An association that's largely created by these tabloids in the first place.
"that's what "general public" wants to read about"
Maybe, but if that's what's required, they should be requesting an interview with him and only reveal what he agrees to reveal. If he wishes to, that could lead to a more insightful look at a man and his motivations rather than random paragraphs about pizza and surfing.
If he chose not to reveal anything, a responsible journalist would accept that and understand that the man has reasons for wishing to stay anonymous. Not dig into his information and publish it anyway, leading to both him and his friends being needlessly harassed for preventing crimes. At the very least, this could lead to future would-be Samaritans from deploying fixes or publicly detailing their methods.
At least they manages to increase their clicks with some facts rather than just making things up, I suppose.
I'm not saying that the current state of affairs is good or defending it; however, I think that the blame is misplaced and the problem lies in culture clash, not in malice (as often happens with the media).
I mean, you're right about his age and pizza and hobbies. They turn a tech-news story ("Major malware attack stops") into a human-interest one ("Meet the man who saved the internet"), which plays way better for these papers. The general public, or at least their readership, probably does enjoy those details.
And I suspect they didn't exactly consider this 'doxxing'. It's a less invasive piece than a lot of what they run, and the information was available via public sources. The Sun in particular considers felony phone-tapping fair game, so this is almost chivalrous by their standards.
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But... none of that justifies a damn thing. The general public wants plenty of things that are harmful or illegal, and we don't accept "people wanted it" as a defense of those things. The Sun, as I mentioned, proved that point in spectacular fashion.
Even conceding that the information was available, this isn't something excused by decent journalistic ethics. Publishing nominally-positive personal accounts about people without any attempt to contact them or let them request redactions is pretty odd. Showing up at their friend's houses without notice or interview requests to the main player is bizarre and unwelcome. Offering real name and location info on someone who just interfered with a major criminal action is downright irresponsible - he made the info available in the past, but might have felt pretty differently after interfering with this attack. Using his Twitter photos (unembedded) is comparatively harmless, but it's also illegal!
So yeah, I see why there was a human-interest piece run here. But that doesn't actually justify how the thing was handled.
Really, a remark like that is on the same level as someone calling mathematics "pointless and kind of boring".
What makes it particularly not-pointless, is that it allows one to discuss these things without you having to feel any need to defend yourself because indeed you didn't say anything about "excuse" or "justify".
Similarly, math allows us to say "two plus two equals four" without anyone having to jump in and clarify that they never said it wasn't four.
It's absolute no excuse for the doxer.
> MalwareTech doesn’t give out his name on his Twitter page or blog. There are no headshots. It’s obvious that he just wants to be left alone to get on with what he enjoys – hacking shit, and figuring out how stuff works.
For a modern mainstream internet user, who sees that everybody goes with their real names and photo (except trolls), it's not obvious.
> stalking other people’s Twitter and Instagram accounts
How can reading information that people have voluntarily posted online for everyone to see can be called "stalking"?
> The weird emphasis about his fondness for pizza, and how he works from a small bedroom in his parents’ place? That shows they don’t actually respect him, or what he’s accomplished.
To me, it shows just that they were interested to paint a picture of a human being instead of just a username. I feel that HN audience is very used to talking to someone whom they know just by a nickname, with no personal details or information - but for the general public, the concept of "anonymous hacker" is not associated with anything good.
> Why do I need to know his age, and that he enjoys pizza? Why do I need to know his name, or know what he looks like? Does anyone care that he enjoys surfing? It adds nothing to the story.
Look at any NYT or Guardian longread about a complicated issue that touches a lot of people - instead of analyzing statistics (as I personally would prefer), they always include an individual story or two, with unrelated personal details, to make the reader feel "connected". Only logical to assume that, while to me, and probably, to HN reader, this is just irritating and distracting, that's what "general public" wants to read about.