Oddbean new post about login | logout I just realized that my first paid computer job was when I was maybe 15 and a random dude on the Internet hired me to write "security software that would persistently monitor and record keystrokes of his office employees and send a backup of the recordings out once a day as a hidden email in the background". I was super excited about getting paid for writing software and let's say I was still morally very flexible and lacked any ethical foundation for my work. Typical "I was young and I needed the money" situation but it's scary to realize that bad people would hire literal teenagers to write malware for them.
Well, however you view it - one thing's for sure: "they saw your talent"
I used to build pc's for (mostly) family and did Perl with MySQL and cgi for webapps.. Great times!
jinx 🍻
What a saddo that guy was. He must have aspired to being a little Hitler
don't hate the playa, hate the game?
"his office employees" suggests they were also his computers. Unless he was giving them the impression that he was okay with his hardware being used for personal activities. I've always used employers' devices with the assumption that usage was being monitored. Except for that one time I tried an experiment to see if booting a workstation from an Ubuntu CD would allow us access to blocked websites. Shift supervisor was like "I don't know what the hell y'all are doing but if you got time to hack, you got time to clean. Grab a broom!" 😂 nostr:nevent1qqsrwzj2v8p8kdc35qfvapnng2snfjfhdpmawe7253wuky9rvxxzv4gpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hsygzsm98u9kzcp35zkpc62shck8335gqtq5yt4w26xwl0pp2a72qavvpsgqqqqqqssf5pgc
Humans will do disputable things when they are broke and desperate. It could happen to any of us. That is why inflation is so evil. It keeps us all broke and desperate.