Kevin Mitnick, Hacker Who Once Eluded Authorities, is Dead at 59 (dignitymemorial.com) 100
Kevin Mitnick, once the so-called "most wanted computer criminal in US history," died on Sunday. He was 59. The New York Times adds: The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer. He had been undergoing treatment at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center following his diagnosis more than a year ago, according to the King David Memorial Chapel & Cemetery in Las Vegas. After serving prison time for breaking into and tampering with corporate computer networks, he was released in 2000 and began a new career as a security consultant, writer and public speaker.
Mr. Mitnick was best known for the crime spree during the 1990s that involved the theft of thousands of data files and credit card numbers from computers across the country. He used his skills to work his way into the nation's phone and cell networks, vandalizing government, corporate and university computer systems. Investigators at the time named him the "most wanted" computer hacker in the world.
In 1995, after a more than two-year-long manhunt, Mr. Mitnick was captured by the F.B.I. and charged with the illegal use of a telephone access device and computer fraud. "He allegedly had access to corporate trade secrets worth millions of dollars. He was a very big threat," Kent Walker, a former assistant U.S. attorney in San Francisco, said at the time. In 1998, while Mr. Mitnick awaited sentencing, a group of supporters commandeered The New York Times website for several hours, forcing it to shut down. The next year, Mr. Mitnick pleaded guilty to computer and wire fraud as part of an agreement with prosecutors and was sentenced to 46 months in prison. He was also prohibited from using a computer or cellphone without the permission of his probation officer for the three years following his release.
From an obituary: Kevin was an original; much of his life reads like a fiction story. The word that most of us who knew him would use -- magnificent.
He grew up brilliant and restless in the San Fernando Valley in California, an only child with a penchant for mischief, a defiant attitude toward authority, and a love for magic. Kevin's intelligence and delight in holding the rapt attention of audiences revealed themselves early in his childhood and continued throughout his life. In time, he transitioned from pranks and learning magic tricks to phone phreaking, social engineering, and computer hacking.
When his desire to push boundaries led him too far astray, he landed in juvenile detention and eventually served a couple of stints in prison. His time on the FBI's Most Wanted List was well documented in his New York Times bestselling book, The Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker, and his other titles: The Art of Deception, The Art of Intrusion, both co-authored with William Simon, and The Art of Invisibility with Robert Vamosi.
Kevin emerged from his final prison term, which he deemed a 'vacation,' in January 2000. He was a changed individual, and began constructing a new career, as a White Hat hacker and security consultant. He became a highly sought-after global public speaker, a writer, and established the successful Mitnick Security Consulting. In November 2011, he became the Chief Hacking Officer and part owner of security awareness training company KnowBe4, founded by close friend and business partner Stu Sjouwerman.
Mr. Mitnick was best known for the crime spree during the 1990s that involved the theft of thousands of data files and credit card numbers from computers across the country. He used his skills to work his way into the nation's phone and cell networks, vandalizing government, corporate and university computer systems. Investigators at the time named him the "most wanted" computer hacker in the world.
In 1995, after a more than two-year-long manhunt, Mr. Mitnick was captured by the F.B.I. and charged with the illegal use of a telephone access device and computer fraud. "He allegedly had access to corporate trade secrets worth millions of dollars. He was a very big threat," Kent Walker, a former assistant U.S. attorney in San Francisco, said at the time. In 1998, while Mr. Mitnick awaited sentencing, a group of supporters commandeered The New York Times website for several hours, forcing it to shut down. The next year, Mr. Mitnick pleaded guilty to computer and wire fraud as part of an agreement with prosecutors and was sentenced to 46 months in prison. He was also prohibited from using a computer or cellphone without the permission of his probation officer for the three years following his release.
From an obituary: Kevin was an original; much of his life reads like a fiction story. The word that most of us who knew him would use -- magnificent.
He grew up brilliant and restless in the San Fernando Valley in California, an only child with a penchant for mischief, a defiant attitude toward authority, and a love for magic. Kevin's intelligence and delight in holding the rapt attention of audiences revealed themselves early in his childhood and continued throughout his life. In time, he transitioned from pranks and learning magic tricks to phone phreaking, social engineering, and computer hacking.
When his desire to push boundaries led him too far astray, he landed in juvenile detention and eventually served a couple of stints in prison. His time on the FBI's Most Wanted List was well documented in his New York Times bestselling book, The Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker, and his other titles: The Art of Deception, The Art of Intrusion, both co-authored with William Simon, and The Art of Invisibility with Robert Vamosi.
