zlacker

>>thirty+(OP)
I was not aware he was ill. Always sad to hear people that are taken by cancer.

I didn't know Kevin, but am friends with Tsutomu Shimomura who worked with authorities to get him arrested. Tsutomu worked with me a bit when I was at Sun trying to get a cryptographically secure subsystem into the base system specification. It was fun to listen to his side of this story.

The 80's was a really weird time for computer enthusiasts, and it was the period of time when what was then considered the "hacker" community schismed into what today we might call "white hat" vs "black hat" hackers.

As a person who considered themselves to be part of that community I was personally offended by how the story of Kevin painted everyone who thought of themselves as a "hacker" as a criminal. It made for good story telling to make these folks "pirate" or perhaps more accurately "privateer" types in their swashbuckling ways of sticking it to the man. People would say, "Exposing security holes is like solving puzzles (which is fun) and important because if I don't do it, well somebody 'bad' will." And while I'm here, why not make it hurt for them a little bit to incentivize them to fix this problem quickly!"

I didn't disagree with the importance of pointing out security problems, but the flamboyant way it was done scared the crap out of people who were both clueless and in a position to do stupid things. As a result we got the CFAA and the DMCA which are both some of the most ridiculous pieces of legislation after the so called "patriot" act.

The damage that did to curious people growing up lost the US a significant fraction of their upcoming "innovation" talent. While not diminishing the folks who leaned in to the illegality of it.

>>ChuckM+Jd
Markoff and Shimomura received $750,000 for their book rights and $650,000 for the film rights. The most sensational parts in the book or the movie had absolutely nothing to do with the truth.

Sharknado is closer to reality than Track Down. The cringest part is Tsutomu's fictional gf.

>>29athr+6s
Take Down (the movie) was fantastic fiction, and even showed Mitnick as convicted before he even was.

However my cringiest take away from the book was Simomura's detailing of what he was eating which seemed to have so many mentions that at times I thought it was a healthy eating dialogue.

>>dijit+NM
Anyone who knew Kevin, knew that Takedown was complete BS - "fiction" or not.

You'd be better off watching Freedom Downtime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Downtime

https://archive.org/details/FreedomDowntime-TheStoryOfKevinM...