
After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered - signa11
https://forklog.media/after-10-years-in-tech-isolation-im-now-outsider-to-things-i-once-had-mastered/
======
wpietri
This is a decent account of how much has changed, and he conveys the sense of
alienation well. But what strikes me is that he talks about the whole thing
like something that unaccountably happened to him. He didn't install botnets;
he was arrested for installing botnets. Botnets that he somehow sees as part
of the "true spirit of hacking", from the long-lost innocent age of 2009, when
pure curiosity was the only motive. In reality, the botnets of the time were
a) industrial-scale commandeering of other people's gear, and b) widely used
for spam, DDOSing, and crime. [1]

I am perfectly willing to believe that his sentence was egregious, as federal
prosecution is often more about a prosecutorial win than any real sense of
justice. But given that he still seems unable to take responsibility for his
choices, I could also be persuaded that having him away from a computer for a
decade was perhaps on net the best thing for society.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botn...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botnets)

~~~
fsloth
All of his hacker ethos feels very superficial to me. I.e. get this or that
gizmo under control etc. There does not seem to be a deep curiosity for CS or
maths as such, rather a childish joy in opening other peoples locks and taking
other peoples hardware under control.

That was cool in the 70's when telecoms infrastructure wasn't commoditized. I
understand how enticing it is to hack big co telephone networks, for example.
Big, big machines with very strict access rights.

2009\. Computing and communications infrastructure is commoditized. The world
is literally swimming in computers. There is no unusual computing or telecoms
capability you can harness by breaking into another system. It just means you
want to break into the system instead of actually using your own.

It's pedestrian and rude, like stealing someone's umbrella.

Plus, he breached the implicit trust in him as an employer.

10 years is a lot, though, for bad taste and disappointing social graces.

~~~
jonny_eh
These days it's more interesting, and justified, to hack into your own
hardware, that you legally bought and own.

~~~
fsloth
Yes. The direct analogue is trying to pick your own lock, versus picking a
lock in someone else's property just for kicks.

~~~
facorreia
Not even picking locks. More like smashing people's windows, grabbing food
from their fridges while enjoying the satisfaction of being a l33t hax0r.

~~~
ta17711771
A better analogy might be using the same encryption key Volkswagen and Audi
were shipping as security to every car to steal a car...

------
annoyingnoob
I recently had someone in a restroom ask me how to flush the toilet. The
toilets had IR sensors and flushed automatically. This person had been in
prison for many years and had never seen that before.

I think part of the social reform that people are protesting for recently
needs to extend to people in prison. Our system does nothing to rehabilitate
people or to prepare them to re-enter society. We need to treat prisoners like
humans and provide them with something, anything, to help them on the outside.
Our system really tries to keep you in the system.

The OP got a harsh sentence but I don't particularly feel much empathy. I
could have gone the black hat route too, but I didn't.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
FWIW, the rest of the world considers prison sentences in the US to be
absurdly long. This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of
Europe, you'd get less than that for murder.

~~~
stronglikedan
> This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get
> less than that for murder.

Both of those things are problematic, IMHO.

As for US sentences being absurdly long, I attribute that to the privatized
(profit-incentivized) prison system here. Abolishing that concept would be a
good starting point, I think, because it would eliminate a very large chunk of
the humanitarian problems in one fell swoop. Then we can work on the rest,
starting with the perverse incentives of the legal system itself.

~~~
austincheney
Sentencing is decided by a judge not by a prison warden. Beyond vague
conspiracy theories I don’t see the connection.

~~~
seisvelas
>Beyond vague conspiracy theories I don’t see the connection.

It's not vague at all. Private prisons lobby for mandatory minimums. Mandatory
minimums remove sentencing power from the judge:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_sentencing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_sentencing)

The older system you describe is called discretionary sentencing, it is a
dissipating vestige of the era before private prisons.

~~~
floor2
Important correction - the significant political power in the US comes from
the prison guards union, not a "private prisons lobby".

The prison guards union is an incredibly powerful lobbying force, which has
successfully increased prison sentences for many crimes, blocked efforts to
decriminalize marijuana, made more mandatory sentences, etc. Whether those
guards work in the 92% of prisons which are government run or the 8% which are
privately run makes no difference.

------
throwablePie
> "Caging me for a decade is not rehabilitating. I may be making excuses for
> myself, though there is a lesson that could have been learned with the same
> amount of value for justice if the sentence was 2 years, 3 years, 5 years,
> even 6 years." From the article at: [https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-
> hacker-ghostexodus-severi...](https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-hacker-
> ghostexodus-severity-of-my-crime-wasnt-based-on-what-i-did-but-what-i-could-
> have-done/)

I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in
prison is excessive for most non-violent crimes. I'm American but I live in
Asia so maybe I'm now an outsider. I'm not aware of any other country that
punishes this harshly.

Serious questions: Does any other country _routinely_ punish so severely? To
what end? At what financial and psychic cost to society? If we're unique
(exceptional?) why do we do this to ourselves?