Kevin emerged from his final prison term, which he deemed a 'vacation,' in January 2000. He was a changed individual, and began constructing a new career, as a White Hat hacker and security consultant. He became a highly sought-after global public speaker, a writer, and established the successful Mitnick Security Consulting. In November 2011, he became the Chief Hacking Officer and part owner of security awareness training company KnowBe4, founded by close friend and business partner Stu Sjouwerman.
Interesting dude. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Pro Vaxxx (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see why you chose the anonymous coward route. If you have any evidence at all that vaccines cause cancer then please share it. Otherwise your comment comes across as unhinged loon.
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Bitchute. Home of the deranged.
When conspiracy is your only hobby, it time for a short walk and a quick drop.
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Looks about as reliable as The Onion. But less funny.
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Re: Pro Vaxxx (Score:5, Interesting)
There's even a video clip from the late Dr. Montagnier, who was quite famous, well respected, and renoun, in which he was asked if he was going to take the vaccine, and he said "no, because it's ... HIV.. it gives the recipient immunodeficiency."
You missed the best part of what he said later on. He predicted mass deaths in two years [imgur.com] from vaccines.
Sooooo . . . . yeah.
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Is it a better tool than tellijng people not to take a vaccine when you know there's a virus circulating? You realize you can rt-PCR the vaccine and the sequence the result right? And yes it's easy to do .. anyone with basic molecular biology knowledge can do it. If some are genuine and some aren't how do the vaccine manufacturers know for certain that say 100 people won't do that? They'd have to make 1 in 200 the malware .. at which point it's less dangerous than the covid virus (which you can also amplify
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You can buy a nanopore device ($1000 .. google it) and it shows you the RNA (or DNA) code in any sample. All you have to do is get a sample of the vaccine. The way some people I know did it was getting the shot and then using a venom extractor to extract it. You need to separate the vaccine LNPs from blood before adding it to the sequencer or you'll have to spend an hour or two doing that in software (easy if you know your own genome code already). And no it is NOT rocket science .. watch an introduction to
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And, btw Robert Malone didn't "invent mRNA" .. he played a role but first off mRNA exists in nature and second his role in mRNA vaccine development is one out of many before and after him. He's taking too much credit. He's not the only person to contribute to the development of the concept. Best case scenario ..it's literally like one of the Wright Brothers claiming jet engines suck. Mainly he's pissed that he doesn't get royalties. He even admits to taking the vaccine, and that was after he had already sta
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Dont worry, we are still on course for idiocracy, where electrolytes are what plants crave.
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While she said "reduce population," that was a malapropism. She meant to say "reduce pollution," which she had said shortly before the error, and to which she had referred elsewhere in the speech with other terms like "reduce our em
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A family friend, 80, in good health before the vaccine, started having heart problems soon after the shot and died if heart failure three months after. Those are the facts, whatever the causes. I also knew someone unvaccinated who caught the bug and died.
So I am not saying that mass vaccination didn't save more lives than it ruined -- I still believe it to be the case, for now -- but effectively mandating it on people who knew their body better and had reason to be wary, especially when it was known that va
Re: Pro Vaxxx (Score:4, Insightful)
Well most vaccines would improve your odds of living long enough to get cancer. However, a few viruses can give you cancer, so vaccines against them also protect against cancer. For example 98% of cervical cancer is caused by HPV, for which there is a vaccine. However, the HPV vaccine causes dreadful psychological damage to republicans when they realize that women might have sex without the taxpayer paying to watch them die of cancer.
Re:Interesting dude. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with these internal organ cancers is they are hard to detect, but the time you exhibit symptoms its already spread everywhere.
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Yup ,happened to my cousin. He had liver cancer (no, he wasn't an alcy, he was very fit and ran every day) but didn't realise until the secondaries caused bowel cancer with obvious symptoms. Despite chemo he died 6 months after diagnosis aged 45. RIP.
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That's terrible. Must have been hard going through that for your cousin and those close to him.
Re:Interesting dude. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet MRIs have no negative consequences, unlike xrays or CAT scans. One of the best things for public health possible would just be routine full body MRI scans for everybody, with results interpreted by AI.
Re:Interesting dude. (Score:5, Informative)
The MRI itself is likely perfectly fine, but there have been discussions concerning the contrast agents, in particular Gadolinium retention, as it is essentially a heavy metal that can remain deposited in the organs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
And here:
https://vcresearch.berkeley.ed... [berkeley.edu]
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Regardless of whether the test itself has side-effects, universal testing of any kind can have negative side-effects if the disease isn't common and the false positive rate isn't negligible. When most of the positives are false positives it leads to a lot of wasted time for medics and stress for patients.
