Is your son a computer hacker? (2001)
wh0rd.ca
wh0rd.ca
They eventually confronted me and said I must have all internet postings passed through them in the future, or shut it all down.
What they didn't realize is the modem PCI card in their desktop was a LAN-over-RJ12 card hooked through the walls directly to my machine where I maintained the always on dialup connection and served it to them.
I had a complete MITM on all their internet traffic.
After their demands were made, I simply served them fake copies of all my online web presences that revealed final messages that I was closing them down to respect the wishes of my parents.
The rest of the world saw the continually updated versions, and I was never caught.
Now I work in infosec.
Makes me feel for parents with a predisposition to anxiety. I recently started telling my parents about all the times I snuck out after dark as a child and they were horrified. This is the (very sophisticated) digital equivalent.
Hahaha. 2001 was pretty good.
> We don't
> Put lipstick on pigs for sponsorship fees, our users are our only sponsors.
> Care for brands: red, green or blue. PC hardware isn’t a fashion show, performance comes first.
> Test at 1440p or 4K: high resolutions are rarely optimal for gaming (refresh rate > size > resolution).
> Get fooled by the corporate army of anonymous forum and reddit influencers that prey on first time buyers.
Righto. So they don’t shill. And they know how to benchmark and measure the right things; except for the period of time when they accidentally showed AMD topping the charts and then had to adjust their expert benchmark scores. 4K gaming isn’t real; it’s a conspiracy invented by Big GPU and no gamers want it because clearly all gaming graphics is chasing higher FPS. And not only are they not shills, YOU are!
What a convincing argument. Others more reputable in the benchmarking scene considered userbenchmarks to be poorly executed to begin with, but wow, they really do not know how to take an L, at all. Of course it is convenient that the cases where AMD processors would succeed at are irrelevant.
Now I’m not playing games most of the time so a high framerate in games is hardly important to me. But who would I rather get advice from: Sour grapes userbenchmarks, or literally any other reputable benchmarking site? They inch closer and closer to blatant SEO SPAM every year.
I know Intel is not good at PR, but they really ought to pay these people... to stop making them look bad.
This point especially is such nonsense. If you're only gaming at 1080p you don't even need to be looking at benchmarks, just go buy literally any current midrange GPU and enjoy your capped 144fps in esports and like 80+ in AAA games.
Their obsession with "benchmarking with the most popular games" is silly for the same reason - there's no point in comparing a top end GPU or CPU on Fortnite or CS:GO performance, because stuff that costs half as much already caps out the max framerate on a 144hz monitor on those games. (Of course there are CS:GO pros who are trying to get absurd FPS for competitive reasons, but that's a tiny fraction of players, most people aren't going to care about the difference between 300fps and 400fps on a 144hz monitor).
They're not wrong in that you need that level of GPU to get a particular level of input latency, but the "reason" that you need to run at such a higher framerate than your display's refresh rate is because those games have absolutely garbage frame pacing.
Take a chapter out of the desktop compositor world - if you (the application) knows you're rending at 3x the monitor's refresh rate, wait to sample the inputs and render until 2/3 of the frame interval has passed. Save your GPU the effort (and power consumption).
The best theory I've got is that the owners were shorting AMD stock before it became obvious that they were serious competition again, and now they're using their reach to spread as much FUD as possible to claw some of their money back. But they come off as such idiotic hacks, I'm not sure that theory really makes any sense.
Then they did a complete 180 when AMD actually shook up the CPU market. Perhaps the site's owner changed?
There's a great video about the site here for those who are curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSBj2LKkWg
0: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X/Rating/3916
I remember (vaguely) pinging AOL's irc servers with hays cmdset commands and as a result my parents getting a letter to the effect that I was a computer criminal and we were on some 'blacklist' forever, fortunately this apparently blacklist didn't seem to be shared between ISPs so I was back causing chaos within days >_<
And now here I am, mid thirties, children, and I wonder if I would let my kid play DOOM when he is 8 or 9.. I think I'll let him play the original ones, but the newer games seem to be much more intense (maybe that's just down to the graphics/music?)..
