Re: Exactly 500 word essay on "Why hacking is cool, so that Marcus changes his web site"

[Drsolly <drsollyp () drsolly com>]

My thoughts.

Yes, breaking into other people's computers is way cool. Before I was
involved in Antivirus, my main activity was Data Recovery. People came to
me with dead drives, messed up file systems and tangled databases, and my
offer was, I'll get your data back or you don't pay me. This was in the
early and late 1980s, and I was possibly the first person offering a
commercial data recovery service for PCs.

I developed a variety of ways to break into systems that didn't want to 
let me have their data; I'd estimate that my success rate was about 90%, 
and a typical fee would be 500 UK pounds.

One of the commonest drives then was the ST225 20 mb hard drive, with a 
very simple mechanism that had a very common failure mode. I developed a 
technique called "magic finger", which consisted of putting your finger on 
exactly the right place on the drive, and exerting the right amount of 
pressure in the right way, and then the data could be streamed off to 
another medium. 

Some of the most satisfying jobs, was when a database got screwed up, and
the database vendor refused to release the database format. So I'd stare 
at small toy databases until I understood how the file format worked, and 
then I could revive the data from what was there, even though the database 
couldn't make sense of it.

Read "Tales from the Flying Disk Doctor", which are stories about real 
data recoveries, but with extra dramatics and characters added to make 
good storylines. I still remember the "George and Mildred" recovery.

So, if you count these as hacking (and I don't see why you wouldn't), 
hacking is way cool.

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Dave Aitel wrote:

> “Why hacking is cool, so that Marcus changes his web site”
>
> Hacking, or in common parlance, “breaking into other people's computers” 
> is a tool of the human spirit. We live in a time where new technologies 
> engender new freedoms as well as new tyrannies. As the discipline of 
> revolution must take hold among a society in order to combat any 
> tyranny, such has hacking taken hold among the technical community. More 
> than anything else, the searchable database has made oppression of a 
> group of people a scalable event. It can now be done subtly and out of 
> sight, in airport lobby's, in welfare offices, in school admission 
> offices. You can gerrymander an entire society with enough data on the 
> populace and the aid of advanced computer algorithms.
>
> Because morality and legality are entirely separate worlds, hacking, and 
> the apotheosis of hackers in modern culture (Matrix, et. al) , provides 
> the public three valuable things. The first thing is the idea that 
> unknown heroes, electronic Robin Hoods, are working to defeat the 
> oppression around them. Hacking truly is the mighty made low. It's not 
> joe-blow's cell phone that gets hacked, but Paris Hiltons. It's not your 
> sister's email, but Michael Bloomberg's. This is as true for the 
> Pakistani hacker groups as for the Chinese. Higher levels of oppression, 
> not higher levels of expensive upper education, spawns hackers in places 
> like Turkey, China, Eastern Europe, and South America. Sometimes just a 
> story about revolution can be enough to inspire true freedom.
>
> The second thing hackers bring the public is a complete defeat of the 
> false sense of security world governments would like to provide 
> themselves with extensive Brave-New-World-like monitoring tools. What 
> use is monitoring the public when that data can be manipulated, 
> corrupted, and deceived. What use is it to fost an electronic voting 
> scheme on the public when the public knows how it can be fooled into 
> voting for whoever controls the wires? By defeating the false sense of 
> security normally associated with complex technologies the public does 
> not understand, hackers defeat a small part of the modern tyrannies we 
> could find ourselves under.
>
> The third thing hackers deliver is an offensive operations team against 
> the very powers that seek to defuse other cultural revolutions. 
> Whistleblowers have a technique to use that provides anonymity. The 
> anonymity of astroturfing corporations can be penetrated. Shredded 
> documents detailing environmental destruction can be pulled from a 
> hacker's email archives and emailed to newspapers. When The SCO Group 
> find their website has been hacked, can they trust that their email has 
> not been stored somewhere, ready for revealing at an inopportune moment? 
> In this way, hackers keep those people in places of power honest.
>
> While hacking does harm a few, it frees a many. An exploit itself is a 
> study in cool understated elegance. Hacking is done under extreme 
> pressure and personal risk, each hacker a submarine captain in a leaky 
> boat with a cool head and a steady hand.
>
> Thanks,
> Dave Aitel