The man who hacked Hollywood

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201205/chris-chaney-hacker-nude-photos-scarlett-johansson?printable=true

by cyphersanctus • 14 years ago

70 41 14 years ago

gq.com

GoRevan• 14 years ago

"You feel like you've seen something that the rest of the world wanted to see." Really?

mkuhn• 14 years ago

If you think about how much money is made by selling gossip I think it is a fair statement.

cyphersanctus9• 14 years ago

True, though he probably meant it in a sarcastic way, like "clearly everyone wanted to see a naked Scarlett."

rbn2• 14 years ago

I always wanted to see a marketplace for valuable information. Think of all the leaks that we hear about and think about all the ones that we don't hear about.

You would go on it. List your information for sale and then blogs, newspapers and/or whoever may be interested can purchase it from you.

coryl• 14 years ago

I suppose the issue preventing the existence of such a marketplace is fraud (bad/misleading information). But many publishers don't seem to have a problem selling BS anyways right?

rbn2• 14 years ago

All marketplaces a fraud issue. You can always solve it via reputation points and/or proof.

Even in the media they always say "Reliable source". With this marketplace the "source" can provide information to anyone.

cyphersanctus9• 14 years ago

Sounds like a great weekend project. Relatively simple to code, would definitely be covered by some tech blogs.

andrewcross• 14 years ago

Would be simple to code, but a marketplace is definitely not a weekend project. Getting enough supply-side information would be the big challenge.

pingou• 14 years ago

I'm a bit surprised so many people would put real information as answer to their secret question, and I'm surprised a lot of websites offer this alternative to log in without knowing the password, it seems like a big security hole to me.

cyphersanctus9• 14 years ago

Well, I remember once needing to use that function to recover a password I had forgotten. If i hadn't put real information as an answer to the question, I'm not sure how I would have been capable of answering it..

xuki2• 14 years ago

I make up a single fake answer for every secret question out there and always use that one.

caseysoftware• 14 years ago

I used to make up answers.. and was bit by not knowing.

Now I associate a friend I grew up with the site and fill it out as if I was them. Now I can say "ING -> Mike" and I know which Mike and what their info is but it doesn't mean anything to anyone else.

earroway• 14 years ago

Time to recode email password retrieval.

decodersignal• 14 years ago

Is it possible for a single website to make $50,000 a day with banner ads? That seems a bit exaggerated.

phpnode• 14 years ago

that's "only" $18mm a year, so yes and a whole lot more

cyphersanctus9• 14 years ago

Its definitely possible. Though usually that kind of massive traffic can be monetized in different, more creative ways than general banner ads.

corin_2• 14 years ago

With a CPM of $10 that would only be 5 million banners, so maybe 2-3 million pageviews - very doable. Even if that CPM shrinks it's doable.

Amadou• 14 years ago

Stories like this make me think there would be a market for low-volume, high-security email services. For example, a service that only accepts logins from pre-authorized devices, where any access pattern out of the ordinary is immediately vetted by a human with extensive experience. A sort of concierge email / instant-message / voice-mail service.

Does anyone here point me to such a service?

cyphersanctus9• 14 years ago

Indeed, there's definitely a market for such an email service. Then again who knows how much they'd be willing to pay for it. To have a manned service like that might be difficult to bootstrap.

olefoo3• 14 years ago

It would also be difficult to insure. If you're providing any Service Level Agreement, or something where you are taking money and selling based on a quality like security; you are going to fail at some point and get sued as a result; so your upfront costs and pricing structure have to reflect that.

Gmail can be free because it's a free service and you get what you pay for. To provide something of an equivalent service level for money with an additional guarantee of watchdog security services; you'd probably have to start around $10,000 USD per customer/year. And who's going to pay $10K for an email account?

olefoo3• 14 years ago

One thing that strikes me as sad about this is that he very obviously had some level of talent, drive and ability; and if we as a society had found a way to channel that productively we would all be better off.

And before you go all "lol, cracking password resets is not technical skill"; think about this for a bit. If you were raised in a context like his (parents separated early, bad schools, no mentors etc.) would you necessarily have turned out better?

Who knows; if he'd had a better math teacher in junior high school who'd gotten him interested in programming early, he might have wound up working at a startup in Silicon Valley.

kordless• 14 years ago

It all comes down to choice.

dyeje• 14 years ago

Unfortunatly one's options are not always clear.

puredemo• 14 years ago

You don't choose the circumstances of your upbringing.

daniel-cussen• 14 years ago

> Who knows; if he'd had a better math teacher in junior high school who'd gotten him interested in programming early, he might have wound up working at a startup in Silicon Valley.

Yeah, but then we'd be reading what his blog post instead of this more fabulous article, and it'd be yet another piece about Raspberry Pi.

corin_2• 14 years ago

> "One reporter on television called him 'creepy,' " she continues. "It's not right." Hearing this, Chaney looked up from his grilled cheese. The paparazzi just caught him on a bad day, he figures. "I hadn't shaved in a while," he tells his mom. "I kind of looked like a creep."

Is it possible that not only his mum, but he himself, doesn't realise that reading private conversations and looking at private (sometimes nude) photos belonging to others, without their permission or knowledge, is "creepy"?

cllns• 14 years ago

"faces sixty years in prison and $2.25 million in fines."

csense• 14 years ago

Sixty years? Shouldn't a sentence of that length be reserved for rapists, murderers and repeat offenders?

zem• 14 years ago

anyone else disappointed by what the article turned out to be about? i was expecting someone who had found ingenious new ways to deal with some entrenched hollywood practices.

The man who hacked Hollywood

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