Hacking

“ One answer is to simply ignore look-see hacking. Society could decide that it makes more sense to use valuable police resources to catch dangerous criminals—forgers, embezzlers, white-collar swindlers, corporate spies and malicious hackers—than to chase look-see hackers. ”

“ To describe a fellow programmer as hacker was a sign of respect. To describe oneself as a hacker was a sign of immense personal confidence. Either way, the original looseness of the computer-hacker appellation diminished as computers became more common.
As the definition tightened, "computer" hacking acquired additional semantic overtones. To be a hacker, a person had to do more than write interesting software; a person had to belong to the hacker "culture" and honor its traditions the same way a medieval wine maker might pledge membership to a vintners' guild. ”

“ Then he built and sold Blue Boxes which recreated the tones to make free calls."
"Phreaking and computer hacking, they're the same?"
"Ya, ya, especially for the older hackers." The Flying Dutchman patted himself on the stomach. "You see hacking, some call it cracking, is taking a system to its limit. Exploring it, master- ing the machine. The phones, computers, viruses, it's all hack- ing. You understand?"
"Spook called hacking a technique for investigating new spontane- ously generated lifeforms. He said a network was a living being. ”

“ In the new, severe, responsible, high-stakes context of the "Information Society" of the 1990s, "hacking" was called into question.
What did it mean to break into a computer without permission and use its computational power, or look around inside its files without hurting anything? What were computer-intruding hackers, anyway—how should society, and the law, best define their actions? Were they just BROWSERS, harmless intellectual explorers? Were they VOYEURS, snoops, invaders of privacy? Should they be sternly treated as potential AGENTS OF ESPIONAGE, or perhaps as INDUSTRIAL SPIES? ”

“ One person's creative subversion of authority is another person's security headache, after all. Even so, the central taboo against malicious or deliberately harmful behavior remains strong enough that most hackers prefer to use the term "cracker"—i.e., a person who deliberately cracks a computer security system to steal or vandalize data—to describe the subset of hackers who apply their computing skills maliciously.
This central taboo against maliciousness remains the primary cultural link between the notion of hacking in the early 21st century and hacking in the 1950s. ”

“ When police officers march through the front door of a hacker's home today, they may be better prepared than their predecessors, but they will also be facing bigger hurdles. Today, top hackers encrypt everything sensitive. The data on their hard drives, their live data connections, even their voice conversations.
So, if hackers are still hacking, who are their targets?
It is a broad field. Any type of network provider—X.25, cellular phone or large Internet provider. Computer vendors—the manufacturers of software and hardware, routers, gateways, firewalls or phone switches. ”

“ It is important to note that, as the idea of computer hacking has evolved over the last four decades, the original notion of hacking—i.e., performing pranks or exploring underground tunnels—remains intact. ”

“ This is "hacking" as it was defined in Steven Levy's much-praised history of the pioneer computer milieu, Hackers, published in 1984.
Hackers of all kinds are absolutely soaked through with heroic anti-bureaucratic sentiment. Hackers long for recognition as a praiseworthy cultural archetype, the postmodern electronic equivalent of the cowboy and mountain man. Whether they deserve such a reputation is something for history to decide. ”

“ The urge to confine the culture of computer hacking within the same ethical boundaries is well-meaning but impossible. Although most software hacks aspire to the same spirit of elegance and simplicity, the software medium offers less chance for reversibility. Dismantling a police cruiser is easy compared with dismantling an idea, especially an idea whose time has come. ”

“ As it's worded, the legislation puts malicious, destructive hacking on a par with look-see hacking by saying that anyone who destroys, erases, alters or inserts data via a carrier faces a prison term, regardless of the person's intent. There is no gradation in the law between mere deletion of data and `aggravated deletion'—the maximum penalty is ten years for both. The AFP has taken advantage of this lack of distinction, and the result has been a steady stream of look-see hackers being charged with the most serious computer crime offences. ”

“ This notion of collective innovation and communal software ownership distanced the act of computer hacking in the 1960s from the tunnel hacking and phone hacking of the 1950s. The latter pursuits tended to be solo or small-group activities. Tunnel and phone hackers relied heavily on campus lore, but the off-limits nature of their activity discouraged the open circulation of new discoveries. Computer hackers, on the other hand, did their work amid a scientific field biased toward collaboration and the rewarding of innovation. ”

“ A positive course of events can originate only from political experiences of individual empowerment. Wider choice and broader possibilities involve specific risks. Hacking is by no means an experience without precedent in past pragmatics. The German war code was hacked, and nations are very eager to confer honor upon other hackers of distinction: scientists who break the secrets of genetic codes, or spies who discover the secrets of the enemy. Examined from a literate political perspective, hacking, as a peculiar form of individual self-constitution, can appear as criminal. ”

“ Phreaking is loosely defined as hacking the telephone system. It is a very loose definition. Some people believe phreaking includes stealing a credit card number and using it to make a long-distance call for free. Purists shun this definition. To them, using a stolen credit card is not phreaking, it is carding. They argue that phreaking demands a reasonable level of technical skill and involves manipulation of a telephone exchange. This manipulation may manifest itself as using computers or electrical circuits to generate special tones or modify the voltage of a phone line. ”

“ Most of them, however, are not sorry for their hacking activities. Some are sorry they upset people. They feel badly that they caused system admins stress and unhappiness by hacking their systems. But most do not feel hacking is wrong—and few, if any, feel that `look-see hacking', as prosecuting barrister Geoff Chettle termed non-malicious hacking, should be a crime.
For the most part, their punishments have only hardened their views on the subject. They know that in many cases the authorities have sought to make examples of them, for the benefit of rest of the computer underground. ”

