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A Cybersecurity Firm’s Sharp Rise and Stunning Collapse

127 points| jontaydev | 6 years ago |newyorker.com | reply

36 comments

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[+] wildmusings|6 years ago|reply
Here is a proper news article for those who can do without a dozen pages of drivel about the CEO's hairdo, flying lessons, and underwear shopping: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/18/fbi_raids_cybersecu...
[+] notzuck|6 years ago|reply
Whilst theregister.co.uk does get straight to the point. the newyorker article tells a very interesting story about his work in hacking P2P, working with the secret service, trying to sell his software to the FBI, GPS tracking his mates cheating wife etc.
[+] willbw|6 years ago|reply
Some people find the details interesting. Life isn't always about processing information as quickly as possible
[+] ianhawes|6 years ago|reply
Thats a good way to phrase it. About 1/4 way through the article I realized I wasn't anywhere close to the end.
[+] robocat|6 years ago|reply
Normally I prefer El Reg but that is dry and uninformative, whereas the New Yorker article rocks a heap of other critical information.

Most importantly they are colouring in the people and their flaws, without specifically labelling them (e.g. psycho/sociopathic is never said, but the behaviours are).

The interactions with politicians and federal entities are critical to understanding the story.

What you see as irrelevant information is all extremely relevent if you care about protecting yourself against fraud, manipulation, bad actors, etcetera.

Think about the legal and social context of this article, and you will see other facets of the reporting that are clever.

[+] robocat|6 years ago|reply
The El Reg persona:

I am a middle aged intelligent man who used to be an engineer, and now I have moved up the ranks. I work in IT for a droll company, so I can afford some toys and vacations, and a bit because I just like hardware.

I treat El Reg like a British pub, where wit is appreciated, and sometimes we talk about "the war" (our collective past), and certainly taking the piss out of ourselves and everyone else is a good laff.

I also need to know some of what El Reg writes about for work; at least they make it fun, unlike most of the rest of my job where much of the pleasure is black.

[+] jvehent|6 years ago|reply
> 76-97 minutes read

indeed...

[+] baobabKoodaa|6 years ago|reply
The author seems to confuse peer-to-peer file sharing networks and onion routing. The explanations in the article don't make any sense.
[+] danso|6 years ago|reply
I didn't see any mention of onion routing. There's several references to the "Deep Web", but that's in the context of file-sharing peer-to-peer networks.
[+] armitron|6 years ago|reply
What doesn't make sense? Limewire is P2P.

My impression of the -sparse- darknet mentions is that they were independently (= not through their P2P monitoring software) looking for useful data there and manually inserting it into their datastore.

[+] gwern|6 years ago|reply
I was also a little puzzled by

> In the nineties, Microsoft pursued a canonical FUD strategy, creating phony error messages to make consumers wary of using Windows on a competitor’s operating system—a tactic that resulted in a legal settlement exceeding two hundred million dollars.

[+] cerved|6 years ago|reply
Ahaha, the fake memoir
[+] SlowRobotAhead|6 years ago|reply
I thought it was going to be Crowdstrike. But I suppose that hasn’t happened yet.

Whatever tech, whatever assets, whatever they have, you can do as you will, I would need to have my head in the sand to be doing business with them. Too much smoke not to be at least a little fire. Just my opinion of course!

Edit: One of those times practicality clashes with politics apparently. Can’t say anything bad about the company that failed to protect high profile clients, then used that failure to help start the Trump/Russia fiasco before quietly walking their statements back - because to be aware of that would mean supporting the bad man.

[+] chelmzy|6 years ago|reply
Just purchased their product as it is at the top of the EDR market. Could you explain your comment?
[+] katbyte|6 years ago|reply
Could you elaborate on Crowdstrike?