I feel like I have to defend the parent here. My experience in the nulling/warez/pirating community is that it tends to be young adults doing the majority of the work and mostly they do it for kudos and not monetary benefit.

Adults might be giving them the kudos, but the hard work (again, in my experience) is young adults, of school age.

A lot of them started as young adults, but the scene has been going on for over 20 years. Some people quit over time, and some other joined as they got old enough to contribute, but I wouldn't paint with as wide of a brush as you're doing.

these young adults havent learned the utility and nessecity of anonymity

Young adults aren't breaking into streaming devices to extract the CDM keys. They also aren't running trackers like Orpheus and Redacted. Those are small examples, but I'm not sure I understand how young adults would ever have the mobility and network to do these things.

George Hotz (geohot) was a teenager when he cracked the iPhone and was 20 when he cracked the PS3. So...yes, young adults certainly can extract keys if they have the time and motivation, and being young adults they often have plenty of time on their hands.

Using George Hotz as an example is pretty disingenuous. He is clearly not your average young adult, even for the average of HN.

That was some funny stuff. Watching this guy make Sony freak out and chase after him down the street with lawyers. Halt varlet, for I shalt sue!

Er, you may not have been a young adult with l33t hardware hacking skills, but others were.

Odd comparison, I wasn't basing this off of my experience as a young adult.

They are. Plenty of them are more than talented enough for it.

Can you provide a counter-example or is this all anecdotes?

It was definitely the case for me! I aged out of warez when I got a full time job.

I think the warez ‘golden age’ was 1995-2015.

Before that most of the protections were just not that severe (and thus interesting), and after 2015 Steam, Netflix and Spotify severely stemmed the influx of people being exposed to piracy and thus potentially going deeper into the culture.

Tangentially related but I think that’s also why in a strange way the advent of the smartphone and other ‘curated technological experiences’ has lowered computer literacy for the average person born after ~1995.

Yeah, I think software piracy was a huge part of technological learning for me from an early age, figuring out how to the name of what I was even looking for (cracks, Warez), using astalavista, early torrent clients, forwarding ports, finding good torrents, using a firewall to block applications, applying cracks, learning about loaders, key generators, patches, protectors, and later reverse engineering and cracking software myself... staring at assembly in IDA for a few days straight so you can do something no one else online has done is a pretty interesting experience and probably one of the most formative ones to my enjoyment of computing.