~~~
desstap
You are in Asia right? Let’s see

China - disappeared for comparing xi jing ping the dictator to Winnie the
Pooh, or mention Hong Kong or Taiwan in a postiive light on wechat

Singapore - 2 years in jail for selling gum, death penalty for Having drugs

Vietnam - 34 years for drug trafficking

~~~
non-entity
> 2 years in jail for selling gum

What do they have against gum?

~~~
fencepost
Ever wondered what those black spots on city sidewalks are? That's gum. All of
it is gum that's been spat out then walked on until it acquires a top embedded
coating of city grime.

~~~
IHLayman
Are you seriously justifying a two year prison sentence for selling gum?

~~~
fencepost
Not at all, but nor do I choose to live in Singapore.

------
CalRobert
This bit at the end was the most interesting to me.

"For me, I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don’t really see meaningful
human interaction anymore. I see a society that is impossibly distracted by
likes and selfies, smartphones, and similar technologies, and I often find it
frustrating to find my place in the midst of this new interconnected world
simply because I was not there to naturally evolve with it."

~~~
V-2
Has it really changed _that much_ in 10 years, or is part of it just the sense
of alienation everyone experiences getting out of jail after a long time?

I mean, 10 years ago people lamented over the exact same thing; and before
that, and before the before.

I can't prove it of course, but I'd bet you might feel that "human
interaction" is not quite what you remember it to be if you had only just
spent 10 years behind the bars.

And that's even if the technological progress on the outside had stood
perfectly still for some reason.

~~~
ghaff
>has it really changed that much in 10 years

Yes (although I'd probably put the real dividing line at more like 12 years).
Facebook wasn't available outside of certain institutions until 2006, the same
year Twitter dates to. The iPhone was first introduced in 2007 and arguably
didn't really take off until the 3GS in 2009.

So, yes, the internet was well-established by the 2000s. But today's always
connected world of social media and everything else is only about a decade
old.

ADDED: Of course, if you turn back the clock about another ten years, for many
people it would be the difference between pre-Internet and a mostly broadband-
connected very commercialized internet.

~~~
mywittyname
I'd argue it hasn't changed much for technology people. I had an iPhone in 10
and used it constantly for the same thing I do today: news, web browsing when
away, and chatting with friends. My google history confirms this. I still use
the same gmail address, reddit, social media, Steam, bank, etc accounts.

I think the biggest difference for me is that I use spotify now for music,
rather than downloading it. And streaming video is now legit, so there's less
need for torrents and newsgroups.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
What's changed is social media. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram
all use machine learning to provide just the right feedback for us to keep
cominng back for more. This has hijacked our dopamine feedback loops and
changed the way we interact with each other.

I know personally, my attention span is much worse than it was years ago. It's
tough to find friends, and if I weren't married, I bet it would be tough and
highly competitive to find a mate. I think this has something to do with it.

------
indigochill
>The only solution to making me happy again would seem to download Ubuntu,
mount it to a USB thumb drive, and get it installed. Had I known that Windows
10 doesn’t utilize BIOS, but has replaced it with UEFI (Unified Extensible
Firmware Interface), which is a secure boot option that validates programs
before giving them permission to run, I wouldn’t have wasted two more days of
my life trying to install my favorite operating system.

I don't understand what he's saying here. I dual boot Ubuntu on my Windows 10
PC all the time (as well as using Virtualbox).

Otherwise, I'd say his accounting of the changes shows although he may be an
outsider simply by virtue of time away, he's still more savvy than the
majority of the population.

~~~
john-radio
> I don't understand what he's saying here. I dual boot Ubuntu on my Windows
> 10 PC all the time (as well as using Virtualbox).

I think you have to disable UEFI before you can do this.

~~~
Nursie
No, just the secure boot flag. Linux can EFI boot, and most UEFI bioses are
perfectly happy to boot 'legacy' BIOS OS images as well. You just have to
figure out how to disable windows-only mode.

~~~
Izkata
If it's even enabled in the first place. I don't think my Thinkpad was, but I
do remember my previous Asus did have it enabled.

------
martythemaniak
Surely I'm not the only one that thinks very little has changed in 10 years?

I hadn't built a PC (nor used windows) between 2005 and 2016. After a few
hours of catching up on the newest names (ie, what's the cheapo intel line
called? What DDR version do I get? What is the SATA equivalent now?),
everything became super familiar. Putting everything together was much easier
(mouse cursors in BIOS?!) and looked a bit different, but amusingly familiar.

