I don't get it.

Now, this is obviously both illegal and Immoral.

But also, like... A Lot of work just to expand your porn stash. And it's 2025! There's so much legal, commercial, easily accessible pornography out there to suit all tastes and preferences and formats. So the sheer effort and time and dedication and knowledge to perpetuate such massive amount of illegal activity over a long dedicated period for such a seemingly minuscule if any gain... As I said, I just don't get it :-/

I think doing illegal things gave him that extra kick. real innocent people and all.

It's about control and taking away people's autonomy.

Probably the fact of having things that no one else has.

> breaking into their social media, email and other accounts by guessing or resetting their passwords, the indictment said.

Password re-use seems to be too common.

Shouldn't "downloading and cracking encrypted passwords" be functionally impossible? This third party must have had atrocious practices.

Presumably this is referring to him downloading one of many different data breaches that are out there, and yes, many of the services that have had their password databases leaked had terrible security practices. Couple that with password reuse across services by the victims and he'd be able to guess passwords for the services he was actually interested in based on the passwords he got from the data leaks.

Also, note that the article is probably misusing the word "encrypted"—you usually hash passwords, not encrypt them, and plenty of services will have used a bad hash function or failed to salt their passwords, opening them up to easy brute forcing with rainbow tables [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table

It's not cracking in the sense of a mathematical breaking of the underlying crypto.

It's cracking in the sense of like, hashcat. Using wordlists, common passwords, common patterns (1 on the end, substituting a with @, i with !, etc.) and other methods and seeing if you output something that matches something on the list of hashed passwords you downloaded.

I can’t tell if the freep.com website has awesome ads that break my adblockers, has no actual content, or is some sort of weird post-information artistic statement. One way or another there doesn’t seem to be anything related to the headline there.

Your adblockers are broken. There's an entire article there.