Or I just let him play everything.. I dunno, grand theft auto (granted, the top down one) did me no harm when I was around puberty heh...
The news had actual blood on the streets, from real people who had actually died there, real violence, real panic, real bombs and real war. If you shut off the TV, it does not go away, it's taking place somewhere out there, in the real world. A game is a joke in comparison.
Would I really want to use my hacker-grade computer knowledge to enforce a parental control jail on my childrens' ability to consume this meaningful information about the real world at a young age?
(Being the naive developmentally-delayed kid in the peer group who was overly-shielded by parents also is VERY bad.)
One would even argue that DOOM jumpstarted my CS career.
If that really want questionable content, it will be cat and mouse game. Build trust and respect... Give them enough rope to hang themselves... Occasionally do responses without admitting knowing... then punish if they cross your safety threshold, but then they will know you somehow know.. so a cat and mouse game will begin if they are not responding to the mutual(ish) trust plan.
There are no shortcuts to good parenting, spying on your kids traffic is a massive intrusion into their life.
I hope at least to get to the point where they can talk to me about weird shit going on instead of me having to detect it for them right?
Tried looking into what she had been up to. Burned the dammed phone.
Edit: I mean… any tips?
It destroys mental health of many teenage girls.
No unsupervised texting.
Let them have friends at your place.
I'm now an adult in therapy dealing with all the coping mechanisms and trust issues I developed and unsurprisingly I have a very distant relationship with my parents.
I watch my kid at the park now. When he is older, he will get to go further with less intervention/overwatch on my part. Eventually of course go without me.
Same for online. At first I will be beside him. I will educate what to watch for, what the motives of the actors are and how to work with them. Baby steps.
Later, he will get to go online without me watching every move. But I will review DNS logs. And I will let him know I am doing so, preferably in front of him.
Eventually, he will go without me. Although I will likely have a traffic shaping thing so I can have some bandwidth too!
I could see this changing if I notice bad behavior. If they're hanging out with bad influences or ordering drugs online or something I might intervene electronically. I'm still undecided about whether to enforce electronics limits (I use mine a lot). It doesn't seem like you should default to intrusive parenting though.
"No wifi access until you figure out how to spoof your MAC to this."
'Popular hacker software includes "Comet Cursor", "Bonzi Buddy" and "Flash"', well, technically they were all used to hack, just in the opposite direction.
Anything questionable, I can confront, or be prepared for, they know it’s happening, I’m good with it…
And then my punk ass teenager decided to change the id on the phone to get past the controls.
I’m mad, but more proud. Way to think around the problem!
You’re grounded.
“Hacking” has real world consequences if you get caught. Try harder, padawan.
I mean, things have changed a bit. I would absolutely let him on the internet of my youth, but the internet of today is massively different..
I don’t have an answer for this yet…
(If anyone was to restrict their kids network, make it fair for them by installing lunix on their machines, so they have a fighting chance!)
He objects to it. He doesn't mind so much the monitoring, the thing he doesn't like is when it locks him out because he has been using it too much, and we tell him he has to do stuff (like his homework) to get more time. He thinks he should be able to use his laptop as much as he wants.
He tells me he is going to hack it and remove it. I told him I'd be happy if he learned how to do that. It would actually be pretty straightforward to disable. (It runs as a Windows service, and he has an admin account, so `services.msc` or `net stop` would do it.) And if some day he actually works out how to disable it, I'd be impressed. Since it is custom software, not off-the-shelf, he can't just download some script kiddie tool to do it automatically, he has to actually develop some understanding (e.g work out the Windows service name).
That said, while it would impress me if he worked out how to disable it, I'd soon get to work on working out how to harden it against that somehow. (e.g. lock his IP or MAC out of the network if the software isn't pinging a central server). And then see if he can break the hardening. I think such a game may be fun, and educational too.
BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War.
...
Lunix is extremely dangerous software, and cannot be removed without destroying part of your hard disk surface.
Which in retrospect may have also been satire
Edit: here it is https://archive.is/e0diF
Or https://web.archive.org/web/20040612092245/http://www.adequa...
