Slashdot Mirror
LoU's Iraq/China Attack Correction
PDG writes "Last nite,
Legions of the Underground, or LoU, hosted an IRC press
conference to dispell rumours regarding their recent statement
on cyberwarfare against Iraq and China for human rights violations.
They claim that their intentions were not cyber-terrorism or the destruction of network systems. This release came after the denouncing of their idea by a coalition of the 6 oldest US based hacking organizations (CDC, CCC, L0pht, etc)
"
I thought the Computer Chaos Club was german, not US based... But I may be wrong, and there exist ccclubs everywhere.
Markus
What a bunch of pathetic losers. ( -- hey look, some one who can actually spell losers)
It's nice to see an example of how a hacker can be politically aware and still be disgusted with international politics..it's also a nice example of how the hacker community can be self-regulating and self-policing (within their own definition of what needs policing). Hopefully this should cut down on the "hackers are lawless anarchist freaks" media rant once so popular in mainstream press.
Why are you legitimizing this group's existnce by covering them on a respectable news site such as slashdot? This is absurd. These people are pathetic idiots that probably sit around on IRC with hostnames like leet@want.to.hax0r.me.just.try.to and pingflood for fun. 'Legion of the Underground'. Ooooh I can tell you I'm real fucking scared of these juvenile morons right now, that is such a scary name!
In any case, I can tell you from what I know about most people that are good with computers, they'd better not let the iraqis know their home address because they're probably really goddamn easy to beat up.
Hell, I'd like to know their home addresses as I'd be more than glad to take a pickaxe to them myself.
My gosh, how could anyone read all of that? It just seems like they're searching for reasons to legitmize using their hax0r skills, instead of looking at the problem and determining using hax0r skills is the best way to combat the problem (Which its not).
I'm sorry, you're absolutely correct, this site has far few pictures of breasts on it to be considered respectable!
I see your point, but I believe this particular story should have been put under 'humor', as that IRC log is the funniest goddamn thing ever. Those guys need to get a fucking clue and get a fucking life.
I was drinking coffee when I came to the part about them being "really goddamn easy to beat up" and now there's coffee all over my keyboard. Damn you. ;-)
This is "News for Nerds", not "News for Losers". /jargon/l/Lamer-speak.html, and definitions of hacker, cracker, phreaking, samourai, hacker ethic, warez d00d
As I said before, look first at ESR's Jargon File:
cracking n. The act of breaking into a computer system; what a cracker does. Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre hackers
Therefore they should be called "cracking organizations", not "hacking organizations".
Other documentation of interest is: http://info.wins.uva.nl/~mes
What a sad situation this is. Does anybody know what the "oldest hacking groups" opposed to "LoU"'s actions are? The ccc a whopping 2 years old, (and yes they are HQ'd in Hamburg Germany), Phrack, a publication not a group, right along with 2600. CDC, old yes, they are the CDC, I guess you can't really describe them as anything. It's sickening how innacurate reporting (expescially in a publication like this and expescially HNN because of their name alone) really is. You people really ought to know what you are talking about before you talk about it. You mis-lead everyone else with false information.
First, Please dont drag /. down with stupid winning script kiddie crap like the shit we've seen recently. This is not the place for such things.
Next, I think all of those ppl out there who think they are *hackers* should find a gun and shoot your balls out.
If you really think your this good at software/hadware.. then why not contribute to the opensource/openhardware community.. instead of getting off by hacking/cracking/pracking other ppl's propterty and boasting about it to your pathatic friends.
And, If you really want to declar war on a country.. why do you have to choose the most deprived and poor countires out there? You must really be trying to suck Uncle same's big fat dick.
This is the last time i'm going to reply to a hacking news item.
Some of you keep saying how stupid it is about these "hax0rs" using their script kiddie skillz to destroy stuff. What angers me is the contradictions Ive seend below. One person said "Why dont these "leeto hax0rs use their skillz to contribute to the open source movement" so on and then go on to insult the l0pht and phrack for promoting script kiddies. If you havent noticed, l0pht and phrack and a few others contribute greatly to the entire software world. They arent the idiots helping out script kiddies and helping 12 year olds hack web pages. They are the people that release the fixes and advisories that probably, multiple times, have saved all of the readers here some trouble in one way or another. So dont go insulting people without thinking it through.
Totally Agree..
I'm from Iraq, Even though I dislike Saddam Hussain. It does not mean these so called hackers should come and destory my countries infomation highway just cause of this.
They say Iraq's people are poor and dying. What made them poor? This is the most sensless thing I've seen in recent times. If they ever did anything to destory the telecommunication infrastructe of my country.. hundreds or thusands of more people would die, due to untimly medical attention and other problems. This is bad.
Next, I feel we are being trageted just cause we are different and poor. And I believe every one of those hackers are total racists when it comes to people living outside the US. If you dont like your country, why not destroy it.. instead of destroying someone elses!
If they could actually do it, why haven't they ? It's
totally lame to just talk about it.
