470 DEAR HACKER

470 DEAR HACKER

Dear 2600:

I found out how screwed up this world is over the course of two to three weeks. I minimized this window that comes up on boot up. The librarian went over to the computer and freaked out and rebooted it. Later in the day when I went back to the library, she pulled me aside and asked me why I messed up the computers. I was like what the hell. She threatened to give me two days of in-school suspension if I didn’t tell her what I did to mess the computers up. Also, my friend asked about Kevin Mitnick and if they had any books about him. The librarian freaked again and made him walk through the little scanner thing two times and empty his pockets to make sure he didn’t steal anything. The world has all the wrong ideas about us. I think it is stupid to think that we all have malicious intentions. What do you think about this?

gpf Stupidity breeds in schools.

Dear 2600: As I was listening to the October 1988 edition of Off The Hook, I

realized that while I am only 15, I really do feel like I am part of something special. When I think about computers, I think about them as “a gateway” to another world. I think of them as marvels. I can sit there for hours pondering over the internal workings of a Commodore

64, or a Vic 20, an 8086 laptop, 186, 286, 386, and so forth and so on. I’ve noticed today in the “computer” world, there are many people, young, old, new, who don’t understand, but alas... believe they do. They think that “hacking” is composed of loading up their AOL, or any ISP connection for that matter, and firing away a nuker, egg- dropper, or some other exploit. They don’t understand that a hacker is not always someone who is malicious, or someone who only goes to destroy, or ruin someone’s day. They don’t know that a real, true hacker is someone who wishes to understand how something works... who wants to dive into the depths of how this functions, how part A

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

whether it be strict Assembly, Binary, Hex, C, C++, Java, visual basic, Pascal, Fortran, Perl, Cobol, and so forth.

I am only in the 10th grade, but already I know that I do not want to go into this world as one of the people who don’t know A from B, B from Q, 17 from 35, and 00110 from 4e6. I am not exactly sure why I felt the need to write to you, but I needed to vent my voice. I want to dive into the depths of science, computers, how they work, how they will work. How the phones work. I don’t want to destroy, I don’t want to break, I only want to learn. I think that is what is wrong with society today. The American media has shown hackers as people who sit in their room all night, doing nothing but squinting at their monitors, trying to mess up someone’s computer.

Graphix So few people retain this sense of wonder that really is an essential part of appre-

ciating technology. If you ever reach the point where you can talk to someone on the phone or over the net and not realize how incredible the whole process is, you’ve lost something really important.

Dear 2600:

I am an avid reader of your mag and I have been hacking websites and just recently hacked the computer system at my place of employment. About a half a year ago, I hacked our school website and backed up all the files on a CD, which I hid so very cautiously in my vent. My friend and I have been competing with each other on what we can hack and we always make backups of the stuff. This time I decided to