10 years ago I got a new Android from Google. Apple released a new iPhone with
a larger screen. I had an app on whatever Google Play was called back then and
this app still works on my phone. I read news online, I coded in Java,
Javascript and Python on my MBP. I read Paul Graham essays about startups and
posted comments on Hacker News.

The police had descended on my city (Toronto G20 in 2010), putting up massive
barriers, kettling protesters, making massive arrests and brutalizing people.
I was checking Twitter to see what was happening.

I booked flights on aggregators, booked hostel stays on websites and planned
my trips through Google Maps.

Sure, many particulars have changed (AirBnB vs hostelworld, more things on
phone vs laptop), but I honestly struggle to see much technological change in
my life. Getting a Tesla, which was completely unattainable in 2010, seems
like the technological highlight of the past decade.

Ironically, it seems our political situation has changed drastically over the
last 10 years while technology has been slowly spreading but remaining fairly
stable.

~~~
pphysch
There haven't been many experiential leaps in consumer hardware since 3D
graphics on 60Hz 1080p displays and touchscreens, wifi became established in
the early 2000s.

VR is still firmly in enthusiast space.

NLP/speech recognition has subtly come amazingly far for consumer products but
most people don't use it (or just aren't aware of it) due to the social stigma
of talking _to_ your phone in public.

------
jaybeeayyy
> That summer the temperature inside my cell reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit.

I hope people understand common this is in jails and prisons around the US.
The prison I worked at was the same way. We were told to lie about the
temperatures in the pods because the thermometers were broken but the common
areas would reach up to 100 degrees. Hell, even the control rooms would get
115+ because they wouldn't fix our air conditioner. I got heat exhaustion once
and had a heat stroke. These places are the worst human rights abuses in the
US and should immediately be abolished and replaced with something much less
sinister and more helpful.

~~~
3pt14159
People should go to prison for covering things like this up. 125F / 50C is
absolutely fucking ridiculous.

~~~
jandrese
Prisoners don't vote, politicians don't give a shit about them. 125F cells may
even been seen as desirable by people who consider prison as purely for
punishment or sequestering undesirables from society.

------
testplzignore
Not being able to talk to a lawyer is insanity. How is that legal?

~~~
sneak
The carceral state in the US is totally out of control. It is entirely common
that people are denied human rights in jail/prison, even prior to trial.

Effectively no one holds prisons or guards or medical staff in the US to
account for these incredibly common and widespread human rights abuses. The
parallels with US policing are clear (as is the systemic racism: the system is
working exactly as designed).

It even happens to innocent people:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder)

[https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-
ice-20180...](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-
ice-20180427-htmlstory.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-
prison_pipeline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline)

~~~
nix23
Well its normal that they denied human right's, maybe the most important of
it, it's called 'freedom'.

But i know what you mean.

Having private prisons is also a big NoNo i think, its like every single one
state service is corporation driven ;)

~~~
rayiner
Private prisons are a red herring. The vast majority of prisoners are not in
private prisons, and states have been moving to get rid of them. In many big
states, like New York and Illinois, private prisons weren’t legal to begin
with. Rikers, the NYC jail famous for its abuses, was public.

People make private prisons to face of prison abuse for tactical reasons. In
reality, the story of the American prison system is the story of the
government: voters who demanded “tough on crime” laws; brutal publicly run
police; harsh publicly operated prisons; all tied together and supported by
public unions.

~~~
selecsosi
This 100%. Private prisons are used to create a contrast statement for
corporate suppliers of prisons and lobbyists to "show" how cheaply operations
can be done. They are a conference booth to lure states in regarding shredding
prisoner QOL for a 6% revenue increase can work without increasing the inmate
death rate too much.

The Industrial private prison complex owner group don't want to operate, they
want to sell support, training, equipment and materials to public prisons not
operate (like a defense contractor), because a prison is very complicated
management problem and has little public reward over budget efficiency sadly
(things are changing but slowly).

------
raldi
_> Most inmates have computer access which uses a specialized access control
program that allows them to email approved contacts for .05 cents a minute._

Oh not this again
[https://slashdot.org/story/76748](https://slashdot.org/story/76748)

~~~
copperx
$0.0005 x 60 minutes = 3 cents per hour of internet. That's surely a better
deal than you can get in the civilian world.

------
platz
> certainly not the way I left it back when I was arrested in 2009 for
> installing botnets and commercial remote access programs on a handful of
> sensitive clinic systems, which included a critical SCADA system.That was
> how I became the first person in recent United States history to be
> convicted for corrupting industrial control systems.

> As I probe around the web and observe this new generation of hackers, I see
> individuals that have lost touch with the true spirit of hacking. A brood
> that is motivated by greed, revenge, and anger. Harmless curiosity has
> become a thing of the past.