"If you havent noticed, l0pht and phrack and a few others contribute greatly to the entire software world."
Such as ? Did they write emacs, gcc, the Linux kernel, bash, X11, mozilla, blender ? As a result of their actions something like 20% of the sites are cracked ; but I don't see their 20% contrbution to Linux code for instance.
If they don't want to be insulted, then they could stop craking sites without their permission in the first place, have a clear position with respect to cracking (which nowadays is a crime in most countries), and for instance contritube by implementing a robust security model for Linux, (which is not difficult given current design).
No matte whatr, a hacker that also cracks or wants to be associated with crackers, will always be insulted for cracking, just like a hacker who swindles people would be.
I mean come on.. When web hacker kiddies go public, everyone freaks out, especially when they haven't done a damn thing... A bunch of loser wannabe's, the lot of em...
I have read the cDc for over 4 years and their stuff keeps on getting better and better.
Although my favorite is still cDc #329
signed their own death warrants. I'm not joking. If they do this thing, then members of LoU will be found dead one day, murdered by Chinese secret agents. They aren't subject to the same 'rules' that the CIA and 14INT people abide by. Just before Christmas a German hacker was found dead. He had been screwing with the Chinese servers that censors news/emails from the outside. Be warned.
Go home and hack your mothers!
heh
I doubt China takes the "LoU threat" all that seariously. I sure as hell wouldn't.
It really nice to see an open mind now a days. First off, (as far as i know) most of LoU is older. Like early to mid 20's (ok maybe thats not "older" but thats past the "eleet hax0r" stage). Second thay are very talented at what thay do, not like the IRC punks you talked about. Spoofing a host name is one thing, holding a record of largest mass hack is another. You fear what you do not understand or can't control.
congrats you are the new military assholes.
btw the USA has some pretty bad human rights
abuses, why dont you bitch about it? oh wait
you live there.
i though hackers WERE lawless anarchist freaks!?
like cool linux exploits? who doesnt?
just because a black person is in power, you get scared right? well get scared motherfucker!!!!
seriously tho the us needs to get over this idea that we can bomb whoever we want to when we want to - its gonna bite us in the ass when all those "3rd world" countries get stronger, and they all hate us. we need to work WITHIN the UN framework, they are really not some shadowy new world order! in the long run we cannot police the world.
ESR's Jargon File:
even in the jargon file itself there are no claims that it's "ESR's", as it certainly is not. he's maintaining it at the moment, and has been for some years, but in parts at least (read the whole thing; this is all covered) it dates back to the sixties.
personally i'm not fond of his editorial style, nor his "rah, rah" mentality, but last i looked at it he wasn't pretending that it was "his" in any way. better an imperfect maintainer than none at all, i guess, though at this point it's getting a bit out of date in spots, and on the whole it shouldn't be seen as anything more than an interesting historical oddity anyway. i have a low tolerance for these self-conscious community-formation efforts. if a community doesn't form spontaneously, it's not a community.
I guess if your definiton of racist is blaming people for problems they caused themselves then I'm guilty as charged.
the burden is on you to prove your bizarre belief that iraq bombed itself or embargoed itself. if somebody did to the US what the US has done to iraq, we'd be in the same shape they are -- and if somebody told you it was our own fault, you'd be pissed.
before we freaked out on iraq, iraq was, like all oil-rich arab states, a rich state full of oil. if you're going to try to comment on history and world affairs you should at least learn a little bit about the subject first.
Its your damn Leader who blocks the UN from droping food.
we did a deal with saddam hussein where we'd sell them food if they sold us oil. they sold us the oil. we didn't hold up our end of the bargain.
How dare you blame us for your contries problems
because he was specifically talking about the things that we have done to them. he expects us to take responsibility for our own actions. we should.
and then tell us that all hackers and crackers are racist.
you made that one up yourself, kid. he said nothing of the kind.
We are so called "Racist" because we see hate filled people like you in Dictator ships
"hate filled people"? your post clearly has some hate in it, but there was no hate apparent in his post at all -- nothing but some justified anger at his country being bombed and starved for no sensible reason. you're responding to a fictional and rather fantastic image of arabs which the media has presented to you, and which you have unfortunately been fooled by. i've met a number of arabs in the US, and a few in the middle east (israel) as well. they're no more "hate-filled" than anybody else.
this other guy probably called you a racist because your post was a violent attack on somebody for no other reason than the fact that he was an arab. that's what racism is. you hate him because he's different. i know you think that you're justified, but that's my point -- if you didn't think that your racism was justified, you wouldn't feel that way.
and maybe even your fucked up system of belifs and values . . . makes your county small, poor and stupid?
as far as sheer, raw stupidity is concerned, iraq is a country, not a county. heh. you, my young friend, should be very hesitant about taking any credit for the prosperity of the US, okay? very, very hesitant. as for the size of iraq, that's more a matter of geography than anything else. are you suggesting that they should invade their neighbors, so as to expand? well, the last time they did we went apeshit on 'em, and have continued so for six years after they withdrew their troops.
and i've explained, in very simple terms, the fact that iraq is poor only because we're arbitrarily preventing them from doing business in a normal fashion.
there is certainly nothing about the iraqi "system of beliefs and values" that is any more "fucked up" than your own. it ain't perfect, but from what i've seen of you, i'll bet my money on the culture that invented modern mathematics, thank you very much (hint: it ain't yours).
