Your HN karma is 1337 right now lol!

Yeah we had FXP hosts on most of the east coast universities. Those were the days of just having fun. Ironically it's the knowledge and experiences of being in the scene that quasi got me into working for the government and those letters agencies. I was fortunate that the only real trouble I caused was met with education and support rather than a harsh response. If I was born 5 years later with the slow deployment of ZERO tolerance policies I would have been screwed.

I still give back though, I have a few racked servers that are out there sharing torrents (all legal data), and run a bunch of crawlers for archive.org etc. It's as close as I can get these days to the olden days.

I'm sure it is a polemic terrain, but I really wonder if this is fair. Eager to hear opinions.

I consider (myself) and most people I know to have been children at 18 and up to several years older than that. But it's not like people wear their "maturity" levels on their forehead, so the justice system has to make an arbitrary cutoff somewhere.

Not saying it's ideal, and individual circumstances have to be considered, but it's the best a crude system can do.

There are exceptions, adults may have guardians and are effectively considered minors if they have mental problems for instance, and in some cases, children can be emancipated. But these are usually for extreme cases.

I saw some neuroscience research once that indicated you don't really mature until your early 20s.

That said, in some cultures you are considered an adult at about 14 (mostly hunter gatherer cultures that lack the insane complexity and fundamental weirdness that we have right now).

18 seems a good rough split-the-difference, but equally, in an ideal world it'd be 21. That said, most people wouldn't want to wait that long to do responsible adult activities like drive cars too fast around the place, vote for the people who do the best job of lying, and consume borderline-lethal quantities of alcohol ... :-)

Edit: That said, super heavy penalties for what are effectively (technically speaking) victimless crimes might not be good for society overall - might be better to allow the existing offence rate for that crime.

For instance in the former soviet and satellite states people felt like there was no crime, because of propaganda despite the fact that there was a huge amount of it.

If the penalty is very high you will still think very hard about it even if you are good at evading detection.

It's a very common misconception that laws prohibit a given action. Getting straight to the point, they don't and can't: Mere words on paper can't stop a swinging fist, per se. The pen is not mightier than the sword.

Rather, the point of laws is deterence by consequence. You can swing that fist, and no piece of legalese can stop you in your endeavour, but that piece of legalese can and will stipulate the consequences for swinging that fist. The hope being the consequences will convince you to not swing that fist. The pen is not mightier than the sword, but the gavel can be mightier than the sword.

Obligatory IANAL.

The same applies to scams, drug dealing, and other nefarious activities.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement_in_the_Un... [1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/02/united-state...

As I understand it, in other places, like Australia, employers don't do a background check exactly. They send the job description and the candidate info to a government agency that just answers back "yes" or "no". So that, for example, a hacking conviction might disqualify you for some jobs, but not ALL jobs. And you have some idea beforehand the kind of jobs you might have success passing for. The offense is very specifically weighed against the job description, and not just some HR person's delicate sensibilities.

To me, barring some extreme exceptions, it's not fair for punishment to extend beyond what you were sentenced to. There's also peripheral issues, like the plea bargain system, which gives prosecutors lots of leverage to "convict" people that are either innocent, or guilty of a lesser crime than they plea to.

Unfortunately this does not avoid them using "3rd party" services but it is refreshing to know employers can't have a data trawl from the Government.

- only relevant convictions are assessed against.

- most states expunge convictions after a certain number of years. Those convictions will not ever be considered in any job application ever, nor any court case. There are some small number of exceptions.

- your record is as tightly held as a state secret.

- there is no third party access to records beyond police and courts.

- there are no for-profit prisons with quotas. I don't believe there are many, if any, for profit prisons at all. They are looked down upon.

- the judiciary is well educated, career accomplished, is not voted in, and has an expectation of continued professional development.

- the judiciary tends to be more progressive than politicians, focusing on interventions and improvement rather than incarceration, where appropriate and possible.