Your Harmless Curiosity didn't stay so harmless in your case, did it?

Spare me your empty, hypocritical moralism - just like Kevin Mitnick.

------
xet7
Just couple days ago I had to help someone to find up-to-date webbrowser for
WinXP [https://feodor2.github.io/Mypal/](https://feodor2.github.io/Mypal/) to
use on internal network, they had no option to upgrade. Legacy apps are here
with us forever.

------
namelosw
> For me, I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don’t really see
> meaningful human interaction anymore.

People may think it's because he's been disconnected for so long. But I have
the exact same feeling, and think about this problem every day.

I'm a software engineer, and doing everything okay in the modern world. But I
mostly use smartphones as a phone like in the last century unless I have to, I
don't use most social media stuff, and I don't even take pictures.

I don't feel bad or sad about it because I was not interested in the first
place. But I feel disconnected, and cannot empathize with people. Everything
seems more and more pointless to me.

I wonder how many people feel the same, or it's just the op and me?

~~~
twodave
I haven't used really any form of social media (besides HN I suppose) in close
to a decade at this point, and I don't feel at all disconnected or left out.
Instead I tend to feel real benefits from:

1\. Being hard to "reach". If someone wants to talk to me, they have to call,
text, email or show up at my house. They can't just broadcast something on
their whateverplace and expect me to find it. That makes me appreciate the
people in my life who do make the effort to communicate with me personally. It
lets me know they value me as a person and that I'm worth their time.

2\. I am almost never tempted to think about my image. As a result I'm more
"in the moment" and also more certain of my own motives. If the family is
doing something fun, we can simply _enjoy it_. No need to document (though
there's certainly no rule about this, and plenty of candid pictures are still
taken). As someone who at times struggles with anxiety and loneliness, this is
one (very large) less thing to worry about.

------
wolco
Too bad he wasn't a frontend developer would love to see his take on the
changes

~~~
ryandvm
Honestly, front-end development is probably the most forgiving area of all for
tech workers returning from an extended hiatus.

Front-end churn is like the apocryphal factoid about the human skin replacing
itself completely every few years. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that
you're never more than 4 years behind the state of the art in front-end
development.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I got out of school in 2013 and then went to a job that was pretty self
isolated, working in proprietary format that wasn't really aware of the rest
of industry - at best there was some Python and some .Net work. I took another
position a couple of years ago where I got throw into the deep end of the
modern material - ASP.NET Core, Node, NPM, React, Typescript, modern ES, the
whole kit and kaboodle. I can tell you it took me a loooonnng time to get it
all figured out. A lot has changed in the latter half of this decade.

~~~
discordance
Do you think for the better? - I don't think so

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
.Net? Absolutely. Tools? Oh yeah. JavaScript, HTML, and CSS? Probably. The
sheer breadth of things you need to know to stay relevant? Not so much - it's
just too much.

------
Nursie
Well, that Dell Inspiron ought to have a BIOS/EFI switch to allow you to
deactivate the secure boot features, and there are ways to install ubuntu on
secure-boot systems using a shim. Failing that, there's now WSL...

But I guess 10 years is a lot of catching up to do!

~~~
toyg
If you don't know about UEFI, you are not going to look for a switch to turn
it off...

~~~
mikewhy
Secure Boot was introduced in 2006, approximately 3 years before this person
was incarcerated.

------
Supermancho
I don't think technology has progressed, in a meaningful way, since
2007...much less 2009. It's still all virtualized, cloud providers, instead of
servers. It's still digital advertising doing what it was doing in 2002.
Myspace and Facebook were around in 2009. Twitter hashtags is a footnote. A
lot of what happened is specific events, not technological leaps. I dunno,
maybe I'm influenced by how it's all seemed pedestrian since the internet took
over mainstream culture in the 90s and now it's just been refined to a sugary
powder that's delivered through phone screens.

~~~
throwaway894345
At least in the DevOps space, we can now develop applications without
mastering process managers, log exfiltration, ssh configuration / server
hardening, bin packing, configuration management, brittle infrastructure
provisioning scripts, etc. This is somewhat revolutionary in that it doesn’t
require specialists with decades of experience—devs can operate their own
services down to the infrastructure. This affords a lot of impressive
organization improvements even while the technology is nascent (lots of room
for improvement in the build, infrastructure management, and orchestration
spaces as well as in the “appliancification” of infrastructure or
“platformization” of the cloud, depending on how you want to look at it).

