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I Was a Teenage Hacker
HotWired Washington Bureau Chief Declan McCullagh reveals
the sordid truth about how he spent his teenage years in this article published by IntellectualCapital.com. But Declan is not nearly
as sympathetic to the current generation of crackers (who will continue to be called "hackers" in the non-geek press no matter
what you or I say) as the headline would lead you to believe. Here's a quote: "Oh, I know. I have become a humorless curmudgeon who cannot appreciate
hackerdom's stellar exploits when I see them...."
I went to college with Declan at Carnegie Mellon. He was an outspoken member of Student Goverment. His skills lie in communication and writing. I highly doubt he was a teenage hacker, but clearly he knew many people who were. He has associated with enough people of technical prowess to be able to write about it rather intelligently.
I get a kick out of reading his articles, because I knew him. But I don't buy into his attempt to gain credibility by making up some fictional past.
Real credibility is judge on current works and perspective, not some attempt to make up some common history with one's audience.
If it's military/government/medical - don't fsck with it. Don't even attempt entry. It had nothing to do with the cops - just the realization that some systems just might be mission-critical, and the consequences of a mistake ("Oops, my new command shell turned itself into a fork bomb") were too grave.
Once in, don't damage anything. Don't touch user data. Don't interfere with the operation of the system from the end-user's perspective.
On your way out, clean up your mess. Undo your backdoors as much as possible, and always attempt to tell the sysadmin what holes you used to get in so he can fix 'em before the next group of wanderers shows up.
I learned a lot about various operating systems during this phase. Where else would a protogeek in the early '80s be able to play with VMS and UNIX other than on someone else's machine through an X.25 network?
On software, yes, my friends and I cracked. We learned a lot of assembly language during this time. To this day, I still have, on a bookshelf, about half of Infocom's product line, and all of Sir-Tech's. I purchased every single box on that shelf. There were cracked Infocom games out there, but we ended up developing a crack that beat the "normal" crack by a country mile. We ended up admitting defeat on Sir-Tech's Wizardry; someone else published the crack that beat its nibble-counting scheme before we finished disassembling the code. (Then we just went back to playing it :)
But y'know what? We learned a hell of a lot about programming in the meantime. When we weren't cracking, we were writing our own code - versions of Life, adventure games, graphics hacks, whatever we felt like doing. We started off as crackers (of other people's software and the occasional system), and learned what we needed to know to end up as hackers (of our own software).
Someone posted an interesting comment on the intellectualcapital.com site - suggesting that today's crackers' efforts would be much better spent on using what's available to create something new, rather than idly DOSing web servers. I echo those sentiments. Nobody has to break into someone else's computer to have access to a modern operating system / compiler / better-than-a-1-MHz-8-bit-CPU. The power my friends and I once spent hours trying to get access to is now available to anyone, and it's available for free - as in beer and speech. Get out there and use it. If you must break into someone else's system, you've got the option of doing it as a friendly competition amongst your friends on your own network, a'la "Capture the Flag" at DEFCON. Besides being legal, it's a hell of a lot more challenging and fun when your opponent actually knows what he's doing!
(Yeah, yeah, I know I'm preaching to the choir here... but hey, isn't that half the fun of /.? :-)
As if the 80's weren't bad enough, now we can blame them for the current confusion on the issue of 'hacker'.
/. -- big deal). I can figure out from context what someone means by 'hacker'.
Think early 70's. Think MIT. A hack was a clever piece of code. To hack was to write clever pieces of code. A hacker was someone who hacked.
Sadly, at some point they gave in to your newbie BS (due to being outnumbered), and the common usage of the word was changed. Now people are just trying to change it back.
I like the old -origional- definition more. Sorry. Then again, like most hackers, semantics don't bother me much (just enough to post on
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm not old school, but your definitions make
/.
much more sense to me than the definitions that
CmdrTaco and some others throw around. Crackers
to me always implied people cracking software
protection as well.
Plus I'm sick of reading "They used the word
hacker incorrectly!!" for every single mainstream
post that is listed on
LET'S MOVE ON. It's pretty clear that hacker is
now synonymous with someone that *hacks* into a
computer system, for good or evil. What is the
point of dividing this up?
It's like trying to explain to someone that you
play the cornet, not the trumpet; the
euphonium, not the baritone; the english horn, not
the oboe. You drive a jeep, not a truck. You live
in a condo, not an apartment.
The important thing is: you KNOW what these people
are talking about; you know what they mean.
-WW
--
Why are there so many Unix-using Star Trek fans?
When was the last time Picard said, "Computer, bring
... made me think to myself:
While the former is usually going to be found guilty of some sort of computer crime, IMHO, the latter is a clear violation of the regulations of any level of security clearance that I've heard about and is, I think, a felony. If any govt. agency allows this to happen and go unpunished or is stupid enough to not have a policy in place to guard against such a situation, that agency deserves to have information stolen.
Yah, yah, yah... I know. Just because the door isn't locked isn't an invitation to come in and vandalize the place. But how would you feel about a bank that left the vault unlocked? Would you have real pity for a jewelry store whose employees left the place unlocked while they went out to lunch?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M