The fact that a small bunch of losers with an attitude wants to be associated with the glory of the true Hackers of the past, doesn't mean that we have to accept that.
No more than if murderers claimed they have to be called "hackers". Period.
BTW, this way we can make instantly an distinction between losers+people not well versed in computers, and knowledgable people, based on their use of "hacker".
The term that is predominant for people that the jargon file calls "crackers" is "script kiddies". :-). I guess that the problem comes from TV, films, and books, that idealize the cracker as being Really Cool(tm), and that this myth is amplificated by crackerz sites.
Except that script kiddies existed much before scripting languages such as Perl, Visual Basic were invented, and they were called crackers. You don't heard much of the script kiddies of the past, because they have grown up, have children for most of them, aren't interested in breaking into systems anymore and either have managed to do something useful with their life, or kept doing dubious things, like working for Microsoft as a beta tester, or script grandpa (:-)).
I have no problem with associating people intruding in others' computers, and people breaking programs protection: both are illegal activities, both are mostly done "for fun", both come with an attitude. Breaking a program is cracking, breaking a system is cracking.
But I do have a problem with associating crackers with people with Linus or RMS, or Bill Joy, or J. Hubbard, or any other hacker.
Maybe you'll want to make a distinction between cretinuous crackers, and some that would be more educated, but then simply call them "lame crackers", just like overly vocal Linux users are called "Linux zealots". Or call the "better" hackers simply "breakers".
Both folks could be the hackers in the real sense of the word tomorrow, if you teach them that construction is better than destruction. Most of them are young and eager to learn. So teach them.
Hey, teaching is difficult, I'd rather correct them on Slashdot, and see what I could do when I'd met them
Umm, the correct term in this case is "hacking organizations." The Cult of the Dead cow and L0pht are unquestionably respectable hacker groups, not hax0r d00dz.
While there is some amount of hackish activity in the true sense in those groups, they can't be called "hacking organisation". A hacking organisation is for instance the FreeBSD core team or the Samba team. If you look at the site of L0pht (and why the hell are they namming their organization like hax0r d00dz would do ???), you'll see everywhere the word crack ; currently on the site they is an add for "L0phtcrack" with the slogan "Sniff. Crack. Faster", links to obvious crackers sites like "Hackers News Network", etc...
Yes, they don't infringe the law, but they are constantly, implicitly or explicitly, advocate cracking systems, or idealize cracking as being cool, and constantly use crackerspeak, and crackers attitude (crackers' attitude is close to the caricature of show-offs doing rap music: "Yo my brother, we are cool and mighty and rebels").
I'm sorry but if I'd see on a site from some organisation with an add with "Rape. Murder. Theft", constant implicit praise of rapes, murders and thefts, and associated with in any reference to a technique to for instance to avoid Russian Mafia's murderers, a note such as "of course as usual these advices can also be used to commit murders, and to get rid of your wife or your neighbor", with links to sites selling weapons, then I legitimaly won't call this organisation a "respectable" organisation.
I agree that since their primary goal is not cracking, "cracking organisations" is perhaps too much, but since they one of the primaly source of code and information of "hax0r d00dz", and since they are adopting partly cracckers' viewpoint, and entirely their attitude and language, it is indiscutably more appropriate to call them "cracking organizations" than "hacking organizations". Maybe it would be even more appropriate to call them "organization focusing on security problems with a cretinous rebel attitude, hax0r-d00dz language and dubious sympathy for crackers". But never, NEVER, a "hacking organization". Again a typical "hacking organizations" is the FreeBSD core team. For an organization without a idiotic I'm-cool-dude attitude and focusing on security problems, see CERT site.
And i dunno where ESR got this cracker thing from."
Probably from Real Life(tm). Get your head out of the lame self-promoting crackers' sites, you'll see that everywhere else, crackers are considered as nuisance, misguided teenagers and at worse hopeless moronic assholes.
i have a low tolerance for these self-conscious community-formation efforts. if a community doesn't form spontaneously, it's not a community.
:) they were probably right, too. at that time, usenet was much nicer in the summer, because all the psu kids were home on break. (penn state was the aol of that era; i assume it was still so in 1993 -- has the honor been transferred to webtv now? plus ca change etc. i no longer bother with usenet, but i visited back again for a couple of months in 1995.)
