Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by darksaga 5567 days ago
My bs meter was high for a number of reasons. This paragraph was the most notable:

"Meanwhile she refuses to be chained to her computer, limiting herself to a few hours a night online. She rarely visits online forums "they’re boring"and a few days a week takes a course in college to further her goal of being a teacher. She lives in an English-speaking country not the U.K.but won’t say more about it"

So the previous paragraph stated she was "memorizing Windows Opcodes and scouring source code for exploitable bugs", but then suddenly she only spends a few hours online? Not likely. Most hardcore hackers I know don't just drop off the radar. The hunt to break into systems is like a drug. I have yet to read about, or know any hacker who simply spends a few hours online a day. At the speed internet security moves, this person's knowledge would be useless inside of 6 months.

Also, how does this person maintain her expert hacker knowledge with a few cursory hours a day on the internet? Literally impossible. Add in the admission she deletes all her emails and wipes all her drives clean? Really? Does this person memorize every line of code she uses then?

My conclusion? A carefully crafted profile of an Anon personality. Although I have no doubt this person probably exists, it certainly is not a 16 year old girl, and a majority of the information in the article is total BS. When you apply some very basic logic, the story just falls apart.

2 comments

> Add in the admission she deletes all her emails and wipes all her drives clean? Really? Does this person memorize every line of code she uses then?

I agree that the persona is bullshit and that 'she' is a probably a mid-to-late 20s male but...

Where does it say that she/he deletes wipes all her drives clean? It only says that (s)he wipes her web accounts. From reading the article, (s)he keeps her personal files/documents on a MicroSD card; quite a smart and disposable solution really.

Perhaps the personal files are encrypted also? It's interesting to imagine what other steps you could take to protect your privacy, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to do alternating sharding at the bits and bytes level over SSH with off-site storage (Half on MicroSD, half off-site), does any tool do something similar currently? You could even put a self-destruct timer on the offsite storage (if last_login > 5 days ago: format hard drive with 40-pass erase) or maybe a kill-switch containing sensitive informatoin (ala Wikileaks).

She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. "I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds," she says by e-mail.
"A few hours" could be anything between 2 and 8-10 hours. When I was a teenager I'd get in front of the computer as soon as I got back from school and keep the computer on until I went to bed. That added up to ~6 hours a day on average. Anything more would be unrealistic for someone who needs to go to school every day.

Some of the other discrepancies, though, look more suspicious. The very notion that a security-conscious person who has just committed a federal crime would spill so much about his/her life in a random newspaper article reeks of BS.

8-10 isn't something you "limit" yourself to. From the context of the sentence "a few hours" suggests 2-3.