------
ConfusedDog
2009 didn't seem to be that far back to me. Sure, a lot has happened, but a
lot of skills are still transferable, especially in SCADA. Basic concepts of
OOP or security principles are largely the same as well.

~~~
qayxc
You seem to forget the prison time.

13 months of isolation alone have a devastating effect on the human psyche and
general cognitive abilities. Many of the negative effects (e.g. loss of self-
worth and cognitive abilities) are irreversible.

------
kungfufrog
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UKeHbrsF94&feature=emb_logo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UKeHbrsF94&feature=emb_logo)

One of the videos that got Jesse McGraw on the FBI radar and ultimately
arrested. I don't necessarily agree with the severity of his sentence or how
he was treated in prison, but his behaviour was pretty reprehensible and
juvenile.

It is sad he lost 10 years of his life from some pretty thoughtless actions
that I'm sure had he had more life experience would not have considered
undertaking.

------
tw04
I'm trying to figure out why he's even being labeled a "hacker". It sounds
like he installed a bot onto a system he already had access to as a security
guard then used it to packet other kiddies. I don't see anything about remote
exploits, or even breaking into a system - this is the epitome of script
kiddie.

I get talking yourself up and hustling to make money, but it feels like a
stretch to call this guy a hacker.

------
solarengineer
We’ve often had to relearn or learn. That’s what the author needs to do as
well. When faced with a totally new system, they’d have poked about and
grokked it.

Come to think of it, they have a massive advantage over many of us - the
absence of a distracted mind, the absence of short attention spans.

If they applied themselves to it, they can learn new stuff again.

Per society norms and laws, they did the crime and paid the time. I wish them
all the best with a fresh start.

------
devnonymous
While I sympathize with the OP and try to imagine what it would be like, I
have to wonder whether there /really/ is that much of change if we are
speaking strictly about linux, the internet and programming in general since
the last 10 years.

I know for sure that it isn't hard to get back to it based on the experience
of a friend of mine.

She was a sysadmin back in the 90s. A proper one. As geeky as any other linux
geek running Red Hat 6.2 with window maker as the desktop environment as her
main computing environment. At the turn of the millennium, she quit her job,
got married and had a couple of kids. After quitting her job she barely ever
kept in touch with computers. Of course, she browsed the web, used email
shopped online but I'm willing to bet she didn't ever open up a command
prompt. Her personal laptop ran windows and the house had one other computer
(a mac, IIRC). Everything in her life revolved around her family and kids. She
indulged in her other more satisfying interests of books and music if she ever
had any free time -- which was very very rare.

3 _months_ ago, now that the kids are old enough to not fuss and worry about,
she decided to install linux and get back into everything with the intention
of getting a job.

Last week she gave her first online talk for beginners (kids/teens). It was
about container fundamentals. She introduced container concepts, docker and
k8s.

By what I described it is perhaps hard to imagine just how disconnected she
was from what 'we'[1] call tech but she really was -- she quit tech when
Ubuntu was not even a thing !! ...and yet she was able to ramp up fairly
quickly.

[1] I'm acutely aware that for non-tech people tech chops could also mean
being able to use keyboard shortcuts where most people would use a mouse

~~~
devnonymous
For perspective, here's what HN looked like this day 10 years ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-06-10](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2010-06-10)

...have things _really_ changed that much ?

------
gorgoiler
My constitution gets weaker as the years go by. I had to stop reading after
the description of solitary confinement brought on a panic attack.

~~~
tagh
Maybe it's not your constitution weakening, but your empathy strengthening? If
more people felt injustices like this in their gut, the world would be a much
better place.

~~~
gorgoiler
Well said.

------
nonines
>> I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don’t really see meaningful human
interaction anymore. I see a society that is impossibly distracted by likes
and selfies, smartphones, and similar technologies, and I often find it
frustrating to find my place in the midst of this new interconnected world
simply because I was not there to naturally evolve with it.

For what is worth he's not alone in this. Being "interconnected" the way he
thinks he's missing feels actually being less connected than ever. In a way he
sees the right picture IMHO but he thinks he misinterprets things. I guess
it's his broken ego which puts these kinds of "I-must-be-wrong" filters in
front of him but if he ever gets rid of them I think that his vantage point on
the current techscape will be unique exactly due to him being absent of it for
so long.

------
canistel
_Windows has seized control._

This is exactly how I feel about Windows 10.

~~~
mikro2nd
Gosh, I felt that way about Windows 3.1. It got so bad around Windows 95 that
that was when I switched to Linux. I've never used Windows since, so when
people ask if I can help them "sort out their PC" the answer is... :)

~~~
capableweb
... "I'd love to help you, but I don't use Windows so might not be able to.
But let's take a look, since you're my friend and all and I want you to be
happy"?

~~~
mikro2nd
The truth is I am now _actually incompetent_ to help my Windows-using family
and friends. The answer is that I really _can 't_ help, no matter how much
goodwill applies.

I recently poked at a friend's Windows10 machine that was having networking
issues (probably DNS or proxy settings)... couldn't even find the right sort
of settings to paly around with. The whole thing is a mystery wrapped in an
enigma to me and causes me to break out in a rash when forced to deal with it.

To come back to the GP's original point: Windows assumes a level of control
over the hardware (accompanied by a level of ignorance from the user) that I
find intolerable. After all, I paid for that hardware; surely I get to control
it? ("Not so!" says Windows.)

