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Modest Proposal For Stopping Hackers: Get Them Girlfriends
kierny writes "Hackers/crackers who get arrested are typically male and young adults — if not minors. Why is that? According to research by online psychology expert Grainne Kirwan, it's because the typical hacker 'ages out' once they get a girlfriend, job, kids, and other responsibilities that make it difficult to maintain their hacking/cracking/hacktivist lifecycle. Could that finding offer a way to help keep more young hacking enthusiasts out of jail?"
I dated a robot
This is as retarded as the last story. Timothy must be taking his stupid pills today.
The Girlfriend(tm) could solve a lot of problems young adolescent males have... someone should patent that...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Probably the most effective idea yet. A girlfriend is a lot more fun than a computer, at that age anyway.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
"This guys a hacker, he's in New York, all we have to do is get him laid and we won't have any trouble!"
This approach has been used to rehabilitate terrorists as well. This idea is hardly new. http://bigthink.com/ideas/17036 "This is based on the belief that you’ve got to give these young men a stake in society and it’s been reasonably successful, although Al-Qaida is so cunning." It has some merit, but its an expensive and difficult process.
If someone is bothering you, you take their life away from them.
If someone who has no life is bothering you, you give them one so they have no time to bother you.
My work here is dung.
Of course they were married. Why do you think they volunteered?
That's my takeaway from this.
Then again that's my takeaway from most discussions.
A modest proposal?
That's right... and when it comes to girl hackers, simply unstoppable :).
First, implying that this is only a problem for men is stupid. Women without responsibilities get into trouble too, often with consequences far beyond simple criminal mischief. Secondly, getting saddled with a relationshp does decrease the tendancy towards crime -- but then so does getting a car, a job, a house, etc. It'd be more accurate to say that criminals commit crime because they have less to lose.
That's a terribly obvious thing to say, and it also provides no insight into what to do to achieve it. Should we institute arranged marriages? A chicken in every pot, and a car in every garage? Should we force employers to hire people with a criminal record? Please, do tell. I'm all ears.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If we want more female hackers in the future, then we shouldn't present our ideas in a way that makes it seem like we assume all hackers in the future will be male. Also, I know a lot of openly gay hackers, so I find the title of the article dumb for that reason as well.
You know how hard it is to find a girl who likes guys who are overweight, work on computers, have an affinity for Cheetos, Mountain Dew, and avoiding showers?
Back in the early days, hackers were young hobbyists.
The people who are most dangerous now are simply criminals who've learned to operate computers.
Teenage and young adult hacking is part of the learning process and should be encouraged as part of the growth process. Most of those people will go on to futures in computer science.
The criminals will not.
Futurist Traditionalism
Getting "a life" damages young mens' productivity/creativity/drive. Film at 11.
You could use life against "hackers" (that word in the bad sense) but could also use it against anyone else who is doing things you don't happen to like, too. Politically active for the wrong party? Get 'em a girlfriend. Work for a competitor? Here, have a wife. And if those things don't work, b&e their houses and puncture their condoms for some Surprise Baby Drama.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It all makes sense now! They're prepping for a massive cyber-war in the mid 21st century!
I just wanted to congratulate TFA's authors for this incredibly novel approach to finding a girlfriend - drafting all of society into a plan to find them dates. Ingenious!
A bit desperate perhaps, but still... genius!
Looking for a Rails developer in Chapel Hill?
And from where exactly do they propose we get these girlfriends for the crackers? If we accept the supposition that these are all a bunch of young persistently-single men, then clearly these men are either a) not putting in the effort / participating in activities conducive to getting a mate, or b) insufficiently desirable to any potential mate met thus far.
The common thread in both cases - there is no woman (also, why all the heteronormativity?) interested in him. So do they propose that we kidnap some women from the street and tell them that they're taking one for the team?
Women are people too. Just because it would solve your problem if a woman were to screw this guy, doesn't create an obligation for any particular woman to screw him. I guess you could hire a bunch of escorts, but is it really worth the cost of a decent hooker providing a "girlfriend experience" for long enough to fool the guy into thinking he actually has a girlfriend?
We've already seen how this ends up:
http://i.imgur.com/q0ycr.png
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
The best way to eliminate terrorists was actually invented by Yasser Arafat and some of his advisors, who themselves had invented Black September, the terrorist group that murdered Israeli athletes at the 72 Olympics in Munich:
http://m.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2001/12/hoffman.htm
When they weren't needed any more...they married them off. Told them to go into deep cover in Jordan, found pretty Palestinian girls to marry the "heroes", have kids, be "sleeper agents"...and never gave them a mission. Interviewed years later, few were willing to accept one any more.
First of all, where are you going to find girls that are interested in geeks? Are you going to import mail order brides from China or something? Half the hackers in the world are already in China!