When I learned to buy things online (with my own money) and started ordering gadgets from China my mom was worried the mail carrier would think I was a communist.
Holy moly!
I didn't like most of it, but that bit cracked me right up.
True Hackers use Compuserve or Prodigy.
Meanwhile you can't even use 180° wheel controllers with e.g. rally games because that's just not enough precision—you need something closer to 900°, or the car will about-face too often.
It's also weird how little of muscle memory immediately transfers between racing games, specifically sim-ish ones. Each time I switch from one to another, I'm driving like a drunk monkey again. Plus there's plenty of difference between more arcadey handheld games and more involved desktop/big-console ones. Not much surprise that with all this, games barely approach actual driving feel and skill—I've heard that only Assetto Corsa has some magical feedback for steering wheel controllers, that conveys the feel of a car riding on asphalt.
"Did you know that Tetris was originally written in Haskell?"
"Really? I thought that it was originally written in Russia?"
Reminds me of a Facebook post I saw the night after working on a class project at a friend's apartment. I think it was "you know you live with CS people when you come home and hear people talking about the difference between Pickles and Sea Pickles" (CPickle).
Prodigy offering $400 off a $399 computer at Best Buy if you signed up for a 3 year service agreement was why I had my first modern computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices#First_t...
It went well for a while. But then one of my parents’ friends called my home and couldn’t get through because my program ran for hours tying up the line. He called the phone company to complain. The phone company investigated and my parents got mad at me, and that’s the end of my phreaking career. I was mad at that friend for snitching.
I fondly remember dad spending his tax refund to buy me a brand new Dell the next year, and coming home from work to find me at the kitchen table with it in parts. He said nothing at first, but from the look in his eyes, it took him about 30-40 seconds to remember that I knew what I was doing already.
He would never become a dirty hacker.
Who is this guy?
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying.
OK i have to admit. This made me laugh.
Don’t get me started on the potential pitfalls of AMD processors.
Related story: I one time almost got our internet shutoff by trying to telnet into various ISP (EarthLink) IPs when I was like 13.
With the masses the internet (like every medium before it) became much more propagandistic and propaganda is the art of supplying people with stories they want to be true, because they express a big lie they tell themselves about their lives. This wasn't different, when the Nazis gave people the Volksempfänger and Germans went to the cinemas to look at the newest reels of Wochenschau and every story told them how they (and they alone) are special people and others (jews, roma, sinti, gays, communists, ...) were to blame for all that was wrong.
I don't see why it should be improper or forbidden to reflect on the cultural changes within the internet in a post about an episode about its past — other than political agenda yet again.
This story got so much traffic it broke the site numerous times and in the end we had to disable commenting entirely, so it's entirely possible it would have had more responses if our server had been able to handle it.
Edit: alas it's just a reiteration of the text, pretty much what I would expect from a modern Youtube clip on a channel with a name like ‘TechTV’.
I wonder where Leo Laporte is now.
Thank you so much for finding it.
If I remember correctly, the "hacking manuals" section is what inspired my reading for much of middle school. I wonder how many other 12-year-olds turned in a book report on Neuromancer to a horrified teacher because of this post?
Anyway, at some point someone had the idea to set up our own site which we would position as a deeply serious technology and political opinion site, which was Adequacy.org. Stories were mostly from the editors, who could also post comments only visible to other editors, sadly lost to history.
The author of the linked story wasn't one of the original trolls from Slashdot that made up the site's initial editors, they were someone who got the joke and became an editor. And for scale I think I had the second most commented story on the site, and it doesn't come close - and we had to disable commenting after a while due to the site crashing from the load every half-hour or so....
[1] https://www.sans.org/cyber-security-courses/hacker-technique...
The other stuff like “you can’t remove Linux without damaging the hard drive” and that you have to send it back to the manufacturer to be replaced just seems so cheeky...
This reads to me like some scripted item a jaded customer service representative reads to a computer-illiterate customer complaining about something on their computer, who of course believes it.
I lost it.
You can imagine how easily the masses would have accepted this in 2001.
There are all kinds of satire and hoaxes that have been reported by the mainstream press as truth and reality...