“ Once they passed through that door and sat behind the console of a million-dollar computer, hackers had power. So it was natural to distrust any force which might try to limit the extent of that power.
HACKERS SHOULD BE JUDGED BY THEIR HACKING, NOT BOGUS CRITERIA SUCH AS DEGREES, AGE, RACE, OR POSITION. The ready acceptance of twelve-year-old Peter Deutsch in the TX-0 community (though not by non-hacker graduate students) was a good example. ”

“ What other group of criminals, she asks rhetorically, publishes newsletters and holds conventions? She seems deeply nettled by the sheer brazenness of this behavior, though to an outsider, this activity might make one wonder whether hackers should be considered "criminals" at all. Skateboarders have magazines, and they trespass a lot. Hot rod people have magazines and they break speed limits and sometimes kill people....
I ask her whether it would be any loss to society if phone phreaking and computer hacking, as hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so that nobody ever did it again. ”

“ Crash," which appeared in electronic form in Phrack Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.
"To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we must first take a quick look into the past. In the 1960s, a group of MIT students built the first modern computer system. This wild, rebellious group of young men were the first to bear the name 'hackers.' The systems that they developed were intended to be used to solve world problems and to benefit all of mankind. "As we can see, this has not been the case. The computer system has been solely in the hands of big businesses and the government. ”

“ As 1990 rolled on, the slings and arrows mounted: the Knight Lightning raid, the Steve Jackson raid, the nation-spanning Operation Sundevil. The rhetoric of law enforcement made it clear that there was, in fact, a concerted crackdown on hackers in progress.
The hackers of the Hackers Conference, the Wellbeings, and their ilk, did not really mind the occasional public misapprehension of "hacking;" if anything, this membrane of differentiation from straight society made the "computer community" feel different, smarter, better. ”

“ The computer-crime units that do exist, can't get work. The true scope of computer-crime: its size, its real nature, the scope of its threats, and the legal remedies for it—all remain obscured.
Another problem is very little publicized, but it is a cause of genuine concern. Where there is persistent crime, but no effective police protection, then vigilantism can result. Telcos, banks, credit companies, the major corporations who maintain extensive computer networks vulnerable to hacking —these organizations are powerful, wealthy, and politically influential. ”

“ What made carding even less noble was that it required the technical skill of a wind-up toy. Not only was it beneath most good hackers, it attracted the wrong sort of people into the hacking scene. People who had little or no respect for the early Australian underground's golden rules of hacking: don't damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them) ”

“ The fact that I was a graduate student at MIT when I hacked the Xbox legitimized the activity in the eyes of the right people. However, the right to hack shouldn’t only be extended to academics. I got my start on hacking when I was just a boy in elementary school, taking apart every electronic appliance I could get my hands on, much to my parents’ chagrin. ”

“ In many ways, the core tenets listed by Levy continue to define the culture of computer hacking. Still, the guild-like image of the hacker community was undermined by the overwhelmingly populist bias of the software industry. By the early 1980s, computers were popping up everywhere, and programmers who once would have had to travel to top-rank institutions or businesses just to gain access to a machine suddenly had the ability to rub elbows with major-league hackers via the ARPAnet. ”

“ Police treasure good relations with the business community. Rarely will you see a policeman so indiscreet as to allege publicly that some major employer in his state or city has succumbed to paranoia and gone off the rails. Nevertheless, police —and computer police in particular—are aware of this possibility. Computer-crime police can and do spend up to half of their business hours just doing public relations: seminars, "dog and pony shows," sometimes with parents' groups or computer users, but generally with their core audience: the likely victims of hacking crimes. ”

“ In the end, I chose to paint detailed portraits of a few hackers rather than attempt to compile a comprehensive but shallow catalogue.
While each hacker has a distinct story, there are common themes which appear throughout many of the stories. Rebellion against all symbols of authority. Dysfunctional families. Bright children suffocated by ill-equipped teachers. Mental illness or instability. Obsession and addiction.
I have endeavoured to track what happened to each character in this work over time: the individual's hacking adventures, the police raid and the ensuing court case. ”

“ Make look-see hacking a minor offence and the institutions will stop going after the soft targets and hopefully spend more time on the real criminals.
I have seen some of these hackers up close, studied them for two years and learned a bit about what makes them tick. In many ways, they are quintessentially Australian, always questioning authority and rebelling against `the establishment'. They're smart—in some cases very smart. A few might even be classified as technical geniuses. They're mischievous, but also very enterprising. They're rebels, public nuisances and dreamers. ”

“ All science relies on telling other people what you've done so that they can verify it, learn from it, and improve on it, and hacking is all about that process, so there's plenty published on the subject.
Start with Andrew "Bunnie" Huang's "Hacking the Xbox," (No Starch Press, 2003) a wonderful book that tells the story of how Bunnie, then a student at MIT, reverse-engineered the Xbox's anti-tampering mechanisms and opened the way for all the subsequent cool hacks for the platform. In telling the story, Bunnie has also created a kind of Bible for reverse engineering and hardware hacking. ”

“ Neither tripping nor hacking shall be allowed, and no player shall use his hands to hold or push his adversary, nor charge him from behind. A player with his back towards his opponents' goal cannot claim the privilege of rule 9 when charged behind. ”

“ Theft may arise in a variety of circumstances, including those involving departing employees taking portable storage devices containing trade secrets, failed joint ventures, cyber intrusion and hacking, and misuse of information submitted by trade secret owners to government entities for purposes of complying with regulatory obligations. ”