Minick's license plate wasn't "X CRACKER". It was "X HACKER". I call guys like Mitnick, Poulsen, LOD, MOD, etc. hackers. There can be more than one kind of hacker, just like there can be more than one kind of Slashdot poster. Cracker is just some bullshit term whiney posers invented to try to keep themselves out of trouble.
As for significant incidents, RTM's worm of 1988 is one of the most significant, both legally and technically. There really was little to charge Morris with back then. I think he took a plea on wire fraud and served no time. It may have been the driving force behind the revisions to section 1030 of the U.S. Code.
It also resulted in the creation of CERT.
For all the noise, Mitnick and Poulsen's adventures haven't really had that much impact on the legal world. (Though one of Poulsen or Peterson have some significant decision on appeal about special skill/abuse of trust.) The Bell 911 document case (forget who that was) was probably more significant in that it really highlighted how flawed damage estimates can be ($1+ million vs. $17). Poulsen's most significant contribution was probably the ban on using computers while he was on probation. Mitnick has similar restrictions (if not more severe). Every computer case that comes up now has to consider that idea. Poulsen and especially Mitnick served relatively long and hard sentences compared to those who came before them. With the state of federal law enforcement and the federal sentencing guidelines, any future hackers can look forward to similar sentences if they cause large amounts of damage.
I'm not sure what spawned the EFF, but the Steve Jackson Games case was pretty significant and probably resulted in a new law. I forget the name of it, but it essentially provides more search & seizure protection for computers owned by publishers.
Since four of the books revolve around Mitnick and/or Poulsen, I would read them in this order: Cyberpunk, Takedown, Fugitive Game, Watchman. Cyberpunk precedes the Takedown/Fugitive Game by quite a while. Takedown and Fugitive Game cover nearly the same time period from different sides. Watchman takes place prior to Fugitive Game and isn't too closely related, but Justin Peterson (aka Eric) and Mark Tanner appear in both books.
You've got to be careful taking what's written in these books as 100% truth. For the most part they are based solely on interviews of hackers and their friends.
Littman's books (Fugitive Game and Watchman) in particular are nearly autobiographies of Mitnick and Poulsen. There is much criticism of Markoff's books (Cyberpunk and Takedown) and his articles about Kevin Mitnick. The main argument is that he glorified Mitnick and (with Shimomura's help) may have helped make him "America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw".
As for ignoring the web, I think that's a mistake. For one, Justin Peterson's site has some of his rebuttals to Littman's books and other criticism he's received. Kevin Poulsen has his own site but it's getting a bit out of date now that he's busy with SecurityFocus.com. Mitnick probably won't have much to say online or in print until he completes his probation.
Isn't this typical of a sysadmin, especially for a university? He and his boss want to do things just for their own purposes with no regard for the students or faculty.
I'm watching one of these unfold right now in another department. Their new IS guy spent a bundle on Microsoft stuff and moved everything (mainly web serving and e-mail) from a functional Solaris server to a clumsy multi-server setup. Didn't even provide POP3 from the Exchange server, so everyone has to run Outlook or not use their university e-mail (which is becoming a popular choice). He can't get IIS configured properly, so all the promised additional functionality of Frontpage/ASP is still missing. And to top it off, the servers have been infected at least once in the past 6 months. Not once through this did they solict any other technical person's opinions and they ignored the unsolicted ones. Now the latest blow is coming. The university wants to consolidate and move all departments to one e-mail server and one web server. So now the department has spent 6 months struggling with this new configuration, plus the expense of the machines and software, for nothing.
I gave one to an office-mate a couple years ago. He did about 5 days then stopped. Somewhat irritated, I gave myself and my wife one last year. Mine's still unused and my wife folded one.
I still work as a DoD contractor at the base I was stationed at for the four years I was in.
That's something I forgot to mention. I've known several people that went back to work as techie civilian contractors for the Air Force, but none for other services. I'm sure there are civilian contractors in every branch, but all the ones I've known were Air Force.
I even know one guy that got started in the IT/IS consulting business with contacts he made while in the Air Force.
I can't speak for how things are today, but I know several good IT/IS guys that came out of the Air Force with decent training (and in one case a Master's degree in Math that he earned while in the Air Force). Like someone else said, it's the "least demanding" of the services, if you care about that sort of thing.
If I had to pick between Navy and Air Force, I'd consider my lifestyle. In the Navy there is a decent chance you'll get assigned to a ship at some point. If you're single, that can be somewhat cool. Go see the world, one port at a time. If you've got a family, in the Air Force you're going to get to come home almost every night to your wife & kids. You might be living in base housing in a foreign country, but at least you'll see them.
If you do this, be very careful with the recruiter(s). They will verbally assure you that you'll go into the MOS you want, then you'll get assigned to some crap that isn't useful out in the civilian world. I know a power generation guy and a communications tech trying to get MCSE certifications so they can get a civilian job. Get everything in writing.