Re:Interesting dude. (Score:4, Insightful)
Er... no.
If you look, you will find things, not all of which are significant, and you end up treating people for things they don't have. Even if the imaging procedure is benign, the unncessary treatment that follows won't be.
The issue of screening is a complex one. It isn't always good, it isn't always bad. You can't just give a random test to a randome person and treat the as gosepel; it's an exercise in Bayesian reasoning. Prior probabilities matter; if the prior probability of a condition is less than the false positive rate of a test, then there is a better than even chance you're looking at a false positive. This is why we don't screen teenagers for colorectal cancer, or middle aged men for breast cancer.
You can certainly imagine a world in which everyrone regularly got comprehensive high whole-body examinations, after which everything that was found was thoroughly studied to make sure it was something of real clinical significance. Health care in that world would probably be somewhat more effective than it is in this world, but it would be much, much more expensive and involve a lot of testing and procedures which aren't really warranted. And it's not clear it would get better results than an alternative hypothetical world where everyone regularly sits down with a physician trained to do effective comprehensive health interviews. That alternative world would also pick up things body scanning wouldn't, like mental health issues and patients in dangerous home situations or with poor health practices that could be corrected with intervention *before* the patient gets sick.
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If you look, you will find things, not all of which are significant, and you end up treating people for things they don't have.
I don't think this is a good argument. This just means that we need to get better at interpreting MRIs, to learn to distinguish significant from insignificant findings. And the way to do that is to do routine MRIs.
The issue of screening is a complex one. It isn't always good, it isn't always bad. You can't just give a random test to a random person and treat the as gospel; it's an exercise in Bayesian reasoning. Prior probabilities matter; if the prior probability of a condition is less than the false positive rate of a test, then there is a better than even chance you're looking at a false positive.
Sure, and this would be another beneficial outcome, better educating doctors about the importance of proper application of tests and base rates. Hopefully the experience would make them better at applying proper reasoning to other test results, too, not just MRIs.
You can certainly imagine a world in which everyrone regularly got comprehensive high whole-body examinations, after which everything that was found was thoroughly studied to make sure it was something of real clinical significance.
You could, or you could imagine a
Re: Interesting dude. (Score:2)
We need to get unstuck on a lot of things. We have not arrived. What I imagine from what I propose is we learn a lot. Is it routine for teens to get precancerous polyps that are dealt with by the immune system? Then we have a really good idea that cancer immunotherapies are on the right track. To get to these vistas though, we have to first address the inadequacy of the status quo. I for one am excited about the possibilities of unknown vistas. We have to be bold enough to pursue what we want. Nature will t
Re:Interesting dude. (Score:5, Funny)
He didn't die. He was mind uploaded to the Matrix. He made it in time.
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F*ck cancer. Lost my mom to pancreatic. They're working on it. Someday...
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There have been some promising advances in detection based on urine and stool samples. We're not getting it tomorrow, but maybe within the next 3-5 years, we'll be able to pick it up more often in Stage 1/2 than in Stage 4, when it is usually identified.
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Re: Interesting dude. (Score:5, Informative)
You may be thinking of some other cancer, because pancreatic is harsh no matter the stage. Localized (Stage 1, some Stage 2) has a five-year survival rate of only about 40%; regional (some Stage 2, all of Stage 3) drops to around 15%, and distant (Stage 4) is about 3%. Even very early Stage 1, which is usually diagnosed basically by chance discovery, is only about 60%. There are exceptions for specific types (neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer, which is what Steve Jobs had, is up to 95% curable if caught before it spreads), but for most people, the odds go from not much better to a coin flip to really bad.
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We need to solve this pancreas shit. It's no good.
There's potential good news on the horizon: personalized mRNA vaccines for pancreatic cancer, https://www.nih.gov/news-event... [nih.gov].
The idea is that they take a sample of your cancer, identify some neoantigens [cancer.gov], craft a custom mRNA vaccine to product those antigens, then inject you with the vaccine, hopefully training your immune system to identify the neoantigens as targets for attack.
In the trial linked above, they took samples from 19 patients, managed to make vaccines for 18, gave the vaccines to 16 (the
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The pancreas is intimately associated with the production of insulin and thus the endocrine system as well as the gut. Increasingly Diabetes (involving the pancreas as well) and Obesity, the two big chronic diseases are being thought of as high-level metabolic disorders. Simplifying a bit, a huge percent of modern 'food' is slow poison that causes metabolic disorder. I wouldn't be surprised if the pancreas, in an effort to compensate, toxifies and grows cancerous. I highly recommend reading the article
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His is the most desirable business card to receive (Score:5, Informative)
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If anyone can hack heaven, Kevin can.