This is where you are plain wrong. The community has always existed and of course still exists.
i didn't express myself well. it's hard to nail down, which may mean that i'm just not thinking clearly. here's a possibly better attempt: "a culture which spends too much time talking about itself, rather than being itself, is in trouble." or: "ask not what Our Forefathers did on a PDP11, but what yuo are gonna do next week on that little beige box under your desk."
furthermore, depending on the phase of the moon and my blood sugar/caffeine/nicotine level, i have varying degrees of confidence in the amount of continuity that there's really been.
finally, using the same catchphrases that stallman et al. used in the seventies is nice and all, but it's at best tangentially related to writing emacs. a sense of identity and history is valuable, of course, and the jargon file does promote that . . . i dunno.
none of this is or was meant to be taken as gospel, and if it sounded like arrogant assertions of opinion dressed up as fact, then i goofed and i apoogize.
I bet you never have been for instance at MIT, CMU, Berkeley,
correct. i live in cambridge and know some MIT people, but none connected in any way with CS.
The existence of the communauty was very obvious before the extension of the usage of the Internet ; back in the 1993 for instance, level of Usenet discussion was high quality (better than slashdot)
well, since you invoke Usenet before its final Imminent Demise, i'll haul out a good old-fashioned disclaimer:
WARNING: i'm about to say something that's gonna sound like i'm laboring under some delusions about being an Old Hand or something, and i wish to state right now that i know damn well i'm not.
i was first on usenet around 1990-1992, and i agree; the snr was better. some things never change, though; for example, there were people then who wanted us all to know how much better it used to be
this is what depresses me about the people who say "blah blah blah, flaming is a universal constant, you have to put up with it or fuck off, i'm not gonna stop, manly macho blah blah blah." i used to hear that on usenet, and in 1995 i heard the same crap about spam and off-topic posts on usenet: "i got a right! you just have to learn to live with it!". well, no, we don't. we can get disgusted and walk off and leave you playing in the room by yourself, wondering where the party went. what's left of usenet? the flamers and the spammers have it all to themselves now. they're welcome to the corpse. i don't think it's alarmism to expect the same to happen to slashdot; i think it's just good common sense. nevertheless, there are sporadic outbreaks of intelligent and well-informed discourse around here. the "how many natural languages" poll commentary was very good; the script kiddies apparently thought it was too boring or something, while some interesting people contributed a lot. on the other hand, there's a completely senseless KDE/GNOME war winding down right now . . .
oh, well.
I'm sure if you did a study, you would find a direct relationship between one's . . . grammar skills and how intelligent and wise they are.
:), but that clobbers your point even harder. another example: james joyce couldn't spell worth a damn.
ahem, "one" is singular and "they" is plural . . . in english, "intelligent and wise" is actually referring to "typing and grammar skills", which in my experience are capable of displaying neither quality.
but i'm disagreeing with your point on other grounds, so i don't consider that complaint to be worth anything more than a rueful "oops". still, i've noticed an overwhelming prevalence of glass houses among americans who sneer at poor use of language. the US is an illiterate culture, even though details of english usage are still perceived as caste signifiers. the US may be "post-literate" or it may just be plain old uneducated, but IMHO that's just an implementation detail. the fact remains that it's extremely rare to run into an american college graduate who's capable of understanding anything in print beyond a simple declarative sentence, much less forming a complete sentence of his/her own. forget spelling and punctuation. of course, the english language doesn't help, with its endless complexity and enviable wealth of special cases.
on to the real issue. here's an example which IMHO breaks your assumption: if i had to pick two commentators on language to bring with me to a desert island, i'd bring william safire and noam chomsky. you want grammer, baby? they got it. now, given their views outside of that one field, i think it's safe to say that if one of them is "wise", then the other is a jackass. of course they may both be jackasses
IMHO skill with language correlates well with a general tendency towards attention to detail and concern for quality, elegance (in the engineering sense), style, etc. it also frequently results from an affection for language and for the written word itself (hence a willingness to treat them well). exposure and practice are crucial as well: those who don't read, can't write. those who do write, get better at it (hopefully!). at least they have some hope of not getting much worse. intelligence is always useful in any endeavor, but wisdom is entirely beside the point.
oh, well, blah blah blah. YMMV and all that.
And it's a basic syntax problem that anyone who can code should have no difficulty with.
heh. it starts with a conjunction, it ends with a dangling preposition, and the whole thing revolves shakily around an imaginary antecedent. you're a real champ, you know that?
people with that poor of typing skills are obviously incapable of mastering the art of computer programming.
what the hell is "that poor of" supposed to signify? who cares? you're wrong anyway. i've known a couple of lousy typists who were fine programmers. typing skills are awful handy, but they're not a necessity. typing is a manual skill on about the same intellectual level as playing the spoons. i type about 80 wpm, so what? it means i can look busier than the guy in the next cubicle. big deal. lots of professional typists are a hell of a lot faster than me -- why don't you hire a few to write code for you? is that how you interview programmers? do you give them a typing test and ask for their verbal SAT score? what nonsense.
here's a wild notion: why don't we evaluate the competence of programmers by letting them program, and then evaluating the results? eh? if the results happen to correlate with one hypothesis or another ("i think people who wear sneakers are useless!"), that's interesting, but you'd be a fool to make too much of it unless you're employing the scientific method (ever heard of it?) in a formal and rigorous way.
i love parsing grammar flames. it makes me feel useful.
i've said it before and i'll say it again: pedantry for its own sake always makes an ass of itself.
while we're here, i'll tell ya a little secret, in case you haven't noticed already: there are some people out here who really know the things you bluff about. yeah, that's a dangling preposition. it's called colloquial usage. deal with it.
