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A Hacker 'Hero' Has Been Banned From Cyber Conferences After Decades Of Inappropriate Behavior (buzzfeed.com)
Several readers share a report: John Draper, a prankster hero to an early generation of hackers, used his status at cybersecurity conferences to arrange private meetings with teenage fans and a reporter where he touched them inappropriately, multiple men have told BuzzFeed News. The allegations are the latest in what has become in recent weeks an explosion of sexual misconduct reports that have roiled a seemingly endless list of industries, from Hollywood to the news media to the Alabama Senate race. As in many of those other cases, Draper's actions were well known to at least a core of people who had regular contact with him. Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak told BuzzFeed News that Steve Jobs once told him that Draper, an early associate, once asked Jobs to sit on Draper's back in the 1970s, an offer Wozniak said Jobs declined as being "out of the ordinary." But in the hacking world, where unusual behavior is accepted and often celebrated, there were few official steps taken to prevent Draper's overtures to unsuspecting fans. Volunteers who worked the annual DEF CON hacking conventions in Las Vegas recalled that one of their responsibilities was to separate Draper from his teenage followers. Draper's behavior drew attention at other conventions as well, where he was a frequent presence. Brandon Creighton, a long-standing volunteer at hacker conferences who was familiar with rumors about Draper, recalled escorting him from a private party after ToorCon in San Diego in 2007, though exactly why was not clear.
moar liek John Raper
I don't know exactly what Draper (Cap'n Crunch) is accused of, but I wonder if we (as a society) are crossing into witch hunt territory. Rape is rape, and rapists belong in jail. Flirting, making passes, and asking permission - when the askee is free to say 'no' - isn't criminal. Even if it's kinky.
"Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff."
News at 11.
#DeleteFacebook
Tech still isn't a social matter. Posing and pretending is. And that's what Facebook is about.
Tech is still what it used to be, we just shed the posers when Facebook and the like surfaced. And I guess both sides were happy about it, don't ruin that!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For a minimum of a decade or decade and a half. Draper extensively hit on a friend of mine, who at the time was 18 or 19.
Apparently, not all the teenagers were above 18. That's the part not being mentioned. He wasn't exclusively hitting on dudes under 18, but he just wasn't remotely cautious about the age of the folks he was hitting on. Usually people were NOT interested.
It worked for another hacker hero.
With a name like that he should be a frequent contributor.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Considering the admission fees, I highly doubt that anyone under can go. I mean, can you see "Dad? Can you gimme 3k bucks, I wanna go to a hacker conference".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Do we leave the security conference in alphabetical order or by beard length? Or do we have to wait for Stallman to go first?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So, is he any good in bed? I planned to go next year.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I used to hang out in the #2600 IRC, Drapers panache for young boys was being discussed as far back as 1998 according to my recollection.
Adults are not allowed in the kids section, without a kid sponsoring them.
In other words, adults are not allowed in those sections.
If said teenage admirers were under age then it really doesn't matter if he had any formal authority over him or not.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
I suppose it is to those men who wish to use virtue signalling as some sort of attempt to win the hearts of the opposite sex. Unfortunately they will gladly be exploited and led on, and never realise that "nice guys aren't".
If you're at a hacker convention that is not the appropriate time to hit on a women (or a man). That's why the good Lord made singles bars. You're professional environment is not a dating site. How hard is that to understand?
As for the rest of Utopia thing the Democratic Socialists figured that part out ages ago. The Danes are doing just fine thank you very much.
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The celebrity power pretty much keeps these people beyond criticism. The organisers have often been much more concerned with getting big names than caring about the regular attendees' safety.
This might possibly have been prevented by someone taking Draper aside and telling him his behaviour is not acceptable.
that the whistle is being blown on man who became famous by blowing a whistle.
With a whistle out of a Captain Crunch cereal box he owned the phone system at the time.
Odd. It's not really what I observe. From my position it's still MBAs ripping off everyone else and playing people against each other to keep them occupied.
If you have people skills, what the hell are you doing in tech? There's way more money to be made in management.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The issue with Draper is there are documented cases of his Yoga exercises with boys under the age of consent, 15 years old. This has been well known for many years and even though some of us tried to get the word out, too much hero worship surrounds the guy.
The problem is that when you idolize someone as much as we did (Draper was a member of my group back in the day.) when they ask something weird, you aren't as likely as a kid to say no to your hero. We quickly learned what he was really like...