None of it's fair.

A servile government, with license to use force/incarceration, bent on defending putrid industrial system that hordes as much rights for itself as it can? That has extended copyright to 70 years, by crook & by hook? The whole thing is a sham, a disgrace to the human spirit, a scourge upon the earth.

The damage numbers are all made up. These people get punishments exceeding those of violent crimes. It's all deeply unfair & unjust & immoral. The system debases itself by being a mean, cruel, unjust bastard with no remorse to adults. It's pathetic & weak & servile to the worst aspects of society. Asshole Jack Valenti piece-of-shit RIAA lawyers & trashbag DRM systems are a heavy foot of injustice stomping down on the face of society, forever & ever. It's all woefully biased brutally against society & social possibility, for the greed of very few.

Alas there's seemingly next to no representation for the human cause. Patents & IP rights grow, & seemingly little curbs them, ever. The proprietarization of knowledge & intellect ever expands, a system unable unwilling & uninterested in checking the expansion of intellectual ownership. Fucking shit show man. Fucking awful. Fuck all this.

The way decisions, actions, arguments and repentance work in real life, as regularly seen with children, is usually on a short time frame. If you really need to punish someone - questionable in itself - maybe bring back the whip, but let people walk with a clean record the next day. If people can't be put back into society, they could be subsistence farmers with a netflix account in a fenced in plot of land or something. A significant change in scenery, and some forced lifestyle changes could be OK as part of a judgement

But putting humans behind bars? Nah...

I vaguely remember an intrincate big ascii logo, always wondered what 1911 meant.

> "The group was founded as Razor 2992 by Doctor No, Insane TTM and Sector9 in Norway in October 1985 as a Commodore 64 software cracking group. Shortly after, they changed from 2992 to 1911 which translates to 777 in hexadecimal."

Next question might be what is 2992? My best guess is it's b00b in little endian hex?

Aside from cred, there were a lot of like minded people and back then it was hard to find locals who were into computers/tech, so it was sort of a social network of sorts on IRC back then, I made real friends that I still keep in touch with today, so in a way it was a shared social activity.

One fun anecdote: When I was like 14, I got on a PBX 1800# call with some folks in a group I was in and it kind of blew my mind that I was talking to someone in Israel. It was like the world opened up. That is not novel today, but back then the idea of socializing and sharing ideas with people across the world in real-time (for free) was extremely exciting. Keep in mind back then long distance cost per minute, as did much of the dial-up internet.

About law enforcement: not much. Because I did see that minors were usually spared any real consequences, I mainly avoided anything that involved profit (though I once unwittingly bought a stolen modem for cheap, when it's that cheap you kind of know). There was an uptick of paranoia when Kevin Mitnick was busted (in the town I lived in), but for the most part we weren't doing the same kinds of crime he did (some of the folks I knew were, one ended up in prison for ~13 years). I also stopped being involved when I turned 18, which was a smart move. I got a visit from the FBI or state police (I don't remember) once, and my parents nearly shit a brick, and gave me a stern talking to because they were freaking out, but it turned out they were looking for a flasher who had been going around on Halloween! whew!

Thanks for sharing!

The reason was the juice. The excitement of sending stuff around the world before everyone else. I never cracked on x86 just a little bit with 6809.

I was a courier in late 90s(anyone recall FlashFXP). Fall of 1999 is when isonews.com(some old schoolers here will remember this website) got their homepage owned by the FBI. I left the scene that day.

IIRC the statute of limitations for the CFAA only has a statute of limitations of 2 years, but there are so many other laws outside the CFAA (and copyright, etc.) that you can violate.

Was released a few hours later under Doom_3-RELOADED

Was one of two heads of DRG gaming labs at intel in the 90s...

Yeah Razor was massive back in that day and we ran a massive warez bbs out of that lab....

we got pre-deploy releases and....

the other guy went on to be evp of dev for blizzard...