The joys of hacking

[NotLostJustWandering]

Going off topic from this thread (http://main.bisexual.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10850), so starting a new one:



True. Especially considering that the worst thing Drew could do to this sleazeball is terminate his account, and then he could just re-register under a new name like all the trolls do.

No, I think what we need here is a vigilante hacker. Someone who can trace him to his real identity, access his bank account and personal e-mail, spend all his money on guns and ammunition, and then write a threatening e-mail from him to Homeland Security.


Dang! ........... remind me not to get on your bad side, Atiq!

Can you actually do things like that?

Not me. Hand-coding HTML is as geeky as I get. But I do think it's possible. Let me tell you a story of my struggle with a certain telecommunications company here in Egypt.

I had been buying high-speed internet access from them and had no problems for a few months, and then, 3 months in a row, they claimed I had exceeded my 8-gig download limit, and cut my speed back to something like dialup. The first month I may indeed have downloaded more than 8 gig, but the other two times I knew it was impossible, and the last time their own records contradicted each other: there was an accurate record that I'd downloaded less than 3 gigs, and yet there was also the flag that I had downloaded more than 8 and therefore I again had to settle for low-speed for the rest of the month.

Customer service was like a brick wall. Their rank and file appeared to be zombies who only knew how to blame me and tell me to wait til the next month. On the second occasion I demanded to speak to someone with more authority and was connected with no less than the director of technical support, who was equally rude and unhelpful if slightly smarter. He asked me how it was possible that their records could be wrong and I said "I don't know; maybe somebody hacked my account?" "That is imbossible," he sneered.

I gave up on arguing with him but kept thinking "Really? 12-year-olds hack the Pentagon's computers and yet a third-world telecommunications company can't be hacked?" On another occasion a young friend of mine from a certain European country mentioned that he had a friend back home who was an accomplished hacker. Yes, he had hacked the Pentagon, too. I had him ask his friend to see if it was possible to make a customer's account seem to have exceeded the 8-gig download limit. Later we got this news from his friend. I have to assume that this story is true because I have no means of verifying it.

The young man had never hacked a system in Africa before and took the project on as a new adventure. He found it incredibly easy; the usual safeguards he typically had to worm around simply weren't there. He had 200 customers exceed their download limit and had harassing text messages sent to customers signed with the names of company staff. The only problem was that the company's system was so primitive he inadvertently crashed it with the program he'd created to do the mischief, and everyone went without internet or phone service til they managed to reboot the system.

[Realist]

That's amazing! I used to have a 9 year old neighbor who was the most computer savvy person I ever knew. I don't know how many times he got me out of a mess and back on line.

I was better at working on '49 Fords, though!

[void()]

What you describe is cracking. Please refrain from describing it as hacking. This causes people who do hack, and may all well and good be doing so ethically, to have a bad rap. Hacking is akin to using a wrench as a hammer, when all you have is wrenches, or painting the Eastern face of boulders in a desert red just because.

[NotLostJustWandering]

I don't get you. Care to elaborate?

[void()]

Breaking into anyone else's computer/s with intent to damage or alter data therein is cracking. The cases where such is ethical are few and far between, rarer still it being legal. Hacking involves modifying programming code, on your computer, maybe sharing it on an open source site.

Usually the code you modify would be open source, inviting of 'fixes', 'work arounds', hacks'. Users are granted a right to hack the code, legally. Look up the GPL license, which can better explain. But entering and causing data removal or altercation as you describe is deemed cracking.

People who hack professionally and as a hobby shouldn't be lumped in with crackers. Hackers do simply to do, "because it's there". Crackers go beyond that and say, "all is mine". Yes, there is a distinction. Yes hackers think information should be free but also think the same of respect and human decency, responsibility. Cracker usually have trouble with the last three.

For example, I could possibly access the inner works of this site easily enough. Doing so wouldn't be 'error' if I merely accessed. If I accessed and switched user passwords or changed the site's pages without permission, there's 'error'. Not that I intend to access this site's inner works, Drew. I'm just using a hypothetical. I'm sure it's a headache enough to manage the site without 'help'. You do a fine job of it. :)

Don't misunderstand. There are times when cracking is needed and merited. But they are rare cases worthy of serious reflection. And thus far Anonymous has not really cracked. The ability to enter a security firm's computer system was done by SQL injection, they fooled the site's database into granting them access. Once there they attained private corporate email, released it publicly. It was done to show how 'well' this firm practiced security, and because one of the firm's employees was making a lot of bad press in Anonymous' direction. The Visa/Mastercard/Paypal "attack" wasn't an attack but a ploy similar to a sit in. Look up Truth Is Revolutionary, read about it on their 'official' site.

I ramble too much. Pointless work calls.

[elian]

What most people call "hacking" is actually known as "cracking" as in you are "breaking in" to something. The clueless media and politicians picked up on the wrong term and have been using it ever since to "inform" the people.

The original definition of "hacking" refers to a tradition at MIT of the students undertaking mostly harmless practical jokes on college campus http://hacks.mit.edu

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cracker.html
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html

It may feel good to "teach those guys a lesson" but "cracking" can be unethical unless it is done with permission and can possibly expose people to legal liability.

This message brought you by the American Council of Bland, Stereotypical Regulations

[void()]

Thank you for supplying the M.I.T link, hon. Actually, hacking has a more diverse and varied history than simply this alone. Hacking was once a term applied to journalists and other writers. It is also found among various aspects of engineering, mechanics. A hacker in this sense was someone whom devised a clever use for something, other than its intended use.

Hacking also developed its own language or vernacular. Part of this is evidenced during WWII with the advent of the original British commandos. They were tasked with using engine-less gliders to infiltrate enemy territory. One of the commandos, who remained anonymous, inscribed the term "Woot no engine!"; on the side of a glider. Of course, the inscription also captioned the now notorious / famous Kilroy image. In any event the glider brigade proved a success and now Woot alone is used as an exclamation of having done something clever, or being taken by such.

Hackers also appreciate the term Foo, which at one point was an acronym for Foreign Orbiting Object, used by pilots to quickly access situations involving unidentifiable objects in flight. Other terms such as this have crept into hacking vernacular, which also deploys a nearly psychotic use of puns, re purposed words. One example is borrowed from a conversation I had with the wife. I used 'devariation' to describe a Linux distribution, which was a variant of a derivative of another. In reality hackers often create perverse logical statements, "same difference" being an example, or cat grep foo -R, which breaks down into "Recursive Crap". ( "I can't find foo, print to stdout." --- "I can't find _object name_, please help.")

And yes, I've been gifted by being referred to as someone capable of hacking. All I did was reorder some Lisp coding to optimize compilation(evaluation) by the run time interpreter, which maximized the code's memory use. I made the code tighter and more efficient. For that I was told I had created a fine hack, by someone renown as probably one of the best Lisp programmers in the world. They created a rather large movement which brought about GNU/Linux. But I've gotten away from Lisp for the time being, programming in general. I start feeling malloc-less and it loses interest for me.

Have also helped securing networks, although being they were Windows networks, *chuckle* there is a lot of simple foo you can do to improve their security. If most of the world only knew how insecure Windows is, it would be sunk. Even the core programmers in Windows have admitted to leaving flaws in their coding. One big one is found in getting user input. This is tricky business in the C language as there is no bounds or boundary checking built into the language. This means someone could write a malicious program in a dialog entry box that consumes memory, crashing the computer.

In Linux, which is based on C, programmers devise bounds checking and use it in libraries. Linux also uses hash systems, which can be checked via hex codes, registering via MD5 checksums. I have to quit reading crypto crap, really I do.