Verify you have a well established way to contact you about security vulnerabilities. (There will be vulnerabilities. Things like "anonymous mode" are harder than you'd think to make... trust me.)
never thought being a script kiddie would make me smart, but here we are in 2026.
i had one place, they were using all these shady pay with a credit card for "points" to do these web gui things that were... basically nmap, dig, etc?
so i wrote up a small shell script that took in the servers our (often nonprofit) clients wanted scanned...
and so we could lower our costs and free up analyst time -- but sadly they often found out they had out of date windows boxen they couldn't afford to fix, and we'd have to settle for getting them onto MFA, using password managers and basics like that.
people overvalue AI imho. people are getting weak, they don't teach themselves the concepts that would allow them to make best use of AI.
anyways, i think the type of person freaking out is the same who's been cutting and pasting from stack overflow rather than learning enough to grab a book or read up on a library to get the needful done.
but hey, what do i know? i'm just some freak on hacker news
>Stop living for your idea of others and start living for yourself.
Unfortunately, I exhausted my emergency fund trying for certs and attempting to escape a domestic violence situation, so I do not have that option. I'm trapped.
>He got all of the "Free Kevin" attention because of how long he was left in jail before trial and then being stuck in solitary confinement after sentencing for months.
That was uncalled for on the part of DOJ.
>He was also autistic, a lot of the behavior can be explained through that lens.
I'm autistic. Maybe I should go commit a bunch of felonies to increase my chances of a good job and stature in the hacker community, since things like publishing code, publishing peer reviewed papers, and mentoring newbies have not been productive ways of finding gainful employment nor respect of my peers.
I have friends who did things like take a gap year to travel the world or met their spouses on nights I stayed in to study, and some evenings when browsing HN I feel very sad that I wasted my 20s on a society that does not care about me.
Anyways, sorry to wall of text, but what you said really struck a nerve with me -- there are hierarchies in any community, and one thing I've noticed with the hacker scene is one group of people can mess up over and over using the same sets of facts or diagnoses, but others can expect to have worse outcomes with better behavior for reasons that elude me to this day.
>I'm old enough to remember all the "Free Kevin" gifs scattered around the internet.
A generation of hackers (specifically, the vBulletin generation) stayed as far away from the CFAA as possible after that fiasco, which I suspect is exactly the chilling effect that the DOJ intended.
I have so many stories about his absolutely terrible behavior at conferences. He once refused to pay the entry fee to a charity event and had to be physically ejectedy.
Absolutely better at PR than any actual work, pay careful attention and none of his early stuff was particularly novel, from a technical perspective.
But for whatever reason, we venerate him just because he was victimized by the state. The world is not a dichotomy -- sometimes bad things happen to bad people.
Sadly the ones conservative on AI tend to also be conservative on things like WFH or honoring the hacker manifesto. (Judging based on religion, national origin etc)
And where do we go from here? Law? Medicine? The trades?! Every path seems longer and/or more precarious, but I feel like I've had the same uncertainty as my friends who were writers and artists despite losing many a night (and many a partner) because I worked longer hours but ended up in the same precarious place as my peers.