This actually is one of the points where I disagree with the jargon file. There are people who call themselves crackers, and that's the people in the warez scene that deal with copy protection scheme removal. The term that is predominant for people that the jargon file calls "crackers" is "script kiddies".
This is one of the reasons I no longer refer to what I do with software. I now "pop" software rather than "crack."
if you teach them that construction is better than destruction
I have mixed feelings about this...without a strong mentor relationship, I feel a little knowledge/skill can just beget ill in their lives. On the other hand, I detest censorship in any form, thus I am consigned to dicotomy and brain farts.
Z
Chomsky on Iraq
1 /iraq2.html
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/376
During these years, Saddam Hussein has also carried out major crimes. The worst by far were committed in the 1980s, including his gassing of Kurds at Halabja in 1988, chemical warfare against Iran, torture of dissidents, and numerous others. His invasion of Kuwait, though a serious crime, in fact added little to his already horrendous record. Throughout the period of his worst crimes, Saddam remained a favored ally and trading partner of the US and Britain, which furthermore abetted these crimes.
The Reagan Administration even sought to prevent congressional reaction to the the gassing of the Kurds, including the (failed) plea of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell that "we cannot be silent to genocide again" as the world was when Hitler exterminated Europe's Jews. So extreme was Reaganite support for their friend that when ABC TV correspondent Charles Glass revealed the site of one of Saddam's biological warfare programs a few months after Halabja, Washington denied the facts, and the story died; the State Department "now issues briefings on the same site," Glass writes (in England).
There were no passionate calls for a military strike against this brutal killer and torturer. Quite the contrary: much of what was known, including US support, was downplayed or not reported. After the Gulf War, the Senate Banking Committee found that the Commerce Department had traced shipment of "biological materials" of a kind later found and destroyed by UN inspectors, continuing at least until November 1989. A month later, during his invasion of Panama, Bush authorized new loans for Saddam: to achieve the "goal of increasing U.S. exports and put us in a better position to deal with Iraq regarding its human rights record...," the State Department announced, facing no criticism in the mainstream (in fact, no report). The Bush Administration continued to support the mass murderer up to his invasion of Kuwait, which shifted his status from ally to enemy, much as the Suharto coup and slaughters of 1965 shifted Indonesia from enemy to friend. In these and many other cases, the criterion that distinguishes friend from enemy is obedience, not crime.
Immediately after the Gulf war ended in March 1991, Washington returned to support for Saddam. The State Department formally reiterated its refusal to have any dealings with the Iraqi democratic opposition: "Political meetings with them would not be appropriate for our policy at this time," the Department spokesman declared. "This time" was March 14 1991, while Saddam was decimating the southern opposition under the eyes of US forces, which refused even to grant rebelling Iraqi military officers access to captured Iraqi arms, to defend the population and perhaps overthrow the monster. Had it not been for unexpected public reaction, Washington might not have extended even weak support to rebelling Kurds, subjected to the same treatment shortly after.
The official reason for protecting Saddam was the need to preserve "stability." Administration reasoning was outlined by New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman. While opposing a popular rebellion, he wrote, Washington did hope that a military coup might remove Saddam, "and then Washington would have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein," a return to the days when Saddam's "iron fist...held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia," not to speak of Washington. Iraqi democrats did not regard this as "the best of all worlds." A leading figure of the opposition, Ahmed Chalabi, described the outcome as "the worst of all possible worlds" for the Iraqi people, whose tragedy is "awesome." The US, he said, was "waiting for Saddam to butcher the insurgents in the hope that he can be overthrown later by a suitable officer," an attitude rooted in the US policy of "supporting dictatorships to maintain stability."
Washington claims to have supported the democratic opposition in later years. Their own picture is different, however. Just last month, the British press reported Chalabi's observation that "everyone says Saddam is boxed in, but it is the Americans and British who are boxed in by their refusal to support the idea of political change."
It was our responsibility, indeed obligation, to compel Washington to end its support for Saddam's worst crimes when they occurred, perhaps even to intervene to terminate them had that been necessary. Quite possibly, as in the case of Suharto, withdrawal of support would have sufficed. Currently the Iraqi Democratic opposition is advancing concrete proposals for overthrowing Saddam in favor of a popular-based alternative. They are requesting US support but not military intervention, which they have consistently opposed. How realistic these proposals are it is hard to judge, but we have a responsibility, I think, to ensure that they receive serious and honest attention, and to ensure further that Washington abandon the "refusal to support the idea of political change," apparently still in force. Again, there are no simple general formulas. Slogans are easy, sometimes policy choices too, particularly when we are carrying out or abetting crimes and can desist. But choices are often hard and complex, with unpredictable and possibly extreme consequences. There is no alternative to the careful evaluation of each case, on its merits.
