“Sounds ill ey gahl” … “Eh, kinda.”

December 5, 2023 12:44 AM

“We’ll do it a few times,” Josiah remembers thinking. “We’ll cause trouble for a little bit, and then we’ll just forget about it. We’ll stop.” from The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-Killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story [Wired; ungated]
posted by chavenet (19 comments total)

This was a fascinating read. I remember the Krebs incident and his article on Anna-Senpai, but it was great to have this bigger picture and context, as well as the follow-up. Hats off to restorative justice in cybersecurity!
posted by Dysk at 2:27 AM on December 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Generally the best outcome you could hope for. But this to finish off:

Paras Jha and Josiah White work together for a high-frequency financial trading company.

My eyes rolled so hard I almost injured myself. Same same, but legal this time.
posted by deadwax at 3:18 AM on December 5, 2023 [17 favorites]

I found myself having to confront my own carceral tendencies toward the end of this story. Like, really, why aren't these wrecking-ball brats in jail, I was thinking.

But the restorative justice work the perps undertook does, in the end, strike me as the best available outcome.

It frustrates me still that so many young people are so socially incompetent -- like, unable to perceive harm to others as problematic -- and we seem to have very little chance to intervene with a lot of them.
posted by humbug at 5:24 AM on December 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

That was a fascinating read.
I wonder if there are any initiatives by white hat hackers to recruit young people before they get so far into crime?

And also whether these three truly didn't understand the actual harm they caused to individual people, or if it was more that they didn't want to know.
posted by Zumbador at 5:39 AM on December 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

It frustrates me still that so many young people are so socially incompetent

i don't know what country you're writing from, but at least in the US, it probably has to do with the large number of socially incompetent adults setting the examples
posted by kokaku at 6:11 AM on December 5, 2023 [15 favorites]

Yeah, kokaku, that is 100% fair (and yes, I'm a USAian).

I teach a college course about inequities in and because of IT. Last spring I had a white dude openly ask why he or anyone else should care about said inequalities.

I can honestly say that I never in my life imagined a student asking such a question. I was so flabbergasted and horrified that I can't say I handled it particularly well in the moment. He promptly dropped the class, several weeks in. He's graduated by now, and I would bet quite a lot that he's gonna go out in the world and do a shit-ton of harm, and there isn't a damn thing I can do about it now. I missed my moment.

This spring I'm gonna kick off the course with Rawls and the Original Position and I'm just gonna say, if this is not a formulation of a just and decent society that you can get behind, get the (m-f, implied) out of my class because there is just nothing I can teach you.

This story hit me where it hurts because the three wrecking-ball brats reminded me of the kid I couldn't teach, and by extension, how many people I can't teach.
posted by humbug at 6:21 AM on December 5, 2023 [27 favorites]

I'm dubious that "restorative justice" ever includes going "to work for the FBI".
posted by jeffburdges at 8:09 AM on December 5, 2023 [8 favorites]

That was surprisingly moving!
posted by mittens at 9:37 AM on December 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

*It frustrates me still that so many young people are so socially incompetent -- like, unable to perceive harm to others as problematic*

Young people? I'd love to visit wherever you are where people grow out of it. See: the adjacent Blue article on piracy.
posted by kjs3 at 10:28 AM on December 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

Last spring I had a white dude openly ask why he or anyone else should care about said inequalities.

I can honestly say that I never in my life imagined a student asking such a question.

I don't mean to be insulting, but I honestly can't imagine anyone who seriously studies this who *hasn't* seen this attitude on display. I mean, I'm no academic, just an IT droog, but I doubt I've gone more than a couple of days in my entire multidecade career where someone didn't make some comment to the effect "disadvantaged? fuckem.".
posted by kjs3 at 10:35 AM on December 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

> This spring I'm gonna kick off the course with Rawls and the Original Position and I'm just gonna say, if this is not a formulation of a just and decent society that you can get behind, get the (m-f, implied) out of my class because there is just nothing I can teach you.

there are a number of powerful critiques of the rawlsian concept of the veil of ignorance and you would be remiss not to include them. more generally, once you open the moral philosophy box you're morally obligated to pull more than one ethical framework out of it.