~~~
capableweb
What? Really? If you're being placed in front of a different OS than what you
use you loose basic troubleshooting capabilities?

Look, I'm not using Windows nor OSX very often, when people ask me for help, I
mostly start out as helpless as them. But programmers (or generally computer
literate, or whatever you wanna call it) seem to have way better searching
skills, even for things they have no idea about.

So yeah, helping people with the windows/osx setup sucks, because I'm
completely lost. But if you're a linux user, you're probably used to searching
for knowledge in order to gain it. This also works for others OSes.

I'd understand if you don't want to help them out of principle, but please
don't call yourself incompetent when so many people have it so much "worse".
Mention "DNS" or "proxy" and they'll think you're speaking yiddish.

~~~
snazz
Yep. I haven't used any version of Android since 6 or 7 and I can still use
Google to find out where certain settings are.

------
Grustaf
>After 10 Years in Tech Isolation, I’m Now Outsider to Things I Once Had
Mastered

Seems like a pretty desirable outcome.

------
ed25519FUUU
> _That’s three showers a week. 23 /5 confinement to an 8X10 cell without air
> conditioning, a fan, or adequate ventilation. That summer the temperature
> inside my cell reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit. With no evidence to support
> the inmates’ accusation, I was supposed to be released back into the general
> population. But to make a long story short, that didn’t happen._

One of the reasons I'm really glad we're starting to get serious about prison
reform. Right now the conversation is intentionally narrowed to the historical
treatment of Black Americans, but I don't see how the conversation doesn't
lead to positive changes throughout the criminal justice system. A rising tide
raises all boats.

------
sneak
> _Some people refer to these facilities as “Black Sites” because they are cut
> off from the media, visitors, and lawyers so that what happens in there,
> stays in there. Interestingly enough, the Seagoville Federal Correctional
> Institution was once a Japanese internment camp._

> _That’s three showers a week. 23 /5 confinement to an 8X10 cell without air
> conditioning, a fan, or adequate ventilation. That summer the temperature
> inside my cell reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit. With no evidence to support
> the inmates’ accusation, I was supposed to be released back into the general
> population. But to make a long story short, that didn’t happen._

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its
prisons.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

~~~
randompwd
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

Also:

[https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dostoyevsky-
misprisioned...](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dostoyevsky-misprisioned-
the-house-of-the-dead-and-american-prison-literature)

------
chkaloon
I find it interesting that groups like Anonymous and Lulz Sec, whatever that
is, aren't more active right now. Seems like there's lots of opportunity for
causing mayhem at the moment. Maybe anti-cyber criminal work has gotten really
good?

~~~
y-c-o-m-b
Many of them were arrested. The leader of LulzSec - Sabu - worked with the
feds to capture several individuals. You can read about it on his wiki:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Monsegur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Monsegur)

~~~
mcast
> It was the laziness that got him.

> Sabu had always been cautious, hiding his Internet protocol address through
> proxy servers. But then just once he slipped. He logged into an Internet
> relay chatroom from his own IP address without masking it. All it took was
> once. The feds had a fix on him. ([https://www.foxnews.com/tech/exclusive-
> unmasking-the-worlds-...](https://www.foxnews.com/tech/exclusive-unmasking-
> the-worlds-most-wanted-hacker))

Fascinating that an auto-login setting on his mIRC client probably led him to
be caught.

------
CountSessine
_In the summer of 2011, I was appealing my sentence. I had no affordable way
to contact my attorney_