And/or that they're guys.
When I was writing that comment, I *knew* somebody would try and find something grammatically incorrect. Glad to see my expectations of slashdot readers aren't unreasonable.
." :). i love the fact that grammar lectures always contain errors of their own (mine not least!); i think the errors are inserted by the gods, who wish to keep us humble.
:) well, it's a natural reaction. nobody really likes grammar lectures, not even me, and i've delivered a few (though i'm learning to control the urge: "hi. my name is 'bill', and i'm a grammar jerk . .
the frequency of grammar and spelling problems one exhibits typically gives you a fair approximation as to their educational background.
oh, absolutely. education background may correlate to some extent with intelligence, and to a far lesser extent (IMHO) with wisdom, but it correlates just about perfectly with spelling and grammar. we're in agreement on that one.
When I used the word 'wise', I was referring more to common sense, which most IRC script kiddies seem to lack.
okay, i missed your point. fair enough.
'm going to pretend that your massive generalizations and exaggarations about American literacy weren't intended as an insult to me.
and i'm gonna allege that they really weren't! but while "massive generalizations" are generally bad (if not indeed massively bad!), i think i was using them in a fair way: "it's extremely rare to see blah blah blah"; well, it is. now, if somebody applied for a job with me, and without seeing that person's writing i said, "oh, all you goddamn americans can't spell, don't bother me", then i think we could both agree that i was being an ass. the problem with generalizations (IMHO) comes in when people try to pretend that they are even remotely meaningful with respect to any given individual case.
With regards to your example, I'm sorry, but I don't know who any of those people are,
[blush] sorry, i was being pedantic and annoying. noam chomsky is a nobel prize-winning linguist (in the academic sense, meaning an expert who studies language, not just somebody who speaks a lot of them). he's also a very active critic of the american media and of american foreign policy. his positions are mostly pretty far off in the nebulous area that we call the "left wing". william safire is a "right-wing" political columnist for the n. y. times; he's somewhere to the "right" of george will, i guess. he also writes a column in the NYT sunday magazine called "On Language", which i haven't followed in a few years, but when last seen it was wonderfully sensible, thoughtful, witty, and well-informed commentary on etymology and current usage. he's definitely a good enough writer to take me to task for using four adjectives there.
i'm putting "right" and "left" in quotes in honor of chomsky's views about the narrowing of the scope of public discourse in the US. there's a thread about iraq in this same discussion where chomsky just came up (on politics, not language), and was quoted at great length.
"A hacking organisation is for instance the FreeBSD core team or the Samba team. If you look at the site of L0pht (and why the hell are they namming their organization like hax0r d00dz would do ???), you'll see everywhere the word crack ; currently on the site they is an add for "L0phtcrack" with the slogan "Sniff. Crack. Faster", links to obvious crackers sites like "Hackers News Network", etc..."
Umm your so called hacker group basicly RUNS the HNN site, note the name of the webmaster on HNN
Wait! You are right and I owe you an apology for copiously and stupidly flaming you.
:)
uh, that was a flame? i thought it was kinda polite . . . i mean, you didn't call me a moron, did you?
I thought that you were implying that people described by the Jargon as typical hackers were a complete myth and as a consequence, that crackers would rightfully be called modern "hackers".
oh, golly, no.
we'll have to wait (or participate), observe the making of History, and discover spontaneous emergence of new communication structures, protocols, communauties, and other grandiose stuff.
my gut tells me that you're too optimistic, and that basically we're gonna end up seeing usenet as sort of like the archetype of all "virtual" communities; basically, from cool in-crowd to bad to worse to pure crap. hopefully i'm wrong; this "online community" crapola holds just as much appeal for me as it does for anybody who can type and who doesn't get out of the house enough.
Q: "State-p Florida?"
A: "Been reading JARGON.TXT again, eh?"
heh. yeah, IIRC there's a bunch of those in the file; i recall the "larval stage" entry mentioning it as well. actually that entry kinda adequately covers what i was trying to say originally. and of course, here i go betraying the fact that i've spent way too much time reading that thing myself
You scribbled:
---
"there is certainly nothing about the iraqi "system of beliefs and values" that is any more "fucked up"
than your own."
Yea, nothing fucked up at all about stoning women to death for getting raped
nosiree.
----
Err. That's Iran and the US backed Taliban of Afganistan. Before the US war women in Iraq had a great deal of freedom and rights. Far more so than
most Islamic nations.
However, you say this with some bizzare sense of moral superiority. How is an Islamic fundamentalist any different than a some nut from the promise keepers or operation rescue?
Is big bad China gonna hurt the widdle US?
I don't know about their cracking skills, but their politics are idiotic.
I didn't understood that HNN was ran by L0pht, which is obvious considering the IP addresses of the sites. Sorry.