Now it is #kevinsgate to hack! (with only slight cultural reference to Heaven's Gate [wikipedia.org])
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I have one in my wallet. :)
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A couple tips for using that business card:
take that straight piece in the center and bend it in half at a 90 degree angle to form a tension tool aka wrench
Top to bottom the other tools are:
-Snake pick / mini-wave rake
-?? no idea
-diamond hook
-standard hook
You can google/youtube resources on how to pick locks
Per the rules of white hack lockpicking, never pick locks you do not own, never pick locks you depend on for security (due to real risk of damaging/jamming the lock especially if you are a rookie).
An
A new ghost in the wires (Score:5, Interesting)
I met him once at a conference, he did some pretty impressive phone hacks as a demo, eg. He got two people to stand up then sent an SMS from one of them to the other using his laptop.
I've still got one of his famous business cards somewhere.
Re: A new ghost in the wires (Score:1)
He got two people to stand up
This sounds familiar
A legend (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A legend (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that Kevin lied to *everyone*, all the time? It's a lot easier to write a fantasy novel of your genius if you know your criminal notoriety will get a few fan-boys to read it?
Re:A legend (Score:4)
You do realize that Kevin lied to *everyone*, all the time? It's a lot easier to write a fantasy novel of your genius if you know your criminal notoriety will get a few fan-boys to read it?
Agree. It's a great read, but it should be understood as having an extremely unreliable narrator. [wikipedia.org]
But, taken for what it is, it's a great explanation of social engineering.
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That book is very entertaining and reads true, in the sense that it's very easy to believe the text. It is however extremely bragging, which make it rather funny. And I have no trouble to believe that, as it says in the book, that he did it all for kicks and knowledge and had no monetary gain in mind doing his *thing*.
I also think he did everyone a service by showing the people he hacked how vulnerable they were. And since he never caused any real damage he was punished a little more harshly than needed. Mo
Re:A legend (Score:4, Informative)
It makes sense he cashed in on his notoriety, I just wish he chose a better company to endorse than KnowBe4; Scientology is shady and supporting them was totally against the hacker ethos of his youth.
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I was forced through KnowBe4 training a few years ago. All I remember is that it seemed like boilerplate anti-phishing instruction, like what you could have copied for free from anywhere on the internet, or anyone who understands the internet could have written on their own in less than a day.
I do remember the name "Kevin Mitnick" plastered all over it, and I wondered who that was and why they thought I cared about him.
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Sad to hear, rip kevin (Score:2)
Very sad to hear, rest in peace Kevin.
I cannot believe Kevin Mitnick is dead (Score:4, Funny)
and BSD is still alive. Something is wrong in this world...
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Thank you for bringing up the meme.
Has Netcraft confirmed it about Kevin?
The name Kent Walker sounds familiar (Score:2)
Is the Kent Walker mentioned in this article the same guy who now works as Google's general counsel?
I met him while I was at Google. Didn't realize he was a former assistant US attorney.
Free Kevin (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a Free Kevin bumper sticker on my van for a very, very long time - well after he was released. The other side was a Slackware sticker. (For you old, old timers, this was the same van that my friends and I drove Patrick Volkerding around in when he was at the hospital, and host of what was quite possibly the first "car" MP3 player.)
At Def-Con a little more than decade ago, there was a party at the Artisan. The invite and directions were hidden in the firmware of a hackable LED lanyard. I changed mine to say Free Kevin. One the shuttle over, one of my friends noticed what I had set my badge to and said "He's sitting a few rows up, want to meet him?"
He was an interesting guy. Not exactly what I had expected, but I "knew" him from books and 2600 articles.
Sucks that he's gone.
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I remember those days, back when Pat Volkerding had that mysterious sickness and called on the community to help. I used to rock slackware in my moms basement. I was supposed to see Mitnick at Hope 2006 but his appearance was canceled or something, barely remember.
Hung around with some random guys that turned out to be famous later. But I guess that always happens at cons.
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Indeed an interesting guy, and a loss, but I never did like the "free Kevin" types. No matter how you spin it, he did break the law. And when you consider what all he did, that wasn't a very long sentence at all, in fact I think it was a pretty fair one.
