480 DEAR HACKER

480 DEAR HACKER

a vital role here as they can most of the time. How? The same as always — by asking questions and continuing to get to the truth regardless of the obstacles. It’s prob- ably more essential now than ever. A lot of technical terms are being thrown around by people who don’t always get the facts right. Hackers are in a unique position to point out when things don’t make sense from a technical standpoint. Naturally, this will rub some people the wrong way when it’s suggested that their perspective isn’t necessarily the right one. But in times like this, getting to the truth is extremely impor- tant. It’s also in times like this that many people skip over the evidence to get to the conclusion. As an example, when the videotape of Bin Laden was released to the media, we were able to recognize the format as being digital video. That led us to conclude that a pure digital copy of the video would yield a time code, which would provide much additional technical information that would be useful in verifying the tape’s authenticity. These are all technical facts that we can use to get to a conclu- sion and it’s something the mainstream media had absolutely no knowledge of. At press time, the Pentagon has refused to release a digital copy to us or to anyone. The mainstream media continues not to care. You can draw your own conclusions.

Dear 2600:

I recently had an interesting encounter with my science teacher. I got in a discussion with him about a question I got wrong on a test (of course I wouldn’t have gotten it wrong if the lazy bastard had written the test himself and not had the answer key in front of him). Anyway, at the end of the discussion, he told me I was “leapfrogging ahead of the class” and that I had to “slow my mind down to the level of everyone else’s.” This infuriates me. It’s the kind of thing that people have been criticizing about education for as long as I can remember them criticizing it. Then to hear the exact same thing from one of the teachers! This is even a private school that says it lets students work at their own pace. When will these things end?

Sam S.

Dear 2600: Recently at school, my English class went into the computer lab to

A C U LT U R E O F R E B E L S

Our teacher informed us that we could do our test on the computer, but only on Notepad. The tech person there immediately told us that we could not use Notepad, as it had been taken off of the computers. Knowing that Notepad would not be taken off, I quickly used Netscape (the only available browser) to open up Notepad, as the computer has numerous security features to keep you from using the hard drive.

I quickly showed a friend nearby how to open up Notepad. Seeing that Notepad had been opened, the tech person came over and told me that this was a violation of security and if I were to do it again

I would be suspended. The next thing I did after doing the spelling (there was about a ten-minute break) was play around in the Java console of Netscape. The teacher was mortified and watched me for the rest of the two-hour period. Just goes to show that tech people in schools really aren’t.

RIP Douglas Adams (1952-2001) mr self destruct

That’s probably the most excitement Notepad has seen in a while.