Look! A witch! :D
Also, I guess if you were a girl, you had a free pass, because if this article was anything to go by, hackers could only be boys(?)
Um, no, not a model parent. Draconian.
Because women can't be hackers, I guess?
This is after I got in trouble for "plagiarism," for including a hyperlink in an essay.
FTP is common Protestant insult to Catholics.
(And thanks to the very early part of my mother’s Alzheimer’s, I also know that an archaic meaning of “glory hole” is a cupboard for miscellaneous items, and the etymology of the sexual reference is that both are where you put your “junk”).
(I’m sorry to hear about your mother, my condolences.)
This just shows that even a broken clock is right twice a day.
His offense? He had a shortcut to Notepad in his shared folder, which was seen as a scripting tool.
http://patorjk.com/blog/2013/04/09/was-mark-zuckerberg-an-ao...
Any time Microsoft publicly talks about their love and support of Linux, someone in the room should point out their multi-pronged, multi-year, highly-funded, campaign to poison the well.
As a Mac and Linux user, I really like Microsoft these days. VSCode, WSL, Rust, containers, Surface, .NET Core, all are pretty sweet.
When AWS first blew up they sort of struggled in European Enterprise because they originally went Google route or automating everything while taking a “our way or the high-way” attitude toward legalisation and localised agreements. This is basically why Azure was capable to fill the void that AWS was struggling to fill. Modern AWS has learned a lot from Kim that though, and are now ahead of Microsoft in many areas. I still can’t get a guarantee that only European citizens working in the EU will be the only people who work on my Azure cloud like I can from Amazon.
But as a whole, the sort of setup where I can call Redmond directly when shits hit the fan, and they will even give me hourly updates via phone until the issue has been resolved. That’s a Balmer sort of thing. And so is the financial aspect of how much more sense it makes to chose the Microsoft option once you’re already in bed with them. If anything that last hit has only grown under the new Microsoft.
I mean, how can I justify to my political leadership that I need to buy a Microsoft Teams competitor when it’s already included in our office365 setup? I can’t, and this just snowballs over time.
I’m not unhappy about this by the way. Through the past many decades Microsoft has been one of our best business partners as far as Tech goes. Which is very likely why AWS has adopted the approach.
As an aside, my wife worked in M&A for Sun during the height of the dot com bubble and I attended some amazing acquisition parties all around the Bay.
That should be a dead giveaway.
I can’t tell if this post is serious or satire? Was this actually the consensus back in 2001?
Just kidding. It's satire. It's supposed to be funny because a chip fab is a very clean environment, not a "sweatshop".
Does your child have interests outside of sports and video games? Does your child work independently on projects? Does your child look outside the box and solves difficult challenges? Does your child question the status quo and seeks to find answers outside of their domain?
If you answered Yes to any of these questions then you are a good parent. Just make sure they aren't doing anything illegal and they will turn out okay.
Going back to the topic itself, the vast majority of parents wouldn't even know where to start, not even mentioning if a kid has really became a haxor of sorts. Taking away computers, sending them out to the church,or doing others 'let's fix this quickly the adult way' things unlikely to help. I'm not a hacker but by the time I was 16 I was doing things on computer my parents won't ever comprehend or know how to put an end to it. By the time I'm 18,nobody can say anything to me anymore.
The only real solution to this is to build trust in the family in a way that kids would know that no matter how bad they screwed it up, parents won't go after them but will work with them trying to undo it or at least learn from those actions so they won't happen again.
Despite being satire, it's an important topic and "trust in the family" (and in your parents in particular) is the keystone issue here. Everything else is secondary.
Every one of the outrageous behaviors listed have definitely been someone's actual reality, and for some people it was several of those things. Equally outrageous is how often the parents have no clue what awful things their kids are doing. Not the warez, pr0n, turf wars, freaking, hacking, etc.
It's the stalking, harassment, and deeply seated psychological issues that are guaranteed to get worse by pulling a power-play and declaring victory. That is going now require extra work to correct. That other stuff is more likely to land your kid a great job/career than destroy opportunities to form relationships.