The Evil to Dolly Parton Spectrum - 61323

If you haven't caught on yet, the number is the date

The last few posts have brought a few more of you here, now it’s my job to keep it up. Let’s jump in …

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The Daily Rabbit Hole: Kevin Mitnik - Infamous Hacker

“His first social engineering hack, age 12, getting unlimited free bus rides”

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Source. That sound you are hearing is me changing all my passwords just so that it would take 26 trillion years to brute force it.

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The ‘Wait, What?’ Vortex: Anonymous vs. Myanmar’s military

“It scared their military so hard that in the space of, I’d say, about a week, they decided to take all of their records offline and go paper hard copy only.” - Aubrey Cottle

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Hack vs. Hack …

There is something poetic about the way we take a word and ascribe multiple meanings to it. You can be a hack, or a hack. One is bad to be, the other is a gray area - it depends on what you hacked, or what you were hacking for. If you can’t tell yet, I’m throwing the word hack into the ring to be the next word that semantically satiates for you, like I did recently with the word hollow. Hacking your brain is a hack.

Before I lose the plot completely, the point is that now more than ever it is difficult to identify the good guys from the bad guys. The hacks, from the hacks. Barry Minkow’s story illustrates this well. From business boy-wunderkind, to multiple felonies for fraud, to reformed person, to fraudster once again, and now back in the limelight with a 3 part docuseries (Speaking of which, I gotta do some digging on why 3 part docuseries have taken over the streaming services this year). Minkow has zipped back and forth across the good guy, bad guy spectrum a little too much for one lifetime but his story, amongst others, have led me to develop a graph that the general public seems to follow.

The blue line represents what I estimate is the average approval rating of people that fall across the Evil to Dolly Parton Spectrum. If you’re “bad,” it’s actually better than “meh” because there is some intrigue there - there’s room to move back into a redemptive arc. If you’re good then you actually may not be as liked as “bad,” and if you’re Dolly Parton then you are winning any competition.

The green line represents the path that many famous people swing back and forth across to their own advantage just like Minkow. In a surprise twist, with each swing the line actually moves up like the following chart using John Mayer as an example.

See. It’s science.