The Strange Disappearance of Dancho Danchev 160
rudy_wayne writes "ZDNet is reporting that Zero Day blogger and malware researcher Dancho Danchev has gone missing since August of last year. Dancho, who was relentless in his pursuit of cyber-criminals, last blogged here on August 18. His personal blog has not been updated since September 11, 2010. 'At ZDNet, we made multiple attempts to contact him, to no avail. Telephone numbers are going to Bulgarian language voicemails and our attempts to reach him via a snail mail address also came up empty. Just recently, a trusted member of the malware research community reached out to us to say he had received a troubling letter from Dancho on September 9, 2010, about the threat of persecution in Bulgaria.'"
Re:Unfortunately (Score:5, Insightful)
Not exactly. It's eastern Europe. It's corrupt as hell and cybercrime is a big business. Who's to say that the authorities aren't being bribed to go after this guy? It could well be paranoid ranting, but this guy is in a pretty shitty country where the cops are far, far more corrupt than the ones in the western world.
It's easy to tell scary tales for foreign countries, but I'm here in Bulgaria and I can tell you that it's actually a normal country. We do have a higher rate of corruption, that is insufficient to outright claim cops acting autonomously disappear people on a regular basis in here.
Some things in Danchev's email don't compute for me. He says he's prosecuted for his clearly pro-western bias. Ever since the USSR collapse, this country has had a pro-western bias itself. We're in NATO and EU for crying out loud. The fixtures photos are unfortunately not a very clear message of what he intended. Surely if he wanted to show us bugs he'd take more specific photos.
Either ZDNet has decided to withhold some of the information they have, which is understandable, or Danchev was under stress when sending these emails, which is very likely to be assumed. Unfortunately the reason for this stress may range as wildly as from a governmental hunt to possible mental issues.
If he ever stepped on someone's interests, I doubt it'd be the government as a whole, more a specific organized group that was hurt by his work or has been "asking" persistently for his "help". Which doesn't match his description of the events.
So we're left speculating or mocking the guy, or insulting his country, with a clue on what's going on. Sometimes, if you have nothing to say, it's best to say nothing.
Re:Unfortunately (Score:1, Insightful)
Sometimes, if you have nothing to say, it's best to say nothing.
If you "work in media" you would go broke in an instant. Besides, "Slashdot Mystery Science Theatre" has a catchy ring to it.
Re:Unfortunately (Score:4, Insightful)
...but this guy is in a pretty shitty country where the cops are far, far more corrupt than the ones in the western world.
Clearly you've never visited the city of New Orleans or the state of Illinois.
Re:Tin foil hats (Score:2, Insightful)
I tend to mod things appropriately. If it's funny, I mod it as such. If it's not informative, I don't mod it as informative.
If being funny were meant to affect karma, it would.
Re:Tin foil hats (Score:4, Insightful)
If being funny were meant to affect karma, it would.
And in fact, it used to. That it no longer does is another one of /.'s unfortunate regressions. Another one being that it used to allow non-Latin1 characters in comments (e.g., Cyrillic, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and others). Just because CmdrTaco decides to change something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. The ability to post comments with arbitrary characters was removed due to abuse of Unicode control characters; the proper solution would've been to filter only the control characters, rather than to filter out 99% of the characters.
I don't know what the reasoning was behind the removal of Funny's karma bonus, but I suspect that the reasoning wasn't very sound.
Re:Unfortunately (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tin foil hats (Score:1, Insightful)