypto-nut. If you're proud of the work you're doing and it's not secretive, why bother encrypting the hard-drive? Similarly, he wouldn't have been caught in the first place if he had been security-nutty about the process, but he didn't think he was doing anything immoral.

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