482 DEAR HACKER

482 DEAR HACKER

First off, we don’t “bitch and moan about how much we hate our country.” We bitch and moan about those who continually subvert the principles of democracy and get away with it, all the while masking themselves in patriotic fervor. Second, when was the last time you “cracked into a bank account,” let alone that of someone who’s on

a most-wanted list — or in this case on all of them? It’s not like on TV and way too many people seem to think that it is. This leads to the perception that hackers can

be used as some sort of cyberarmy, which is about the furthest thing from the truth. Anyone with even a slight familiarity of the hacker world would know that we’re con- stantly questioning, disagreeing, exploring, and getting into trouble. Not exactly the kind of people who would do well in a military environment. (We happen to hear from

a sizable number of unhappy hackers who somehow wound up in military service.) Finally, even if it were something simple, where do you get the right to be the judge, jury, and executioner? Imagine if everyone took it upon themselves to impose their brand of justice in this manner. If you really want to help, the best thing you can do is be observant and notice things that other people may not notice. Then let people know what you see. In this age where the truth is fleeting and mass manipulation is common, the ability to detect when something doesn’t make sense is a valuable one.

Dear 2600:

I was going to your website when I found that it had been replaced by cybercrime.gov. Has the mag been shut down? Bob Smellicular

It’s interesting how many people jumped to that conclusion but still wrote to us for an answer. And it gets better.

Dear 2600: Hey guys. Just wanted to be the first to note that this has to be the

most kickass April Fool’s joke I’ve ever seen. Partly because it’s pretty believable that the DoJ might try and hijack your domain if the regis- tration ran out. Now watch them sue you for copyright infringement over these pages or something. Wouldn’t surprise me.

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

For the record, we didn’t copy any of their pages. All we did was put a different IP number in one of our zone files for the 24-hour period. This kind of a change liter- ally involves a few keystrokes and takes less than ten seconds to set up or change back. It’s no more complicated than that. Inside of an hour after the business day began, we received a call on one of our cell phones from the FBI in New York say- ing that its parent DoJ had received a report that our page was being redirected. They wanted to help us figure out who was behind it. While it was nice of them to leave us this message, we had to wonder where they got a cell phone number that wasn’t listed anywhere, why they didn’t realize that this was most likely an April 1st joke, and how something so simple as changing a couple of numbers in a file and making one page go to another page is something the FBI and DoJ think is impor- tant enough for them to worry about.

Dear 2600:

I was just reading your newest issue (19:3) and in your intro (“Freedom’s Biggest Enemy”) something caught my eye. “...Operation TIPS (Terrorist Information and Protection System), which proposes having members of the general public spy on people they come in contact with, looking for anyone or anything out of the ordinary.”

Well, I’m no history buff but this really sounds exactly like the same thing that Hitler did. I remember reading a book (and I can’t remem- ber which) where the kids would even turn in their parents for doing something kind of suspicious. And I’m honestly wondering, and have been wondering for a while, if this is the direction our country is head- ing in. Haven’t we learned from history? I would like to think so, but somehow I can’t seem to convince myself we did.

Oh, but it’s not like this hasn’t happened before. Ever heard of McCarthyism? It all started with Senator McCarthy who had a list of “known” commies working for the government. Their lives got de- stroyed. He asked people to turn in anyone they thought was a commie. The only way out of it once you got called in was to name other people. If you didn’t name other people, then you were a commie too. (Doesn’t this kind of stuff just piss you off on how dumb people are?)

Hells-own