This is only somewhat related, but back in 1990 I worked on a Sequent (now IBM NUMA-Q) that had 10 80386 processors. We regularly ran 200+ users with a load average under 1. We had planned for 10 users per CPU, but it held up well at nearly 30 per CPU.
The old Timbuktu does a decent job. I have a client that's moved a number of their machines over to that to replace pcAnywhere. They feel it's faster and has less impact on the remote machine. I believe it gives you something that pcAnywhere doesn't have: you can have multiple clients connected at once as long as at most one is in Control mode (vs. Observe mode).
I like how the poll was about spending plans. Our spending plan for Linux in the next year is $0. Zero. A big fat zero. But we build and ship a product on Linux (along with other platforms). Ok, maybe we'll buy a Redhat box at Borders for $50, but that's not in the budget.
What I like... It gives the open source community the good IDE that I think they've been missing. Yes, I know there are some out there, but frankly this is the first one that I've seen that comes close to Visual C++ or Visual BASIC. Adapt this to GCC/GPP, Perl, Apache, CVS, MySQL, etc. and it will get dramatically easier for people to move their development to BSD or Linux. The more people that use it, the more it will become a standard.
What I don't like... It's still a bit clumsy. Moving between windows with the keyboard just doesn't work the way I expect. The editor does some strange things. (Control-backspace does nothing. You can indent a select block with tab, but can't unindent with control or shift-tab.) I also don't like the focus on Java. It makes it too easy for idiots to dismiss it as another Java tool. Eclipse can easily be an IDE for C++ or other languages and it runs a lot of native code under the covers.
I bought a Logitech Marble Mouse to play trackball games in MAME. I liked it so much I bought another and use them all day long on my desktop and laptop. The laptop one has a few dings in the ball, but I'm not sure if that's from travel damage or my toddler chewing on it. If it gets a little dirty and starts sticking or flaking out (about once every 2 weeks), I pop the ball out and wipe the bearings and sensor with my finger. I get a lot less wrist strain than I used to with a regular mouse. The worst part is that the movement can be a little coarse and unpredictable when you're trying to do things like precise brushwork in Photoshop or sniping with a railgun in Quake. That's because the pattern on the ball isn't completely uniform. In 99% of what I do, I don't notice it though. When I need precision, I've got a USB Wacom pad & mouse I use.
Personally, I just lug all the appropriate adapters, since I tend to plug everything in at once. But I usually carry a spare "universal" adapter like this with an additional assortment of adapter plugs. I wish they made them with folding prongs. If I have something that uses a NiCD or NIMH pack, I use a rapid charger like this.
I also try pretty hard to buy things that use AA cells so I can use rechargables. It annoys the crap out of me that my digital camera takes a non-rechargable non-AA. I never seem to have a spare when I need it.
The best bet is something all solid-state, without a fragile hard drive. I don't know much about the different options there, but I can give you a list of some of the popular models that are essentially ruggedized laptops (though some are tablet form, you can attach keyboards).
Panasonic Toughbook,
Hammerhead,
Itron,
Psion,
Microslate,
Itronix.
"The laminated timber version, to be built by the firm best known for engineering the innovative "Viking Ship" skating arena for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway, Moelven Laminated Group, is estimated to cost a modest $466,000"
Leonardo envisioned the bridge in stone. When that proved too expensive, the Norwegians settled for a graceful wooden version for $1.36 million.
A 200% cost overrun. Still, it's cheaper than most dot-coms furniture bill.
When I was in school, we used to have fun with the labs full of Sparcstations running SunOS, which doesn't chown/chmod the the audio devices to protect them from any logged on user. I had a script that would play a freaky laugh on every machine in the lab at nearly the same time. I probably made more than a few late night hackers jump out of their skin. We also used to just cat the mic audio over the network to spy on other labs. That is, until someone found out and yanked all the mics.
Ever call Road Runner "support"? They don't support anything.
Every time I've called, it's been because their link to me was dead. Except for one time when the tech correctly said it was a scheduled outage, they've tried to walk me through rebooting my Windows 98 machine (I never admit that the box talking to the modem is running OpenBSD). Except for the one scheduled outage, they've never been able to provide any real-time information or resolve the problem. The outage always mysteriously goes away within half an hour or so. It'd be nice if their NOC guys that notice and fix the problem would somehow communicate with the phone monkeys.
There's a decent Dilbert strip about this. It would be funnier if I hadn't done the same thing half a dozen times myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Minick's license plate wasn't "X CRACKER". It was "X HACKER". I call guys like Mitnick, Poulsen, LOD, MOD, etc. hackers. There can be more than one kind of hacker, just like there can be more than one kind of Slashdot poster. Cracker is just some bullshit term whiney posers invented to try to keep themselves out of trouble.
