The NYT has published an obit for Dan Kaminsky that’s both respectful and timely.
His childhood paralleled the 1983 movie “War Games,” in which a young child, played by Matthew Broderick, unwittingly accesses a U.S. military supercomputer. When Mr. Kaminsky was 11, his mother said, she received an angry phone call from someone who identified himself as a network administrator for the Western United States. The administrator said someone at her residence was “monkeying around in territories where he shouldn’t be monkeying around.”
Without her knowledge, Mr. Kaminsky had been examining military websites. The administrator vowed to “punish” him by cutting off the family’s internet access. Mrs. Maurer warned the administrator that if he made good on his threat, she would take out an advertisement in The San Francisco Chronicle denouncing the Pentagon’s security.
“I will take out an ad that says, ‘Your security is so crappy, even an 11-year-old can break it,’” Mrs. Maurer recalled telling the administrator, in an interview on Monday.
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This man seems like someone I would have loved to have met, and been able to spend the day with, just listening to him tell some of his tales, which while sounding somewhat unbelievable, I would believe every single one. RIP to a unique man.
Thanks, tim. Like I said, I never spent any time with Mr. Kaminsky other than attending his talks, and I didn’t know him at all.
But it’s fascinating to read the various threads about him: everyone says, no matter how important or unimportant you were – big shot super hacker or guy attending his first DEFCON who hasn’t done anything yet – he treated you with kindness and courtesy, like you were the most important person in the world to him.