Just to be clear, is he saying that his prison was actually charging him
$0.05/email to consult with his attorney over his appeal?

~~~
y-c-o-m-b
I'm curious about this too. He also mentioned not being able to access a
lawyer at all when he was in max security. I thought access to a lawyer was a
constant right - even after incarceration - and available free of charge?

------
rungekuttarob
"Big advertisers are using metadata to collect and map any given users’
Internet behaviors for content marketing purposes. I, too, used to steal
users’ data. But it was a crime when I did it. Perhaps if I had sent them an
ad or two it would have been less illegal?"

I kinda laughed and cringed with fear reading this section and the sections
describing life as an inmate.

IMO it worries me thinking about the world he joined full of rights abuse in
prison and mass commercial surveillance of our data.

------
hntxfelon
Alt account for obvious reasons.

In 2003 I was sentenced to 6 years in a Texas prison. The how and why isn't
relevant, other than to say it was a terrible mistake I made seven years
prior. At that point, I was about 5 years into my tech career. I wasn't in
there for a "hacker" crime, so I was in general population, and had more
freedom than the author did.

As for prison conditions, not much I can add to the conversation. It was hot,
miserable, crowded, things we all know about. No real opportunity to improve
yourself; you mostly have to focus into your own little niche and do what you
can to keep yourself safe and maintain who you are as a person (it's easy to
lose yourself in "prison games")

Served a full six year sentence, despite never getting trouble. Parole release
for "good behavior" is a cliche.

During my time there, my wife divorced me and my father passed away.

There was some adjustment upon getting out. (2009) However, the first couple
of computers I used were actually running XP, so that was an easy adjustment.
I think the biggest adjustment was how much more prominent mobile device use
was (in 2003 I think I only received a text from one person ever, on my fancy
monochrome flip phone). From a development standpoint, gettting used to AJAX
was interesting, but to be honest, I did my best to keep up in prison, with a
handful of books I had sent to me.

I remember the first line of code I wrote, in a language I considered myself
and expert in. It felt familiar, but like I was pulling memories from a fog.
Eventually, the "muscle memory" of working in the language came back, but I
can see how it could be very frustrating for someone who was out of the loop
longer than I was.

First job was a remote role, $20 an hour. Some previous writings I still had
online sold the employer on my knowledge, and I actually beat out 4 people in
the interview. I was able to leverage some relationship I had before, get some
additional remote gigs, and continue to build my income and my life back up.

I was actually to be quite successful that way, building up my network,
finding contracting. Of course, I have constraints: traditional employers are
typically not an option, which includes most w2 contracting roles. I've had to
keep learning of course, and have more flexibility than the usual person who
can carve out a niche in one main technology or stack. However, I could work
around the issues of having a felony conviction and maintain a market-level
income. I've even had a couple of situations where I did have to discuss my
past and was able to work through it. (Again, sticking to strict 1099
contracting, and small companies is the key) However, contracting is no longer
a need: through my personal connections, I was able to turn was one of my gigs
into a full time significant role with all of the full time income and
benefits advantages you'd hope for.

I don't mean to diminish the challenges that many face, but I just wanted to
point out that a lot of presumptions aren't automatically true.

~~~
watwut
What are prison games?

~~~
hntxfelon
I use that as a general term to encompass all the ways you can lose yourself
to institutionalization. Some join gangs. Some get lost in stealing and
selling inside of the prison economy. Some "play" religion. Some pimp
themselves out. Some play politics and become informants. This isn't all
inclusive, nor does anything mean you'll lose your character and personality,
but institutionalization is real.

------
coldtea
> _“That’s the stupidest thing ever!,” I yelled at the TV. “Who’d want to put
> their greasy fingers all over a screen like that?” Apparently, everybody.
> Including me._

An aside, but I never understood microphobics and grease-phobics... Perhaps
it's part of not having grown in a 100% clinical/artificial urban environment
my whole life.

Yeah, you'll get some dirt on you and your things. Big deal...

~~~
NathanKP
I assumed that the author was thinking about screens 10 years ago, which
didn't have oleophobic coatings yet. So fingerprints and smudges built up in
layers really fast and made it hard to read the screen.

~~~
snazz
Yes, especially the junky plastic screens that would also get all scratched
up. And plastic screen protectors that would get scratched, bubbly underneath,
and had no effective oleophobic coating.

The modern Gorilla Glass screens and coatings used on iPhones and other
devices are so magical in comparison to those early cheaper smartphones.

------
djohnston
Not to nit but it's pretty trivial to dual boot windows 10 and Ubuntu. You can
even do it straightforward without a flash drive these days

------
ryanianian
I was ready to dismiss this as sour grapes, but ultimately he makes the point
that maybe we're _all_ out of touch with what's really going. The technology
space is no longer transparent in ways it once was.

> I, too, used to steal users’ data. But it was a crime when I did it. Perhaps
> if I had sent them an ad or two it would have been less illegal?

Yikes.

------
nudpiedo
What I see is also a deep reflection on how the hacking counterculture became
the norm but still it sells itself as minority obscure counterculture just to
be more popular. The same happens in other areas like social activism which
are now the thought of majority and distilling its original thoughts into a
fast-food alike consumerism.

------
Goose90053
"President Obama signed an executive order outlining emergency control of the
Internet, and thus the Internet kill switch was born."

WTF?? Is there an Internet kill switch capability? Will it work if invoked?

------
honksillet
What is really striking is the disparity in sentences for various crimes.
There is no way that this persons sentence should exceed that of a serious
physical assault or manslaughter. That is just outrageous.

------
mito88
"...McGraw installed a botnet to some of the computers to subsequently use it
to initiate denial of service attacks (DDoS) on the websites of rival hacker
groups..."

DDoS with "some" computers?

------
trhway
Nobody gets even close to 10 years for the 1st DUI - a clear endangering of
other people lives - yet potential endangerment by a hacker ... There is
something devil about those hackers.

------
vmception
Thats an interesting introspective.

It really sounds like he needs to get away from his 12 year old daughter, whom
unfortunately doesn't know him or have an opinion about him but is tolerating
his obligatory presence.

Despite the assumptions about tech proficiency thrown onto Millenials and
"everyone younger than me while I make excuses about being tech illiterate":
Gen Z doesn't know anything about computers, and would have a much more
foreign form of "meaningful human interaction" than what really is happening.

------
elvyscruz
I felt mixed emotions while reading the article. Information technology
changes so rapidly and time goes by really fast.

------
RickJWagner
A timely article, considering that there are currently hackers attacking
Honda, various law enforcement agencies, etc.

What seems poltically urgent to you today will pale in comparison to losing 10
years of your life if you're caught.