As for significant incidents, RTM's worm of 1988 is one of the most significant, both legally and technically. There really was little to charge Morris with back then. I think he took a plea on wire fraud and served no time. It may have been the driving force behind the revisions to section 1030 of the U.S. Code. It also resulted in the creation of CERT.
For all the noise, Mitnick and Poulsen's adventures haven't really had that much impact on the legal world. (Though one of Poulsen or Peterson have some significant decision on appeal about special skill/abuse of trust.) The Bell 911 document case (forget who that was) was probably more significant in that it really highlighted how flawed damage estimates can be ($1+ million vs. $17). Poulsen's most significant contribution was probably the ban on using computers while he was on probation. Mitnick has similar restrictions (if not more severe). Every computer case that comes up now has to consider that idea. Poulsen and especially Mitnick served relatively long and hard sentences compared to those who came before them. With the state of federal law enforcement and the federal sentencing guidelines, any future hackers can look forward to similar sentences if they cause large amounts of damage.
I'm not sure what spawned the EFF, but the Steve Jackson Games case was pretty significant and probably resulted in a new law. I forget the name of it, but it essentially provides more search & seizure protection for computers owned by publishers.
In no particular order:
Since four of the books revolve around Mitnick and/or Poulsen, I would read them in this order: Cyberpunk, Takedown, Fugitive Game, Watchman. Cyberpunk precedes the Takedown/Fugitive Game by quite a while. Takedown and Fugitive Game cover nearly the same time period from different sides. Watchman takes place prior to Fugitive Game and isn't too closely related, but Justin Peterson (aka Eric) and Mark Tanner appear in both books.
You've got to be careful taking what's written in these books as 100% truth. For the most part they are based solely on interviews of hackers and their friends.
Littman's books (Fugitive Game and Watchman) in particular are nearly autobiographies of Mitnick and Poulsen. There is much criticism of Markoff's books (Cyberpunk and Takedown) and his articles about Kevin Mitnick. The main argument is that he glorified Mitnick and (with Shimomura's help) may have helped make him "America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw".
As for ignoring the web, I think that's a mistake. For one, Justin Peterson's site has some of his rebuttals to Littman's books and other criticism he's received. Kevin Poulsen has his own site but it's getting a bit out of date now that he's busy with SecurityFocus.com. Mitnick probably won't have much to say online or in print until he completes his probation.
Isn't this typical of a sysadmin, especially for a university? He and his boss want to do things just for their own purposes with no regard for the students or faculty.
I'm watching one of these unfold right now in another department. Their new IS guy spent a bundle on Microsoft stuff and moved everything (mainly web serving and e-mail) from a functional Solaris server to a clumsy multi-server setup. Didn't even provide POP3 from the Exchange server, so everyone has to run Outlook or not use their university e-mail (which is becoming a popular choice). He can't get IIS configured properly, so all the promised additional functionality of Frontpage/ASP is still missing. And to top it off, the servers have been infected at least once in the past 6 months. Not once through this did they solict any other technical person's opinions and they ignored the unsolicted ones. Now the latest blow is coming. The university wants to consolidate and move all departments to one e-mail server and one web server. So now the department has spent 6 months struggling with this new configuration, plus the expense of the machines and software, for nothing.
Maybe they could fix it so it makes all those porn/X10 popups transparent.
I gave one to an office-mate a couple years ago. He did about 5 days then stopped. Somewhat irritated, I gave myself and my wife one last year. Mine's still unused and my wife folded one.
I still work as a DoD contractor at the base I was stationed at for the four years I was in.
That's something I forgot to mention. I've known several people that went back to work as techie civilian contractors for the Air Force, but none for other services. I'm sure there are civilian contractors in every branch, but all the ones I've known were Air Force. I even know one guy that got started in the IT/IS consulting business with contacts he made while in the Air Force.
My winner is the stink-free shoes. Teva needs to license this.
I can't speak for how things are today, but I know several good IT/IS guys that came out of the Air Force with decent training (and in one case a Master's degree in Math that he earned while in the Air Force). Like someone else said, it's the "least demanding" of the services, if you care about that sort of thing.
If I had to pick between Navy and Air Force, I'd consider my lifestyle. In the Navy there is a decent chance you'll get assigned to a ship at some point. If you're single, that can be somewhat cool. Go see the world, one port at a time. If you've got a family, in the Air Force you're going to get to come home almost every night to your wife & kids. You might be living in base housing in a foreign country, but at least you'll see them.
If you do this, be very careful with the recruiter(s). They will verbally assure you that you'll go into the MOS you want, then you'll get assigned to some crap that isn't useful out in the civilian world. I know a power generation guy and a communications tech trying to get MCSE certifications so they can get a civilian job. Get everything in writing.
