104 DEAR HACKER
104 DEAR HACKER
they contacted the media (The Washington Post) and several other organizations (EFF, CPSR, ACLU) after the incident. Spread the word around, let more people know, and maybe we won’t have any more chances of dealing with the S.S. men in our local malls.
Keep up the great work!!! Knight Klone
Atlanta, GA
The D.C. events are a perfect example of what transpires when hackers stick together and use their resources. It also serves as a model of what can happen when authority figures overstep their boundaries and then try and cover the whole thing up.
Dear 2600: First off let me say that The Hacker Quarterly is one of the best pub-
lications I have read in a long time. It talks of all the things that Mr. Computer Science Prof should have told you but wouldn’t, most likely because it might endanger his/her control over students. However, I am sending this mail mainly because our neo-Nazi sysadmin (I don’t really know if he is a Nazi, or just scared of free access to informa- tion) has so severely restricted our access to the Internet that most of the newsgroups are academic related or tea-time conversation topics. Anything that might pertain to socially deviant behavior (hacking, learning something not government regulated, etc.) has been deleted. In fact this morning more than 1,000 newsgroups have been screened out from our system. Is there any way for a person to get around sys- admin control over net access for users or access Internet before the screening process goes into effect?
I have tried to get more info on Internet, but even anything more than a story-like explanation of the system is impossible around here. Shameful, doesn’t even trust his own computer science students.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Lost and regulated in
NB, Canada
THE CHALLENGES OF LIFE AS A HACKER
Your story is not unique, unfortunately. Oftentimes, people in charge feel the need to restrict or cut off access. Apart from making sure we never turn into people like that, the best thing we can do is look for ways around it. Since you already have access to the Internet, it shouldn’t be too difficult to telnet out to another site that isn’t as restrictive. Perhaps you could trade accounts with a student at another school or subscribe to a cheap public UNIX system. With the Internet in its present form, anything is possible.
Dear 2600: Your editorial on the fate of Phiber Optik was dead-on. Your statement
that “Basically, they succeeded in sending a few friends to prison for trespassing” sent a chill of recognition down my spine. A few years ago, after getting off a late shift, a friend and I were arrested while walking alongside some railroad tracks owned by Southern Pacific. The short version of our story is that the sheriffs had nothing better to do, and needed a “big” arrest for their records, so they charged us with felony attempted train derailment. They stole personal possessions from us during the booking procedure, set bail at an outrageous $5,000 each, and falsified the arrest records to support the felony charge. Of course, the prosecutor read the law and withdrew the felony charge; the charge was supposed to be applied to anyone who placed an explosive within 1000 feet of a switch!
The sheriffs did not want to be embarrassed, however, so they con- vinced the prosecutor to replace the felony charge with a misdemeanor trespassing. Now, the tracks we were walking along were only 20 feet from a major street, in an area that was not fenced off, posted tres- passing, or sensitive in any way. Yet, we were technically trespassing, and we were prosecuted, coerced into pleading guilty (mostly because we couldn’t afford a lawyer, and the public defender never even ap- peared at our hearings), and I actually served 30 days jail time and