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CNet's "Top 10 Hacks"
tdrury writes "CNET has a story describing the "top 10 hacks" (sic) of all time. Good bathroom material - if you can surf from your bathroom. " Mentions the Morris worm and a few other clever ones. And several quite unclever ones (like the Jurassic Park/Pond PR stunt).
The greatest hack of all time may be that we're all laughing at you instead of with you and you don't even realize it yet. It's not "just" about hacking websites... it's about exploring the System. The system isn't just the online world you see, it's your reality. The media has had nearly unlimited power to shape our collective reality until now. Until now. Now the community is redefining what reality is, and exposing alot of facts that most would rather see buried.
Perhaps geeks are more paranoid than most because they know how far information manipulation can go... and infact see it on a daily basis. "Mistrust authority. Promote decentralization." Subversive? Us? Nah.
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Ah yes; nothing like a good bit of linguistic autocracy. Language is a slippery beast; it doesn't have a spec. document and changes every time somebody uses it (actually, I think all European languages except English have some kind of official governing body to decide on `correctness', but for whom are they keeping their language `correct'?). Did you know that `gay' used to be a word without any connotations of homosexuality? No? Well, you do now. Why not start using it in its original sense more often? Because you don't care, because it's been absorbed into common usage now, because heck the word sounds better than homosexual and less offensive than so many other terms...
:-) ).
Or what about the word `album'; I mean, you only have to look here to see that rather than being anything to do with music it derives from the Latin word for white (at a guess because the tablets used for keeping Roman public records were white, which were engraved on, hence the word came to mean anything engraved upon, e.g. those funny vinyl discs on which the first `albums' were pressed).
So why not let the term `hacker' go rather than trying to `correct' the `ignorance' of the masses? You could say instead (with equal accuracy) that the term `cracker' was denoted nothing but a cheese-oriented biscuit until a computer programmer or two got tired of being associated with the wrong sort of people and agreed on a the clumsy term to denote them from The Other.
Try thinking about language as a tool of control and identification rather than communication next time you correct somebody else's use of it. You might end up noticing what you're really saying.
PS-- I sent a rant like this to Mr. Raymond after reading his definition of `hacker' in his jargon file. Got ignored, for one reason or another.
PPS-- Homework for next time: In light of the above, discuss the term `free software' (but not on Slashdot please
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
The Zippy filter is still around. For anyone who hasn't seen it, you should really check it out. It's just about the funniest thing on the web: http://www.metahtml.com/apps/zippy /welcome.mhtml
[...] Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the `login' command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.
Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler -- so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognize when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled `login' the code to allow Thompson entry -- and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources. [...]
A detailed description of the hack by Ken Thompson himself can be found here.
I think that the funniest (and the most truthful) hack is the "MIT doesn't do windows" and the "Crash" button that some hackers put up in '96 when Bill Gates spoke at MIT.
Orson Wells. War of the Worlds.
Remember, hacking isn't just with computers. Probably the best piece of hacking/social engineering EVER was Orson Wells with the war of the worlds. Who else can claim that their hack affected MILLIONS of people all over the country?
Oh sure, I hear the naysayers saying that he probably didn't even mean to do it. But to me, that's immaterial. The hack of turning a regular radio show into a national panic is quite a hack, IMHO. It may not have been cool or good, but I would consider it a hack.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Whatever happened to reading for comprehension, people?? The C|NET story ISN'T proporting to list the "10 Best Hacks of all Time" . It's listing the 10 "MOST SUBVERSIVE" hacks (in their NSHO). That's why those inelegant - but politically interesting - hacks are there.
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-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Eh... That's the first thing I saw when I was reading the article. I stopped after that.. why do they feel the need to "warn" readers that they're not going to talk about "real hacks" (whatever they think that means). Seems a bit over-politically-correct to me.
The hackers wrote of their own "rooting" exploits (that is, hacking the root directory of a server) ...
:o
Man, how could they get something so wrong?
Though I appreciate the symbolic value of "Wargames", it's just not a real-life example of the 'Net striking back. My nomination for #1 would be the cracking and slashdotting of kipling.com's "hacker" contest. >:)
-W-
Is it all journey, or is there landfall?
--Ellison & van Vogt, 'The Human Operators'
Anyone remember this site? If not, read on...
They were a "free porn" ("jumbo shrimp"?) site..all you had to do to get the pr0n was download thier "client"...which actually turned the speaker off of the (l)user's modem, dialed a phone number in Outer Mongolia , and connected to a pop there. Brilliant. beautifulgirls.com split the phone revenue with a northern slobovian phone company, and the people who found $200+ international ld calls on their phone bill were screwed; a court case determined that they were indeed liable for the charges....now _that_ was memorable..btw, i wasn't one of those lusers...