This is only somewhat related, but back in 1990 I worked on a Sequent (now IBM NUMA-Q) that had 10 80386 processors. We regularly ran 200+ users with a load average under 1. We had planned for 10 users per CPU, but it held up well at nearly 30 per CPU.
Well, for battery life, you could port Linux to this.
Porn. That's what's on all my CD-Rs.
Yeah, but did they have to give their name & phone number to RadioShack to buy those parts?
The old Timbuktu does a decent job. I have a client that's moved a number of their machines over to that to replace pcAnywhere. They feel it's faster and has less impact on the remote machine. I believe it gives you something that pcAnywhere doesn't have: you can have multiple clients connected at once as long as at most one is in Control mode (vs. Observe mode).
I keep most of mine in 50-disc cakeboxes that the blanks came in. The CDs I use often are in small (8-64 disc) CaseLogic and other cases.
I like how the poll was about spending plans. Our spending plan for Linux in the next year is $0. Zero. A big fat zero. But we build and ship a product on Linux (along with other platforms). Ok, maybe we'll buy a Redhat box at Borders for $50, but that's not in the budget.
Here's one idea: submit your resumes to Slashdot.
What I like... It gives the open source community the good IDE that I think they've been missing. Yes, I know there are some out there, but frankly this is the first one that I've seen that comes close to Visual C++ or Visual BASIC. Adapt this to GCC/GPP, Perl, Apache, CVS, MySQL, etc. and it will get dramatically easier for people to move their development to BSD or Linux. The more people that use it, the more it will become a standard.
What I don't like... It's still a bit clumsy. Moving between windows with the keyboard just doesn't work the way I expect. The editor does some strange things. (Control-backspace does nothing. You can indent a select block with tab, but can't unindent with control or shift-tab.) I also don't like the focus on Java. It makes it too easy for idiots to dismiss it as another Java tool. Eclipse can easily be an IDE for C++ or other languages and it runs a lot of native code under the covers.
I bought a Logitech Marble Mouse to play trackball games in MAME. I liked it so much I bought another and use them all day long on my desktop and laptop. The laptop one has a few dings in the ball, but I'm not sure if that's from travel damage or my toddler chewing on it. If it gets a little dirty and starts sticking or flaking out (about once every 2 weeks), I pop the ball out and wipe the bearings and sensor with my finger. I get a lot less wrist strain than I used to with a regular mouse. The worst part is that the movement can be a little coarse and unpredictable when you're trying to do things like precise brushwork in Photoshop or sniping with a railgun in Quake. That's because the pattern on the ball isn't completely uniform. In 99% of what I do, I don't notice it though. When I need precision, I've got a USB Wacom pad & mouse I use.
Personally, I just lug all the appropriate adapters, since I tend to plug everything in at once. But I usually carry a spare "universal" adapter like this with an additional assortment of adapter plugs. I wish they made them with folding prongs. If I have something that uses a NiCD or NIMH pack, I use a rapid charger like this.
I also try pretty hard to buy things that use AA cells so I can use rechargables. It annoys the crap out of me that my digital camera takes a non-rechargable non-AA. I never seem to have a spare when I need it.
The best bet is something all solid-state, without a fragile hard drive. I don't know much about the different options there, but I can give you a list of some of the popular models that are essentially ruggedized laptops (though some are tablet form, you can attach keyboards). Panasonic Toughbook, Hammerhead, Itron, Psion, Microslate, Itronix.
"The laminated timber version, to be built by the firm best known for engineering the innovative "Viking Ship" skating arena for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway, Moelven Laminated Group, is estimated to cost a modest $466,000"
Leonardo envisioned the bridge in stone. When that proved too expensive, the Norwegians settled for a graceful wooden version for $1.36 million.
A 200% cost overrun. Still, it's cheaper than most dot-coms furniture bill.
When I was in school, we used to have fun with the labs full of Sparcstations running SunOS, which doesn't chown/chmod the the audio devices to protect them from any logged on user. I had a script that would play a freaky laugh on every machine in the lab at nearly the same time. I probably made more than a few late night hackers jump out of their skin. We also used to just cat the mic audio over the network to spy on other labs. That is, until someone found out and yanked all the mics.
Ever call Road Runner "support"? They don't support anything.
Every time I've called, it's been because their link to me was dead. Except for one time when the tech correctly said it was a scheduled outage, they've tried to walk me through rebooting my Windows 98 machine (I never admit that the box talking to the modem is running OpenBSD). Except for the one scheduled outage, they've never been able to provide any real-time information or resolve the problem. The outage always mysteriously goes away within half an hour or so. It'd be nice if their NOC guys that notice and fix the problem would somehow communicate with the phone monkeys.
There's a decent Dilbert strip about this. It would be funnier if I hadn't done the same thing half a dozen times myself.
But if you buy one, you might also be interested in this product for your TV.
I love those ads. Some of them even called the product "A Marketing Breakthrough."