The guy is just a dirty bum with serious mental issues who has a thing for young guys and doesn't keep the bar above age of consent.
I've actually enjoyed watching all these super nu-male feminist woman respectors all get outed as degenerates. Deep down we all knew only a born rapist would dedicate their lives to following around women showing everyone how much they care, listen, and believe.
It's like a televangelist who thinks god is the only thing that keeps men from succumbing to the temptation of gay hairy buttsex with poop mess.
I started going to cons in the early 1990's and John Draper "Captain Crunch" was always notorious for trying to invite newbie hackers to his hotel room for "meditation" sessions which included massaging and touching and whatever else happened if you allowed it go any further. The guy was always known to be a pervert. Everyone joked about it. He would literally go person-to-person through the crowd and invite whoever he could upstairs for a little one-on-one if you know what i'm sayin. Every con he would show up and do this. The best was at summercon 98 he showed up and did a talk about how everyone owes him thousands of dollars because he is so old school and how he invented the hacker scene. The guy was a fixture at every con. pumpcon, defcon, summercon.
My attorney is glad to hear it. He's an expert in ADA compliance, and he has a boat payment to make.
Do you know anything about John Draper? He is practically a nerd archetype.
Oh gee. Did you copy paste that from YouTube comments?
Make an economy where running out of money doesn't mean desperation. These aren't smart people using sexiness to get ahead. They're economically vulnerable. When the left talk about social justice that's what we mean.
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Since the lawsuit will be filed by the federal government (plus, ADA rights can't be signed away), that seems a trivial objection. And the feds need all the good publicity they can get right now.
Maybe two boat payments!
not to hit on women. There will be time for that later in bars. The women who want to be hit on will show up at the bars. The ones that don't, wont. Everybody wins.
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who the hell is john draper ?
Re: Are we crossing into Witch Hunt territory here (Score:-1)
by Anonymous Coward on 11-17-17 16:19 (#55573729)
[...]
I'm sorry but since you are AC I can't believe you. If what you saw is true then stand up and put your fucking name to it. Don't hide behind AC. If you think what you SAW was wrong; then step up and speak out about it. You are apart of the problem.
You are a hypocritical piece of shit. Please die in a fire.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The "whistle" was not created by "Captain Crunch" the hacker, it was a toy prize included in boxes of Captain Crunch the cereal, from which the hacker took his nym.
The tone was used to disconnect an existing long distance call. Your local end of the trunk knew it was still in use because your local loop was still active. The remote end thought the trunk had gone idle and disconnected the call from that point onward.
When the tone was stopped, the distant end believed it was being asked to initiate a new call and started listening for the DTMF in-band signalling that would route the new call. This was not the same set of tones as a touch-tone phone produced, so a device called a "blue box" was used by the hacker to generate the correct tones.
There were codes used to route the call via specific paths, so one game was to see how many trunks could get involved before the call was completed. Or you could force specific undersea cables to be used.
This was all described in a paper published in the Bell System Journal, intending to inform other Bell technical employees of the internals of the system. Hackers discovered this information and designed a simple tone generator system (the "blue box") to take advantage of it. Bell attempted to scour all the libraries where this journal was shelved to remove that article, and it is hard to find a bound copy from that time period that still has the article in it.
Because it was the local end of the call that maintained the record of called number and time spent on the call, it was usually a toll-free number that the hacker used. The only evidence of the hack would be extremely long calls to toll-free numbers.
If you practiced, you could actually whistle the disconnect tone yourself. It was somewhat fun to walk past someone who was on a long distance call and then whistle 2600 Hz for a few seconds or even less. If they were engrossed in the conversation they wouldn't notice the whistle, but the phone system did. Their next words were usually "hello? Hello? Are you there?"
That is ancient history to most folks these days.
Perhaps that is your experience, but I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that it is probably more common that they are abducted from their parents, or run away at a young age and are subsequently exploited.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'm not 100% sure he's a rapist but (having met him during one of his visits to Australia in the 90s) I am 100% sure he's an arsehole, and a creepy one too.
https://interviews.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=60754&cid=5736634/
Because rumors are not convictions and with no official reports, there was really nothing to do. Imagine a world where rumors were all that was needed to get you banned from a place. Disinformation campaigns would be so much more powerful. Keeping Draper on a short leash was an effective way of protecting everyone from him without playing judge, jury and executioner in the absence of actual accusations or evidence of wrongdoing.