I guarantee you that if somebody did something analogous to your car and house to what he did using computers, you'd want to give him the chair. It's easy to say "oh that's no big deal" when it happens to somebody else, but you inevitably see things differen
Re:Free Kevin (Score:5, Insightful)
Free Kevin wasn't because we thought he had done nothing wrong or that he didn't deserve punishment. It was a reaction to the barbaric conditions he was held in pre-trial.
And to the sickening realization that most of us, should we fall into trouble with the law, could be treated the same way on the basis of tall tales spun by a prosecutor to an uncritical judge about our supposed abilities to turn movie plots into reality.
Re: Free Kevin (Score:1)
Too bad he ended up selling 0-days... (Score:2, Informative)
Opportunity (Score:2)
Not to disparage Mr. Mitnick but did those giving opportunity by not securing networks and computers properly ever get any punishment? No? Thought so. Even then a law forbidding something did not mean that one can rely on it for security...
Re:Opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
If I leave front door unlocked and swinging wide open, you're still a criminal if you come inside my house to steal my shit.
If I leave my front door closed with a weak lock, you've an even worse criminal if you pick that lock and come in to steal my shit.
In the 90s when this guy was stealing people's shit there was no concept of security or safe code or encryption or the rest of it. Hell, the internet worm broke into many systems using RMS's well known password "rms". Times were different. Do not judge people of the past by current standards.
Are you using quantum encryption, an AI network analyzer that's smarter than skynet and a bio inserted brain tap login module for system access? No? Oh then you should get punished when your systems are hacked. *eye roll*
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Hell, the internet worm broke into many systems using RMS's well known password "rms".
If you mean the Morris worm that’s not how it propagated
Re: Opportunity (Score:5, Interesting)
So long and thanks for all the tuna fish. (Score:3, Insightful)
> ... theft of thousands of data files and credit card numbers ...
This statement is an insult, because this is same ubiquitous credit card file that any want-to-be hacker had downloaded from their local BBS.
Anyway, I still have my signed bumper sticker, read all his books. He inspired me to become the security professional I am today.
Kevin, are finally free.
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> ... theft of thousands of data files and credit card numbers ...
This statement is an insult, because this is same ubiquitous credit card file that any want-to-be hacker had downloaded from their local BBS.
Anyway, I still have my signed bumper sticker, read all his books. He inspired me to become the security professional I am today.
Kevin, are finally free.
There was never 100% certainty on that and plenty of credit card numbers were showing up after the fact on those bbs's. Later on it was admitted that some of the numbers where likely stolen by him but terrible record keeping made it hard to tell where a stolen number actually came from.
Compared with On-Line Fraud Now (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, Let's Solve Pancreas Shit! (Score:2)
Track Down (Score:2)
There was a movie made about the capture of Mitnick called Track Down. It was almost completely made up.
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I think you mean take down.
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I have not seen the film, but I understand it was based on John Markoff's book "Takedown" which I have read. Markoff was one of the screenwriters so it ought to be. Tsutomu Shimomura was another of the screenwriters, and he was the white hat hacker who traced Mitnick and led the FBI to Mitnick's 1996 arrest.
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BDE (Score:2)
"Baruch Dayan haEmet" -- "blessed be the Judge of Truth" is what we say when we hear someone Jewish died.
Same as it ever was (Score:2)
Now they use a paywall for this.
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His greatest hack (Score:2)
A hero is gone (Score:2)
I'm going to read a copy of The Art Of Intrusion tonight.
RIP Hacker
How do we know? (Score:2)
Did Netcraft confirm it?
R.I.P. Kevin (Score:2)
I've read Kevin's books and see that most of the reporting is still seriously overblown. He never stole data to sell it. He broke into computer systems for the adrenaline rush of knowing he got in. I think the only thing of value he ever took or stole was cloning other people's phones and using their minutes. Today that wouldn't be taking anything at all since just about every plan has unlimited minutes. He had to clone (which was wrong) to avoid capture when he was being pursued under mostly false pre
2600 candles (Score:3)
The obituary site currently says:
> In Memory Of
> Kevin David Mitnick
> [...]
> Click to light a candle
> 2600 CANDLES HAVE BEEN LIT
https://noseynick.org/pics/kev... [noseynick.org]
NOBODY ELSE IS ALLOWED TO LIGHT ANY CANDLES!
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It's what Kevin would have wanted. :-(
Dammit, it's already up to 2605. 5 people didn't get it, or had no self-control.
Good hackers still exist (Score:1)
Hire a hacker for cheating spouse (Score:1)
My honest experience (Score:1)