Is that what it was asked to do? If it was, sure - the onus of accountability should be shifted to the law enforcement agency that decided to act in the way it did on potentially* matching information, as by asking in that way they would explicitly know it was only a potential match.

34DTM != 34DTM10

We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes. The obvious here being that even if this was the exact plate criminals can very easily, and do, swap plates - so you shouldn't just aggressively be knocking down vehicles because of the standard screwed in license plate that is displayed on the back. When was the last time you checked your license plate and made sure it was still yours? Would you even know it is yours? It has happened to me.

Maybe I'm missing something here but diversification is a pretty fundamental investment rule and I'm not sure why the advice doesn't usually follow it here. Putting everything into a "you can't touch this until you're ~55+" bucket seems like quite a risk.

Hard to cry this as a benefit after locking papers down behind a costly wall for decades.

I got in a bit of trouble by my parents at the time and probably just stopped pirating stuff for a bit. No more issues from the ISP as we complied with the C&D and I stopped seeding stuff or uploading to shared FTPs (I can't really recall which was the issue at the time)

The whole damn business model of a forum was to provide a solution to people that didn't want to / didn't know how to RTFM, but everyone was toxic as hell toward one for not wanting to do that.

Nowadays you just have to risk accidentally billing your parents CC the tune of multi-generation wealth to get that real-world experience.

You have quite the faith in code enforcement.

Further underground indeed. It's obvious dev for a career and dev as historical dev are already two wildly different things. My fire was certainly extinguished quite a while ago.

I really am nostalgic of the "old" internet. You really used to be able to dig in and explore. Other than the image counter at the bottom center of the screen, most people weren't keeping or watching the analytics. We shared buttons to support each others websites and just built things to build them. When a few of us in what was called the E&N "scene" at the time started building what we called "user systems" (authentication with some social aspects to the site such as comments / etc) it was a revolutionary time. The systems were built absolutely terrible, of course, looking back now. I found a niche by building a flat-file "usersystem" in PHP and sold it in a zip file for $300. It stored all of the users sensitive information in a *.php file in variables and site owners LOVED it- MySQL databases were quite the extra add-on expense at the time. Ah, the glory. The rest is history.