Kevin Mitnick died of pancreatic cancer at 59. A lot of people are posting some link around and I don't know what that link is because of Cloudfed.

Speaking of feds, one of the reasons Kevin is famous is that the feds chased him down for getting into a DEC system and downloading a copy of DEC's RSTS/E OS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSTS/E ). DEC alleged he did billions of dollars in damage (you wouldn't download a car), the press claimed he was hacking satellites to launch nukes. He did a year, and it was insane: he wasn't allowed to make phone calls because they were worried he was gonna hack a telelphone to launch nukes. (The press was really insistent that he could launch a nuke and was an evil wizard of some sort.) After that, he got popped during his supervised release, and went on the run instead of going back to do more time. Wasn't allowed to use a computer or any digital communications networks. This is a sentence that would result in death by starvation nowadays but was sort or manageable then, except that he couldn't get a job doing anything else, so he wrote a book about social engineering using a typewriter and then sent the manuscript to his friend to typeset it.

There was a documentary about this called "Freedom Downtime". It is worth watching. (You might have seen it when I was rambling some time a year or two ago about getting hammered and watching it and I typed "frek evin" in a bunch of FSE announcements.) It is free, you can watch it for free:

https://archive.org/details/FreedomDowntime-TheStoryOfKevinMitnick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN4fCK23Srk