the critiques that carry the most weight for me are the ones about how 1) imagining the veil of ignorance involves separating out selfhood from the materiality of the self, i.e. postulating that there's a hypothetical self out there somewhere in the past that is still recognizably a self despite that self's disembodied nature, 2) imagining that all people, or at least all redeemable people, will upon hearing the concept automatically become egalitarians, and (this is the one that makes me dislike the concept) 3) assuming that it's ethical to put self-interest at the core of one's ethical system, even when the self-interested self is imagined as somehow shucked of its body and then cast backward into some hypothetical blank slate scenario.

there are other valid critiques.

by mandating a rawlsian take on moral philosophy you'd be mandating a fundamentally liberal slash individualistic moral framework under the assumption that only bad people would ever disagree with that framework once properly exposed to it. any decent student would have every right to kick your implied motherfucking ass for trying to pull that nonsense.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:36 AM on December 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was responsible for product security at my old job and I got access to the Mirai source code early on. It was remarkably simple and it's only because Internet of Things devices have such poor security that it worked at all.

Tellingly, it's still working and has spawned a number of derivatives as well.
posted by tommasz at 1:22 PM on December 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

by mandating a rawlsian take on moral philosophy you'd be mandating a fundamentally liberal slash individualistic moral framework under the assumption that only bad people would ever disagree with that framework once properly exposed to it.

No, I'm saying that any person who disagrees with the framework won't get anything much out of my class. Which I think is pretty accurate, on the whole. I will of course try to leave the moral valence out of the equation.

Thanks for the notes on critiques. Much appreciated.

kjs3: Fair point. For me the shock came from a place of "how does a person like that self-select into a course like this?" The course isn't required for any major or program (though it does fulfill an undergraduate breadth requirement).
posted by humbug at 4:20 PM on December 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

It frustrates me still that so many young people are so socially incompetent -- like, unable to perceive harm to others as problematic

I agree, but I also found the gradual one step at a time slide into problematic and illegal behaviour plausible and it did give me a moment of pause. I once (maybe twice actually?), decades ago, found myself driving a friend of a friend "just for a quick drop off" of an eye opening amount of extremely illicit substance and I can very easily see how that might have become a habit. I could probably have made it pay better than delivering pizza and it was all so casual and friendly and easy and no big decisions were in sight. Perhaps I did have some wits about me in the end but the reality was I never got asked to make a habit of it and I'm not 100% sure how things would have gone if it had just kinda happened.
posted by deadwax at 5:57 PM on December 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

Sheesh. Kids these days.
posted by bz at 7:07 PM on December 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I once (maybe twice actually?), decades ago, found myself driving a friend of a friend "just for a quick drop off" of an eye opening amount of extremely illicit substance and I can very easily

My 16-year-old delivered some pot for a friend of a friend the other day. He got paid 30 bucks for an hour work, plus some weed, which he doesn’t smoke. His other job is folding clothes in the back room at Marshall’s for twelve bucks an hour. Hopefully he won’t get asked again, or will turn it down if he does, but who could blame him?
posted by Well I never at 9:39 AM on December 6, 2023

I worked with an early-twenties guy who was a key part of the celebrity mass hack over a decade ago. No one who worked with him had any idea he was capable of doing that. He did not draw a sympathetic FBI agent/college RA as the head of his investigation, and he did not get a chance at the "community service" the kids in the article got. I wonder how he's doing these days.
posted by infinitewindow at 12:12 PM on December 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

humbug: Last spring I had a white dude openly ask why he or anyone else should care about said inequalities.

My esprit-d'escalier instincts tell me to try replying, "You seem like a logical person. Tell me something: why should you care about ... yourself? Why should anyone else care about you, or what you think? Why should anyone ... care about ... anything?"

Let the edgelord student do some normative justification for a change.

There are probably a variety of ways that that could go sideways, but I would like to enjoy my armchair smugness until someone comes along and explicitly mentions some of those ways.
posted by skoosh at 5:00 PM on December 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Why should anyone else care about you,

First prediction of sidewaysness but the dude will most likely (and quite sincerely) say that he doesn't expect anyone to care about him. He's never experienced not being the centre of care so he can't imagine what that really means so it seems trivial to him.

And of course, the very first indication of a situation that does not center his needs will provoke all of the butthurt.
posted by Zumbador at 8:29 PM on December 7, 2023 [2 favorites]