Secondly, despite being overweight, unshaven, sloppy, smelly, ugly themselves, hackers have a very high self-opinion of themselves, and, after having watched a gazallion hours of pr0n on the internet, will be remarkably picky about the looks/abilities of the potential girlfriend. They aren't going to settle for just anybody. Ideally, this person needs to look like Jeri Ryan and should have the brains of Jeri Ellsworth (come on, I think that was a pretty clever match-up)...
And lastly, such girls don't exist, so, finding them, and then, what, paying them to date and have sex with these guys without blowing their cover? It just won't work, it will never work, and the whole idea just doesn't add up at all.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
There were no 9/11 "bombers", well outside of conspiracy land.
But yes a quarter of them were married.
Don't assume that just because they discovered girls at the same time they quit hacking it's the reason why. Maybe they started paying attention to girls (or girls started paying attention to them) because they got bored playing with tech toys? Or that both happened for the same reason: adulthood?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The article is full of prejudice, misinformation and bullshit. First of all, the hackers causing real damage aren't your stereotypical basement dwellers: most of them are either part of a criminal organisation or a state agency. The young kiddies who do it for the lulz, as a challenge or to support an ideology are only the visible tip of a huge iceberg, as they are the ones who are either too careless to cover their trails or directly announce their deeds. Most of the time they cause little harm, and sometimes can even be valuable when pointing out vulnerabilities which could have lead to the loss of sensitive data in the hands of a more mischievous hacker. If you want to stop them from growing up to be blackhats, the most important thing would be legislation that doesn't send them to jail for pointing out that a door is open. If you don't want them to become outcasts, don't cast them out. Provide them with ways to use their skills within the boundaries of the law. Sending a shoplifting kid to jail is a sure way to turn him into a robber, and the iron fist approach will not work any better on adolescent hackers.
I wonder what would be more effective in this thought provoking conundrum?
Yeah I suppose you could get them girlfriends...or you could just take away their computer and give them an iPad instead.
I am an over 35 years old virgin male nerd/geek who never had a date/lady mate before (blame my multiple disabilities I was born with). I also barely have time for fun (used to play computer games a lot). I do security testings for work though. Maybe I will finally get a woman one day or not... :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
If you are under 20 mod parent down.
If you are over 20 mod parent up.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Intelligence oriented towards abstract thinking, objects, and machines repels women like a meeting of the local Linux User's Group or SABR (Society of American Baseball Research). Women find intelligence un-leavened with machismo, narcissism, mild sociopathy (or high), the "dark triad" revolting. Since it correlates nicely with lower testosterone and social dominance.
We are prisoners of our DNA and genetic inheritance. Primates don't have money, or mansions, or possessions. Pretty much all primates mate in the fashion that the most dominant male secures all the females. Until he's killed off by a contender or predators, disease, etc. That is the primal urge of pretty much all women, unless moderated by social environments in turn responding to resource scarcity: not enough food, water, shelter, clothing, etc requiring a nuclear family and "settling" for guys unsexy but who make serious weapons. More J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein, than your sexy dancer and aspiring rapper.
To get these guys girlfriends, when the prospective girlfriends will NEVER BE HOTTER AND DEMAND MORE MALE INTEREST (ages 15-22, basically, and yes that's a product of our DNA -- primates don't wait until fertility is almost gone to mate) is impossible. There is no social structure steering them into that, and away from say Levi Johnston or Kevin Federline. The boys are at the nadir of their sexual value (as they age, achieve power and dominance, the get enough to find the last aging bitter "settling" fertility window of the formerly hot). The girls, the peak.
That is a fundamental mis-match in sexual value in the marketplace. Never going to happen.
Heck the guys seek local hacking dominance just to raise their peer value and thus (pathetically) hoping to raise their sex value. Which does not happen, only by sheer primate-driven local social dominance over others (cruelty unpunished, aggressiveness, machiavellianism, narcissim, sarcasm unpunished, other dominance displays) can men be attractive to women. Even if the guys worked out, bathed, ate right, and dressed well their inner lack of social dominance around others (pushing people around SUCCESSFULLY and intimidating others is the surest way to draw hot teen girls) dooms them to failure.
Indeed the failure of boys to gain higher sexual value ("I hacked Wal-Mart! And all girls still avoid me!") guarantees that they will double-down on efforts to go even bigger and more disruptive, as the ability to push people around is simply not in them (too high IQ, too oriented towards abstract systems) any more than they can dunk like LeBron James (or James can use a spreadsheet or write a PERL script).
I suppose you could match the boys with over-aged MILFs with perhaps 1% of their former hotness, but that's a raw deal compared to the top 10% Alphas hogging about 80% of the actually attractive aged peers. And like most raw deals generates pushback action by the buyers.
It doesn't have to be get them a girlfriend or put them in prison.
Put them in prison and they automatically have (umm I mean, become) a girlfriend!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
...has anyone asked the *girls* what they think of this idea?
I dunno, just asking.