> That's a really awesome story with a great opening, middle, and especially the end, if one ignores the adolescent fraud.
That admission was the best part! Everyone here was not goody two shoes in their teens. Accepting this reality can release people from expectations of perfection. Perhaps ironically, kids' behavior can improve when they feel their imperfections are airable.
In the grand scheme of things, what he did is hardly the end of the world.
And yet, it still doesn't sit quite right with me. I suppose its because there doesn't seem to be the slightest hint in the writing that credit card fraud is wrong, or that it's even something you shouldn't do. I looked for it.
And to add to that, what he did wasn't 'a hack', it wasn't particularly clever. It was just theft of services and a lot of lying because he didn't have something he wanted.
I think if he would describe it as a youthful indiscretion or something similar it would go a long way.
In the hacker ethos, gaining access to systems is in no way unethical or deserving of remorse. The hack in this case was (1) exploiting the ISP’s delayed batch processing of credit card orders, and (2) circumventing their deny list of callback phone numbers.
For the same reason you’ll rarely see urbex photographers expressing remorse for trespassing. Getting onto skyscraper roofs and into steam tunnels is just what you do.
Related - I went to college in the late 90s, at the end of this era, where there was a constant game of cat and mouse between the University unix and network admins and the hacker kids. Yes it was technically felonies all night long, but there was legitimate mutual respect for technical skills on both sides and following the unwritten rules of not causing data loss or disrupting services. This is how I learned the skills to start my career, and probably how they learned themselves back when they were students. For them to rat out a student was kind of unsportsmanlike. It would be admitting they weren’t good at their jobs.
I’m told this hacker culture no longer exists at my Uni. If you get caught escalating privileges on a computer you’d be facing expulsion and referral to the police.
> I’m told this hacker culture no longer exists at my Uni. If you get caught escalating privileges on a computer you’d be facing expulsion and referral to the police.
it has a reason. We did not have our life story at our fingertips in those days. Even if the university computers may not have sensitive information but they could be hijacked to be part of bot net or just mint bitcoins. They stakes are much higher. I am not at a uni so don't know the reality but I can understand if they are doing it.
> there doesn't seem to be the slightest hint in the writing that credit card fraud is wrong, or that it's even something you shouldn't do. I looked for it.
It's there,
> I also don’t want her calling up an ISP and convincing them to make an account for her - I’m not quite ready to reap what I sow.
That point did make it come across as "youthful indescretion" to me.
> what he did wasn't 'a hack', it wasn't particularly clever. It was just theft of services and a lot of lying because he didn't have something he wanted.
Who says a hack needs to be clever? And what is clever? Bug fixes are often something very simple that can take a long time to discover. I'd put hacks into the same category.
Again, I think demonizing confessions like this can cause more trouble. Just because we don't talk about mischievousness doesn't mean it isn't out there.
Sure, but imagine a kid 16, reading 2600, figuring things out. Trying to get access to the best tool for figuring things out.
I think a lot of people transgressed at that age. I, for one, benefitted from being granted a bit of leeway. My transgressions actually taught me to not WANT to break the law which I think is better than just not breaking the law because that’s what’s expected and one has never considered the alternative.
I wrote my first ever (and last) virus for the Archimedes...
Some history:
Waaay back in the mists of time (1988) I was a 1st-year undergrad in Physics. Together with a couple of friends, I wrote a virus, just to see if we could (having read through the Advanced User Guide and the Econet System User Guide), then let it loose on just one of the networked archimedes machines in the year-1 lab.
I guess I should say that the virus was completely harmless, it just prepended 'Copyright (c) 1988 The Virus' to the start of directory listings. It was written for Acorn Archimedes (the lab hadn't got onto PC's by this time, and the Acorn range had loads of ports, which physics labs like :-)
It spread like wildfire. People would come in, log into the network, and become infected because the last person to use their current computer was infected. It would then infect their account, so wherever they logged on in future would also infect the computer they were using then. A couple of hours later, and most of the lab was infected.
You have to remember that viruses in those days weren't really networked. They came on floppy disks for Atari ST's and Amiga's. I witnessed people logging onto the same computer "to see if they were infected too". Of course, the act of logging in would infect them...
Of course "authority" was not amused. Actually they were seriously unamused, not that they caught us. They shut down the year-1,2,3 network and disinfected all the accounts on the network server by hand. Ouch.
There were basically 3 ways the virus could be activated:
- Typing any 'star' command (eg: "* .", which gave you a directory listing. Sneaky, I thought, since the virus announced itself when you did a '* .' When you thought you'd beaten it, you'd do a '* .' to see if it was still there :-)
- The events (keypress, network, disk etc.) all activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the interrupts, if they had been disabled
- The interrupts (NMI,VBI,..) all activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the events, if they had been deactivated.
