Comment by Ndymium
5 years ago
This feels to me like a person with some sort of mental illness or breakdown and delusions of grandeur and persecution. Their explanation doesn't make much sense. If I were Daniel, I wouldn't respond any further.
5 years ago
This feels to me like a person with some sort of mental illness or breakdown and delusions of grandeur and persecution. Their explanation doesn't make much sense. If I were Daniel, I wouldn't respond any further.
Sounds like someone who's developed a prototype which they had grand plans of selling for billions, which then got easily hacked because they don't understand security
The $15k figure implies that's either a bill the hackers ran up on an AWS instance or what they valued their development at
Edit: The blackmail line sounds like a ransomware attack
I disagree. I think this person may not have necessarily programmed anything serious before in their life. Or if they have, probably not a defense project.
If you read the follow-up emails - and apologies for the armchair psychiatry - I think this person is very likely in a psychotic state. Their messages sound very similar to what you find in the "BadBIOS" and other "gangstalking" communities. It's not really tethered to reality.
I think it's extremely likely the author is not a troll and possesses a sincere and high-confidence belief that powerful entities are tracking and persecuting him and that backdoors in lots of software, including curl, were placed by sinister organizations and used to facilitate spying on and attacking him. The software is perceived as a WMD or pathogen partly responsible for this incursion into his life and the damage he thinks has resulted. He's mad because he thinks Daniel is like the mayor of Flint, MI: the water is poisoning people and he's doing absolutely nothing about it. Of course you'd be angry!
This is why it's generally best to not reply to messages as extreme as these. Daniel will never be able to convince him he isn't actually the metaphorical Flint mayor. You just get sucked into a world that's very real to them and not real to you or almost anyone else. It's not possible and not a good idea to try to reason with someone like that.
Yeah, I agree. In his place, I either would have done nothing, or, maybe made a police report (not that I'd expect the police to actually do anything at this stage). Generally speaking, the less you antagonize someone whose first exchange with you is "I will slaughter you," the better, IMO.
I once tried to have a conversation with a women who tried to drive me and my bicycle off the bus lane (where she shouldn't be driving in the first place); and shouted "fuck off you pissy little cunt" to me. For some reason I thought that if I explained my perspective, she would understand.
It ended up with a broken back wheel (she kicked it) and a damaged phone (she took it out of my hand when I wanted to take a picture of the license plate and threw it on the ground).
She was clearly unhinged, but I was stupid as well. I should of just let it go; no one who starts a social interaction with "pissy little cunt" is likely to be calmed down by reason. You have nothing to gain from trying, and much to potentially lose.
> ...and shouted "fuck off you pissy little cunt" to me.
There's a name for this incident - "road rage". Very real and dangerous indeed.
People get completely irrational and agitated. Probably due to effect of being locked up, in a way, non-free inside their cars.
When I'm biking, at times I too get mad at some careless and obnoxious drivers encroaching my freedom, I guess they may be finding me just as annoying for simply missing the fatter wheels and a comparable scale on the shared road. Irrational!
As cyclists we are literally more exposed on the road. So whenever such inevitable bout of irrational fury pops, I find the safest option for myself is to steam-off using similar vocabulary. It's more efficient than reasoning with the unreasonable.
Just to be even safer, I'd let the offending four-wheeled furia be gone before naming the whole piece of that motorized content in precisely spoken choice of words...
It takes practice though. Be safe!
A sad sentiment of giving up, but I think it is premature to abandon your approach. I think it may be worth trying for that small-ish fraction (call it 10%?) of people who can be talked back from their anger. Those are good conversations to have for both parties, and worth trying to have, even if it results in failure 90% of the time.
That said, I think the real lesson for you is: don't make yourself more vulnerable (e.g. letting her touch you or your stuff) if you decide to try to start a conversation!
It also points to a theory I've been considering about personhood, and how people like your driver lady is in a mindstate where, in her mind, you're not a person. It's a very, very dangerous situation, because if they don't think you're a person, then there is nothing immoral about saying or doing anything to you, including violence.
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Moving to NYC couple of years ago I learned the best way to deal with those type of people is to let go and move on. It really isn't worth wasting your time and energy on those people, because they will just ruin your day. Best case scenario you feel better for couple of minutes and then you forget about it. Worst case you end up dead, in jail or worse.
> maybe made a police report (not that I'd expect the police to actually do anything at this stage).
Indeed. But one shouldn't underestimate the chance that this wouldn't be the first report about this person. Lots of similar reports like this may actually cause them to do something.
I agree, in the sense that someone who has done something of this nature is more likely to have done such a thing in the past. However, in this case, the victim is someone who is being targeted through his email address, which is embedded in open source software that's contained in gazillions of systems worldwide. That makes it significantly less likely that whomever he would report this to would have gotten another report about this particular individual.
I wouldn't respond but I probably would notify law enforcement and give them a copy of the exchange.
Yeah, I agree. There's probably not much they can do about it (and the individual will probably not end up taking any action), but in case he does, it's nice to have a police record of it all.
Good luck telling local law enforcement that a federal officer bricked your iPhone or that plausible denial intelligence agents are threatening you.
Well, maybe, but what about "Don't talk to the police"?
That's if they are potentially investigating you for a crime. Sometimes, the benefits of talking to the police outweigh the risks.
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Without that last sentence, I would have assumed you were referring to the recipient, not the sender.
He already responded by revealing the email and real name of the person, presumably without consent, aka doxxing.
That isn’t doxxing. You have no expectation of privacy if you send a threatening letter to another person.
And you base that on what? At least where I live I can't even record a phone conversation without informing the other party, much less divulge it...
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If the person in question throws death threats around, and if that's their real name and address, then doxxing is the least of their concerns...
as I understand he assumes that it is actually a throwaway account and fake name.