

Foiled: Hacker's Audacious Plan to Rule the Stolen-Data Black Market - kwamenum86
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-01/ff_max_butler?

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brandnewlow
The money quote, from the last page:

"I couldn't figure it out; what is this guy doing? Why doesn't he just go get
a job? Then it dawned on me, many years later: Max just likes to hack."

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peregrine
Great Article. The guy had balls.

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ramchip
_Butler gave him a shopping list of equipment he'd need to get started,
including a new laptop, military-grade crypto, and an antenna._

Out of curiosity, what's a "military-grade crypto"?

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DLWormwood
An out-of-date term since before the Internet went "pop." Early on, when the
U.S. military was reluctant to allow civilians full access to cryptographic
technology, there were still laws on the books limiting consumer e-mail
clients and the like to 40-bit encryption. When Moore's Law eventually made
this kind of barrier breakable in milliseconds, the laws were changed to allow
128-bit encryption to be "exported." Nowadays, there's no real limit due to
most crypto research being driven overseas, although I don't remember if the
arbitrary key size limit was finally removed in the U.S. proper.

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jcl
I think the real question is: "What item on a shopping list could 'military-
grade crypto' refer to?" The term conjures up a black-market, backroom deal
for something smuggled out of an air force base, but the reality is that a lot
of "military-grade crypto" software is available legally for free... and I'm
guessing these guys are not above pirating anything non-free. So what were
they buying? Staunch's rationales above are fairly convincing.

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far33d
This is one of those articles that makes me think that Wired might be worth a
subscription.

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pchristensen
This one, the one about the ship full of Mazdas tipping over, etc. I'm a
little suspicious of the magazine as a whole - if there a higher percentage of
stories were excellent, wired would be on HN more.

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asdflkj
I've read a few decent Wired articles, but none as good as this one or the
Mazda-ship one. Do you remember any of the "etc", perchance?

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pchristensen
Mother Earth Mother Board is the classic.
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html>

Get comfy before you read it though - it's lllllllooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnngggggg.

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gcheong
Linkedin shows a Charity Majors working as a sysadmin at Linden Labs.