On activation, the virus would replicate itself to the current mass-storage media. This was to cause problems because we hadn't really counted on just how effective this would be. Within a few days of the virus being cleansed (and everyone settling back to normal), it suddenly made a re-appearance again, racing through the network once more within an hour or two. Someone had put the virus onto their floppy disk (by typing *. on the floppy when saving their work, rather than the network) and had then brought the disk back into college and re-infected the network.
If we thought authority was unamused last time, this time they held a meeting for the entire department, and calmly said the culprit when found would be expelled. Excrement and fans came to mind. Of course, they thought we'd just re-released it, but in fact it was just too successful for comfort...
Since we had "shot our bolt", owning up didn't seem like a good idea. The only solution we came up with was to write another (silent, this time :-) virus which would disable any copy of the old one, whilst hiding itself from the users. We built in a time-to-die of a couple of months, let it go, and prayed...
We had actually built in a kill-switch to the original virus, which would disable and remove it - we didn't want to be infected ourselves (at the start). Of course, it became a matter of self-preservation to be infected later on in the saga - 3 accounts unaccountably (pun intended :-) uninfected... It wasn't too hard to destroy the original by having the new virus "press" the key combination that deleted the old one.
So, everyone was happy. Infected with the counter-virus for a while, but happy. "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law, and been taken seriously (oh if they knew...) and we'd not been expelled. Everyone else lost their infections within a few months ...
Anyway. I've never written anything remotely like a virus since [grin]
I am not sure credit card fraud is innocent pranks or misbehavior... I can tell you with certainty that most teenagers have never committed that sort of crimes tbh.
All credit card fraud is not created equal. He didn't steal any physical goods, nor did he steal anyone's credit card. He stole some hours of internet connection, which probably didn't cost the ISP that much. Not saying it is totally fine, but it really isn't that bad.
If we’re talking about the AOHell era of the mid 90s then I have anecdotal evidence that the majority of kids I knew were committing some kind of wire fraud in exchange for internet access!
Credit card fraud was really common in the 80 among "hacker" types.
I knew of several in Lake Tahoe that were high-school kids at the time in the late 80s - someohow managed to get credit cards and would order deliveries to "vacation homes" in lake tahoe where they knew the owners lived in the bay area and wouldnt be at the house - and would have things dropped off to the vacant houses to go get them.
Also, in 1980 - we had a payphone inside our home in Tahoe. I didnt know this was an odd thing to have until much later.
Late 1980 was when criminality was going up and right before its peak. It is quite lower now ... and people who were teenagers in late 1980 are almost 60 now.
Going through the grueling immigration process, Homeland Security eventually sits across the table from you, looks you in the eye, and asks "have you ever committed a crime for which you have not been convicted?"
It's really not a valid question -> only a court can determine if you've commited a crime, that's why we call people suspects, not criminals, before they are convicted.
For example recently in UK, a group of 4 people have toppled a statue and threw it in the river. This sounds like a crime to any normal person, and they were charged with criminal damage.
The accused raised defences of lawful excuse, owner's consent, etc. They were found not guilty - with many people foaming at the mouth because they disagreed with the decision, media calling them criminals, you know the drill.
But the opinions of random people are just that - opinions. In fact even if you think you commited the crime, the court is not required to accept your guilty plea and could still find your innocent.
Only judge and jury can evaluate defences presented and decide if this is a crime. So what should these four people answer to such a question? Or suppose those 4 people where never charged- what should they have answered?
I doubt there's a single person alive who could answer "no" to that question with certainty and still be telling the truth. What is the purpose of a question like that?
Exactly. It bothers me every day. It defines much of my self-image in being present in the US. I was confronted with that question in my citizenship interview, and more recently in my global entry interview. I know of many others who have been asked the same thing. I'm thinking "heck I drove 9% over the speed limit driving to this interview. They probably know that. When I parked the car, I jay-walked across the empty street into the building. They have that on video!". If I say no, if I say yes, either way I have committed perjury. All just because I wanted my slice of the American dream. I had a friend (deceased) who was a federal agent. He explained to me years ago that the US code is intentionally drafted so that EVERYONE is a criminal (sorry @ClumsyPilot, a "suspect"). If you are in compliance with one section of code you are automatically in violation of another. If the 3-letter agency wants to get you, they can ALWAYS get you. I'm not sure that I believe that. I'm not sure I want to believe that. But he certainly believed that.
It's malevalent question - most people don't even know the names of all crimes that exist - let alone defences avaliable and how they all work togetehr.
Breaking into someone's house is obviously a crime, but if you were running away from a axe-wielding murder then it isn't.
Taking someone's car is theft, but it isn't if 'they would have agreed for you to use it if they had known the situatiojn at hand'.
That admission was the best part! Everyone here was not goody two shoes in their teens. Accepting this reality can release people from expectations of perfection. Perhaps ironically, kids' behavior can improve when they feel their imperfections are airable.