Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michele Slatalla Page B
Book: Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michele Slatalla
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Authors: Michele Slatalla
Tags: General, Social Science, Sociology, Computers, True Crime, New York, New York (State), Political Science, Technology & Engineering, gangs, security, Computer Hackers, Computer Security, Computer security - New York (State) - New York, Computer crimes - New York (State) - New York, Computer crimes, Computer hackers - New York (State) - New York, Gangs - New York (State) - New York
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every kid with a modem and a desire to hack hangs out there. The Wing said he was a specialist in Unix, a language spoken by most telephone company computers and many computers on the international web of computer networks known as the Internet.
You needed a Unix guy on the team. Unix is seductive to budding hackers because it's so versatile. A computer running Unix can "multi-task, " run many different applications simultaneously. But there's a beauty to the cryptic Unix language that's just as important. Unix is like the King's English. There's an eliteness attached to any machine that runs it. And by extension, any hacker who knows how to speak it.
Unfortunately, Unix was not that accessible to most kids in 1989, because you needed one of the newest, fastest, most expensive home computers on the market to run it. A Commodore 64 was woefully inadequate. A TRS-80 was out of the question. For Unix, you needed at least an IBM-compatible computer with an 80386 chip and four megabytes of RAM.
(Today they're practically giving those computers away at gas stations with a fill-up. But back then, the system cost about three thousand dollars. )
Only kids who had more money than the boys from Queens could run Unix. The hacker who Eli met on Altos was one of those kids. The Wing lived in Pennsylvania, just over the state border from Trenton. His real name was Allen Wilson. It was easy to strike up a friendship on Altos, because the board had a chat system, a place where a few kids at a time can log in and type conversations isochronously, in real time. You see someone's message appear on the screen as soon as it's typed. He sees your response as soon as you type it and hit ENTER.
On Altos, Eli learned that Allen has his own Unix machine. Allen ran a bulletin board in Unix, if you could believe it. Allen called his bulletin board the Seventh Dragon. He gave Eli the number. Eli wrote: BOOK TWO: Creative Mindz
With the addition of Allen, came a shitload of pranks and loads of
fun. He hadn't known much about telephone systems, but one thing he knew was how to make Unixes do nifty things. Of course, he and Scorpion had undertaken the task of taking on some worthwhile projects and providing the group with some healthy side-benefits (which cannot be mentioned or commented on at this particular moment in time).
Of course there were things that couldn't be mentioned. That's because they were still going on. And maybe there were things that couldn't even be explained, at least under the hacker ethic.
The "healthy side-benefits" fell under both those categories.
The "worthwhile project" that Paul and Allen had undertaken was this: they were invading a private computer and programming it to find long-distance calling card numbers. It seemed victimless to them. They needed the numbers to fund calls to further their education. Who was being hurt? Not the person whose calling card number got used, because that person would dispute the bill and never have to pay. Not the phone company, because the filched phone calls emanated from a reservoir of limitless capacity. It was like riding the rails. The trains were running anyway, and a hobo wouldn't displace any cargo in the boxcar.
This was how the hack worked. Allen procured the phone number for a computer in the backroom of the Eye Center, which stores and updates customer records. And if you must know, it's where he gets his glasses. Paul doesn't ask Allen how he got the number.
But Paul calls it. Working at his own computer one night long after the Eye Center employees have locked the store and gone home to bed, Paul dials and gets inside this machine that he's never seen. Allen dials and gets inside the machine, too. They're not logged in at the same time, but in a sense they are, since they tell each other what they see. They compare notes.
The Eye Center's machine is just a generic computer connected by a modem to the phone lines. But it has its uses.
Paul writes a program that tells
You needed a Unix guy on the team. Unix is seductive to budding hackers because it's so versatile. A computer running Unix can "multi-task, " run many different applications simultaneously. But there's a beauty to the cryptic Unix language that's just as important. Unix is like the King's English. There's an eliteness attached to any machine that runs it. And by extension, any hacker who knows how to speak it.
Unfortunately, Unix was not that accessible to most kids in 1989, because you needed one of the newest, fastest, most expensive home computers on the market to run it. A Commodore 64 was woefully inadequate. A TRS-80 was out of the question. For Unix, you needed at least an IBM-compatible computer with an 80386 chip and four megabytes of RAM.
(Today they're practically giving those computers away at gas stations with a fill-up. But back then, the system cost about three thousand dollars. )
Only kids who had more money than the boys from Queens could run Unix. The hacker who Eli met on Altos was one of those kids. The Wing lived in Pennsylvania, just over the state border from Trenton. His real name was Allen Wilson. It was easy to strike up a friendship on Altos, because the board had a chat system, a place where a few kids at a time can log in and type conversations isochronously, in real time. You see someone's message appear on the screen as soon as it's typed. He sees your response as soon as you type it and hit ENTER.
On Altos, Eli learned that Allen has his own Unix machine. Allen ran a bulletin board in Unix, if you could believe it. Allen called his bulletin board the Seventh Dragon. He gave Eli the number. Eli wrote: BOOK TWO: Creative Mindz
With the addition of Allen, came a shitload of pranks and loads of
fun. He hadn't known much about telephone systems, but one thing he knew was how to make Unixes do nifty things. Of course, he and Scorpion had undertaken the task of taking on some worthwhile projects and providing the group with some healthy side-benefits (which cannot be mentioned or commented on at this particular moment in time).
Of course there were things that couldn't be mentioned. That's because they were still going on. And maybe there were things that couldn't even be explained, at least under the hacker ethic.
The "healthy side-benefits" fell under both those categories.
The "worthwhile project" that Paul and Allen had undertaken was this: they were invading a private computer and programming it to find long-distance calling card numbers. It seemed victimless to them. They needed the numbers to fund calls to further their education. Who was being hurt? Not the person whose calling card number got used, because that person would dispute the bill and never have to pay. Not the phone company, because the filched phone calls emanated from a reservoir of limitless capacity. It was like riding the rails. The trains were running anyway, and a hobo wouldn't displace any cargo in the boxcar.
This was how the hack worked. Allen procured the phone number for a computer in the backroom of the Eye Center, which stores and updates customer records. And if you must know, it's where he gets his glasses. Paul doesn't ask Allen how he got the number.
But Paul calls it. Working at his own computer one night long after the Eye Center employees have locked the store and gone home to bed, Paul dials and gets inside this machine that he's never seen. Allen dials and gets inside the machine, too. They're not logged in at the same time, but in a sense they are, since they tell each other what they see. They compare notes.
The Eye Center's machine is just a generic computer connected by a modem to the phone lines. But it has its uses.
Paul writes a program that tells
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