I agree that LOU souldn't tear down your country's networks, but the stuff you said about us attacking you because your "poor and diffrent." Is the biggest pile of bull shit I have read on the internet. Their is this thing called Dicatorship that your country belives in. The USA started out by breaking away from a country with a similar government. Your goverment hinders your countrie's growth by trying to us Military force to harass others. Saddam is like a toddler who runs up and hits some one and then runs away and repeats it.
Yes you are diffrent, and it sure as hell isn't the USA's fault your country is poor it's your damning goverment. If we wanted to attack some one "different" we would go after Canada (just kidding.) Actaully we would probably go after India .
How dare you blame us for your contries problems and then tell us that all hackers and crackers are racist. We are so called "Racist" because we see hate filled people like you in Dictator ships don't know how to accpet the fact that you situation is YOUR DAMN FAULT. I sure as hell didn't live back in 1776, but if our country could break away from England I would think that if your people really had that horrable of life your would rebel against Sadam. Instead you fuck heads are acting as human shields for him.
People like you aren't diffrent, your in denail and afraid and to lazy to get out of your poor lifes. Its your damn Leader who blocks the UN from droping food. Its your damn Leader who rules over a country the size of one of the U.S. states that dosen't listen to the rest of the world (U.N.) and then people like you that support him blame us Americans.
Have you ever one thought that its your fault or at least your peoples and your goverments fault and maybe even your fucked up system of belifs and values that makes your county small, poor and stupid?
I stopped reading your post when you started talking about "Main Stream" press. I don't like that term. Yes main stream press might suck but as far as them telling us lies and getting their information from us I think that is highly unlikley. As long as all the News Papers, tv networks, magazines and Internet pages aren't owned by one company they keep each other in check. The is not yellow journalism. If you like Iraqs goverment so much why don't you move their.
Umm, the correct term in this case is "hacking organizations." The Cult of the Dead cow and L0pht are unquestionably respectable hacker groups, not hax0r d00dz. And i dunno where ESR got this cracker thing from. I don't like saltines.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Please research before posting idiotic crap here.
The Chaos Computer Club is more than 15 years old, not two as you asserted.
Jeez, talk about "false information."
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by OGL:
I agree wholeheartedly.
Has any of these guys ever had a girlfriend?
-W.W.
Posted by VIiMprovedlon.crosswin:
You are correct in alot of ways, however, the iraqis cant do anything to anyone, the sanctions make sure of that. Also, I would like to know how on earth anyone is going to 'hack' them when they most likely arent even on the internet.
Another thing I would like to add is, all people that are good with computers arent like the LoU, and all people that are hackers arent like the LoU. 'hackers' come in two different varieties, wannabes like the LoU etc. Then you have people that make programs and do things that help people. I think that the cDc would qualify in that group, because they dont flaunt themselves like the LoU and the rest of that line of so-called 'hackers' they push to try to get places like China to reforem and reconize human rights.
LIz-arD AKA. VIiMproved
"Trust No One"
--
--
=8^
Yawn. Every group has to have a name, They chose LoU, so what? You don't even act like you know what the word hack means. I hack my own machine to see what security flaws it has, and most people do, I don't see why that sould be looked down on just because a Group of people who use computers to access networks or computers in ways that they normally would not be. (hackers)
The fact that mainstream media uses these terms and treats these groups as if they were real, honest-to-god organizations just rubs me the wrong way. The more these pathetic little IRC channels get recognized, the more these pathetic little IRC channels are going to do lame things.
With the web site hacks and announcements like this coming about in recent months, all that the media is doing is ENCOURAGING others to follow in these footsteps. So long as these gimps keep getting their names in lights, others are going to keep trying.
Every time I see the phrase "IRC press conference" I can't help but just laugh, both at the l33t little IRC channels hosting these things AND at the media source using these terms.
All generalizations are bad.
Sorry, I just love that quote. Heh.
I agree with the rest of your points.
Not to mention mastering that horribly difficult skill of hitting the shift key at the start of sentences or for words like "I".
Granted, many of us old-timers started with computers with no lower case, so we only had to hit shift for special characters, but the more intelligent of us have adapted with the times.
It should be noted that the rules of spelling, grammar, and capitalization are not that difficult to master for a native English speaker. And it's a basic syntax problem that anyone who can code should have no difficulty with. Now, one shouldn't expect perfection any more than one expects code to compile and run perfectly the first time, but really, people with that poor of typing skills are obviously incapable of mastering the art of computer programming.
Luckily, cracking doesn't require that much skill...
--
Starting reality daemon: realityd
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
J.
damned vulpine http://sb.drtwister.com/
If they plan harm to some system, I would call that cracking the system, like a detective would crack a case. To fix something with a hack is what I call hacking. I looked at the semantics that they used and it looks like sensationalism. They ought to keep sabotage to themselves if they know any good. The difference as I understand it, is a hacker will do what it takes to get a system to work and a cracker will go beyond that even with destructive means to gain control of a system. Not cool if the system integrety is compromised to get it to work.