~~~
toyg
No need to try to twist this case for political expediency. Have a look at his
story: [https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-hacker-ghostexodus-
severi...](https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-hacker-ghostexodus-severity-of-
my-crime-wasnt-based-on-what-i-did-but-what-i-could-have-done/)

TL; DR: he was just an out-of-control kid squabbling with other hacker kids on
4chan. Hardly political at all.

------
jonnypotty
Cheers. Excellent insight

------
davidwritesbugs
I recently finished a 2.5 year stint in a UK prison and that was bad enough

------
nix23
Its terrible how the American system thinks about prison's.

Imagine he could do/learn something good in those 10 years, when he was locked
away to protect the public (and that really should be the only point for
prisons (protect the public))

~~~
JackFr
> and that really should be the only point for prisons (protect the public)

That's not true. Our prisons should protect the public, rehabilitate prisoners
in so far as they can, and, to an appropriate extent, punish.

Some people are skittish about the idea of punsihment. But it's abhorrent to
our sense of justice that one suffer no consequences after committing a crime.

Now in general I think our prisons and sentencing guidelines to a pretty
terrible job at all three of these things but that is another story
altogether.

~~~
minikites
>to an appropriate extent, punish.

What's the overall goal of punishment? We know it's not a deterrent to crime.
We know it doesn't help recidivism rates. The only remaining reason I can
think of is spite/hate.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Or, a sense of justice. A powerful emotion in people.

Who know how many more criminals there might be, if punishment was off the
table? Recidivism doesn't count that. So there's that social pressure too.

Its pretty easy to figure out 'why punishment', if you try.

~~~
rswail
Who knows how many fewer criminals there might be, if social safety nets,
providing for people's basic needs of food, shelter, health care and
education?

How do you cure homelessness? You provide homes.

How do you deal with mental and physical illness? You provide health care.

How do you give people are path forwards? You provide education.

All of these things are what our societies are _for_. To carry on about "law
and order" and even the "rule of law" without also quoting the part about
"promote the general welfare" is to completely miss the purpose.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
We should certainly provide all of those things. But even homeless people, ill
people, people with no direction in life can and should avoid committing
crimes.

------
emptyfile
Interesting story.

------
ptsneves
A bit ironic given that you are writing a comment in a social media website,
hacker news. :)

~~~
izzydata
[https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/](https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/)

------
buboard
The story seems off (temporally) for someone who got incarcerated circa 2010.
Nothing very interesting has happened to technology since then.

~~~
rootusrootus
That is what I was thinking, too. Hell, we had iPhones well before 2010. There
hasn't been any kind of tectonic shift in technology since 2010, just mild
evolution. Outside of a few specific areas (web frameworks, anyone?), skills
from 2010 should still be very applicable today.

Now, if the author was arguing that it's a mindfuck to be incarcerated for 10
years and it makes him feel out of place, and his mindset is no longer really
tuned towards technology, that I could totally believe. Just going to boot
camp for a couple months does the same thing, takes a few days to reattach to
'normal' after that. 10 years in jail would take a bit longer to adjust from,
no doubt.

~~~
Terretta
In Information Technology, I’d agree as well.

From ‘93 to ‘03 Internet tech got industrialized, commoditized,
commercialized. After an ‘03 to ‘08 consolidation phase, from ‘08 to ‘13 it
got packetized and packaged by CSPs of varying degrees of specialization or
verticality. Disruptive startup or OSS changes in last few years often emerge
from lessons learned in those CSPs in mid 00s.

Then this last decade has been spent on figuring out how to “declare” that
infotech stack of lego bricks and wire it together. We could get to a
consensus way to wire bricks and flows by ‘23 — more likely on bricks, less
likely on flows.