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
It wasn't ranked higher because the worm exploit wasn't intended as a taking-down-systems kind of hack. He made a programming mistake, like they mention in the article. That's what caused the problem with the computers... not his breaking and entering through a known point of entry. It was mildly clever... but only like word macro viruses are mildly clever-
So ``rooting'' is gaining access to the root directory on a server. Got it!
Why can't there be a one page list that individual "hacks" are liked to?
This Click here for page one, then click here for page two, and so on is annoying. Is this just a bullshit way to increase the number of hits they get per day and drive up advertsing prices?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I think the ranking has to do with timing, and it being before the big Internet commercial goldrush. If something akin to the Morris worm were released today, taking down 1 in 10 internet servers, the person caught for it would be sued for about 10 quadrillion dollars and locked up for about 2000 years.
I was going to question the quote about him making a "programming mistake" That is the first that I've read that. I always thought that he knew exactly what he was doing when he coded it, but he really didn't intend for it to get out onto the net, or something like that. Maybe that's what he told his lawyers.
Anyways, I really doubt that a pretty sharp coder would make a mistake like that and not catch it during the testing phase.
sporty - with the new jack swing commin' at ya'
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
did anyone else notice that 80% of these were not true hacks but just web site modifications. (except two : the movie [which wasn't a real hack] and morris [i remember a story from back then where the guys at MIT reverse engineering the worm came to the conclusion that the perpetrator just plain wasn't that good a programmer : the worm could have been a MUCH better hack.) why not real hacks? why not _better_ imagined ones (E911 anybody?) the WWW is NOT the net. there's a lot more to hacking then a URL. [sigh]
How many times could one article use the phraseology, "...proving that..." and "the moral of the story is..."? Rhetorical question.
The special(ly inane) report was advertised as the "10 Craftiest Hacks" and the "10 Most Subversive Hacks", but it's neither. And what's with the slam at Kevin Mitnick on the front page of the article? My understanding is that industrial espionage involves companies spying on each other for competitive advantage, not one man's virtual dumpster diving.
CNET's definition of spoofing is "the interception and jumbling of information from a content-providing Web server before it reaches a person browsing the site...very popular in 1997."
Definitely the borderline lame-assness the Jargon File refers to in its spoof entry. I'm worrying I missed out on that crazy 1997 spoofing fad. Hmm.
I really can't tell whether the article is simply lame or perniciously brain-dead. The tone of the AirTran hack description is misbegottenly whiny, calling morbid humor "crass" (if you can believe that).
Finally, I bet "Real-world hackers" could get within a thousand yards of Meg Ryan. Especially if they're Real World "hackers."
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Make mine methylphenidate.
This is a quote from the #3 hack page ;-)
The hackers wrote of their own "rooting" exploits (that is, hacking the root directory of a server) at sites including those of Penthouse, Motorola, and an ISP in New Mexico. And those who made it to the end of the page found a statement that more interesting material could be found in the HTML source of the hack.
Root directory of a server... ROFLMAO!
I think that writer needs a crash course in UNIX.
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Leonid S. Knyshov
Network Administrator
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
For my money, the Green Building as a VU meter is the most impressive, the cop car on the dome the most humorous.
Anyway, I thought it was sad that true great hacks got no mention.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Problem with your analogy is that there is a precedent for the term cracker that predates computer technology. Figuring out a cipher is called cracking, and so is breaking into a safe (as in ``safe cracker''). So you can't object to the term cracker being applied to someone who breaks computer security on the grounds that the term already refers to a kind of food. Moreover, the two meanings are distant, so there is no confusion. Hackers and crackers are not as distant, so there is significant confusion. People who use hacker in the explorative computer programmer sense can be easily misunderstood to be referring to the security cracker meaning.
;)
When you say ``I'm a hacker'', some people may think that you break into computers, even though you mean that you like to work on neat programs. When you say ``I'm eating a cracker'', nobody thinks that you are munching on the remains a stereotypical masked guy who blows up metal boxes (or worse, performing some indecency).
See http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/for more details.
Like too many news articles this days, this one was just filled with bland moralizing and "teaching" language. And the number one "hack" of all time is the movie "War Games?" What? I'm getting sick and tired of "reports" that merely express what people are suppose to think about a subject under the cover of "informing" them. Bah. Not worth the read- any slashdotter could give you a more interesting, historically accurate, and comprehensive list.
c'mon now!! How does that super-dooper Microsoft hack not make it at number one? Microsoft denied that it happened, and the number one "hack" never really happened, so logic says that the hack of microsoft is number one.....right?
Juiced? Or Not?
Allright we've seen the CNET article and though it is amusing it is no where near to being a list of most 'subversive hacks'. I have allready seen some good hacks being cited here.
Instead of complaining, maybe we could show CNET what a good hack is supposed to look like. What I propose is that we compile a list, that is actually a list of best hacks. Together with some help from Slashdot editors this list could be build and through voting I think we could come up with a list that is a more accurate definition of the word hack.
I vote for Charles Babbage to be on this list. Doing all, that he did, mechanically was and is a great hack.
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