I work at a manufacturing plant as a senior technician on the night shift and electrically things go wrong. If I were to troubleshoot and repair a job, one might say I hacked. Now, if I were to cross some fine line and decided to compromise information or resources on the computer or telephone network, you could call that cracking.
I seem to remember when a hack was novel, something like a valuable shortcut. Like before surge protectors were popular, putting a MOV in the wall socket if computer equipment kept getting smoked was a hack. Now the media seems to call hacking a declaration of war. I call that sensationalism and unresponsible.
What does the Center for Disease Control have to do with this? ;-)
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." - Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori
I read the press release and the logs from the IRC
session on HNN. Their intenetions seemed pretty clear to me.
Regardless of how stupid an idea it is in the first place they ought to have the balls to stand up for what they said.
I started with nothing and I still have most of it.
I agree. How these immature numb skulls call themselves hackers is quite offensive. IMO people like Linus and Alan Cox are the only one's deserving of of the title 'HACKER'. The rest are just hacker wanna-be's.
Ron
You have been assimilated.
You call those guys politically aware?
Ummmm..... before you start throwing stones, remember that the attitudes of, "What a bunch of cry babies..." expressed here are an exact mirror of the attitudes of conservatives when speaking of the "Free Speach" community as it rallies around the issue of censorship and pornography. Just because someone is standing on a different soapbox than yours, does that mean they are a Fool?
Be careful of those glass houses....
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Iraq doesnt have any Internet connection. They have some internal networks crackers can probably dial in, but none connected to the Internet.
Resignation is not the way to face that. Crackers are not hackers. The unaware public may use the term hacker for crackers, but thats no reason for doing that too or not pointing out the difference.
After all, the term cracker is IMHO recognizable enough to be understood by the public, so theres no reason not to use it where appropriate.
Jonathan, this seems to be a bit racist and contradictory to what you were saying. This is sad.
This was the last place I expected to see a posting like the one above.
good luck
--
And any dictator wants to avoid that. If anything, Iraq's internet infrastructure should be encouraged to grow.
Perhaps the bombers should be dropping computers and networking equipment instead?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
LoU, besides having a lame name, does not use their heads. What do they hope to accomplish by denying the people of China and Iraq access to the Internet. The only "results" I can see arising from this are that internet/network/computer access in China and Iraq becomes much harder to obtain. I thought I was the only one who thought LoU were a bunch of idiots until know. I'm glad CCC, 2600, L0pht, etc. made such a big stink.
/. hax0r kiddies may want to check out my site. :)
Some of you
Ex Machina "From the Machine"
xm@GeekMafia.dynip.com [http://GeekMafia.dynip.com/]
> ...would we want to check out your site. Like
> there aren't enough exploit sites out there
> already. I'll take my hax0ring elsewhere,
> jerkwad.
OK. Thanks for the intelligent remarks. Ok... I'm sorry I don't have AOL4Free and ICQ flooders. I really wanted to give you those. Oh.. I'm sorry I can't give you precompiled copies of smurf in rpm format. You'll have to `gcc -o smurf smurf.c` yourself.
> Wait, since you're the "Geek Mafia" (that's an
> oxymoron, moron!) you'll probably come and break
Gee, I never knew that that was an oxymoron. Thanks for pointing it out.
> muh legs or something right?
No.. I think I'll stay here and throw insults at people on slashdot. After all I am the Anonymous Coward.
> Go back to China you wannabe communist pig.
What do I have to do with communism? And by "pig" I assume you mean, "cop" or "facist?" Please.
Ex Machina "From the Machine"
xm@GeekMafia.dynip.com [http://GeekMafia.dynip.com/]
Almost picked 352 as my favorite instead, when i posted as an AC. A tear came to my eye when I originally read it, it reminded me of years past....
/. as a new oases. (even w/ the ads)
The net will probably never return to the good old days but small pockets of freedom will always exist, like hidden oases." - Stein Gjoen
I like to think of
New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract
ideas, but in the fight for daily bread --Rudolf Rocke
In this discussion there are some things to consider. From what I remember, one of the crackers who was caught by Cliff Stoll in his cyber-sting, as covered in the book "The Cuckoos Egg," turned up dead under suspicious circumstances. Recently China sentenced some crackers to death for embezzlement. Needless to say, the evidence of the real world shows that the consequences of cracking can be serious.
Any cracker who is successful in disrupting a nation's IT infrastructure in a big way can become a target for reprisals. The same can be said for the location where the cracker's computer equipment is situated. Both can become subject to retaliation. Between nations often the only law is that of the jungle. In this world there are plenty of people who play it rough, and play it for keeps.
Wow, I am glad that all these groups at least take themselves seriously.
'Hactivism'?
Calling for the 'power of hacking' to not be abused?
Hilarious.
-josh
You're prolly right. I was just paraphrasing the article I read from the Hackers Internation News. My bad.
"Where is my mind?"
I can just imagine all the other hacker groups saying "Jeez, they tryin' to get us killed?!?!".
--
There are no facts, only opinions