Is your son a computer hacker? (2001)
wh0rd.caIn the early 00s my hyper conservative helicopter parents found my Livejournal where they discovered I was into "hacking" and social activities they didn't approve of.
They eventually confronted me and said I must have all internet postings passed through them in the future, or shut it all down.
What they didn't realize is the modem PCI card in their desktop was a LAN-over-RJ12 card hooked through the walls directly to my machine where I maintained the always on dialup connection and served it to them.
I had a complete MITM on all their internet traffic.
After their demands were made, I simply served them fake copies of all my online web presences that revealed final messages that I was closing them down to respect the wishes of my parents.
The rest of the world saw the continually updated versions, and I was never caught.
Now I work in infosec.
Thanks for sharing, it made me smile.
Makes me feel for parents with a predisposition to anxiety. I recently started telling my parents about all the times I snuck out after dark as a child and they were horrified. This is the (very sophisticated) digital equivalent.
I escaped out my window a bit, too. But the digital gaslighting we applied to a malicious teacher in the 90s was next-level and I now I'm infosec-adjacent.
>If your son has requested a new "processor" from a company called "AMD", this is genuine cause for alarm. AMD is a third-world based company who make inferior, "knock-off" copies of American processor chips. They use child labor extensively in their third world sweatshops, and they deliberately disable the security features that American processor makers, such as Intel, use to prevent hacking. AMD chips are never sold in stores, and you will most likely be told that you have to order them from internet sites. Do not buy this chip! This is one request that you must refuse your son, if you are to have any hope of raising him well.
Hahaha. 2001 was pretty good.
So this is what the CPUBenchmark authors wrote before making CPUBenchmark
Did you mean the Intel shill site userbenchmark.com?
I was not gonna comment, but wow, they really are not backing down. From their Intel vs AMD value page:
> We don't
> Put lipstick on pigs for sponsorship fees, our users are our only sponsors.
> Care for brands: red, green or blue. PC hardware isn’t a fashion show, performance comes first.
> Test at 1440p or 4K: high resolutions are rarely optimal for gaming (refresh rate > size > resolution).
> Get fooled by the corporate army of anonymous forum and reddit influencers that prey on first time buyers.
Righto. So they don’t shill. And they know how to benchmark and measure the right things; except for the period of time when they accidentally showed AMD topping the charts and then had to adjust their expert benchmark scores. 4K gaming isn’t real; it’s a conspiracy invented by Big GPU and no gamers want it because clearly all gaming graphics is chasing higher FPS. And not only are they not shills, YOU are!
What a convincing argument. Others more reputable in the benchmarking scene considered userbenchmarks to be poorly executed to begin with, but wow, they really do not know how to take an L, at all. Of course it is convenient that the cases where AMD processors would succeed at are irrelevant.
Now I’m not playing games most of the time so a high framerate in games is hardly important to me. But who would I rather get advice from: Sour grapes userbenchmarks, or literally any other reputable benchmarking site? They inch closer and closer to blatant SEO SPAM every year.
I know Intel is not good at PR, but they really ought to pay these people... to stop making them look bad.
> Test at 1440p or 4K: high resolutions are rarely optimal for gaming (refresh rate > size > resolution).
This point especially is such nonsense. If you're only gaming at 1080p you don't even need to be looking at benchmarks, just go buy literally any current midrange GPU and enjoy your capped 144fps in esports and like 80+ in AAA games.
Their obsession with "benchmarking with the most popular games" is silly for the same reason - there's no point in comparing a top end GPU or CPU on Fortnite or CS:GO performance, because stuff that costs half as much already caps out the max framerate on a 144hz monitor on those games. (Of course there are CS:GO pros who are trying to get absurd FPS for competitive reasons, but that's a tiny fraction of players, most people aren't going to care about the difference between 300fps and 400fps on a 144hz monitor).
I really hate the whole "I need to run super high FPS to lower my input latency even though my monitor can only display 1/3 of that; vsync is bad" people.
They're not wrong in that you need that level of GPU to get a particular level of input latency, but the "reason" that you need to run at such a higher framerate than your display's refresh rate is because those games have absolutely garbage frame pacing.
Take a chapter out of the desktop compositor world - if you (the application) knows you're rending at 3x the monitor's refresh rate, wait to sample the inputs and render until 2/3 of the frame interval has passed. Save your GPU the effort (and power consumption).
Yup! Misspelled the name
That was a wild ride.
Userbenchmark is so bizarre. I really want to know who's running it and what their motives are for being so blatantly disingenuous.
The best theory I've got is that the owners were shorting AMD stock before it became obvious that they were serious competition again, and now they're using their reach to spread as much FUD as possible to claw some of their money back. But they come off as such idiotic hacks, I'm not sure that theory really makes any sense.
What's even stranger is that they were actually favourable to 1st gen Ryzen processors when they came out. On their 1800x review[0] they call it: "A very welcome shake-up of the CPU market"
Then they did a complete 180 when AMD actually shook up the CPU market. Perhaps the site's owner changed?
There's a great video about the site here for those who are curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSBj2LKkWg
0: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X/Rating/3916
Wealthy investor secretly buying out userbenchmark to spread FUD is an even juicier conspiracy theory...
Hah my first computer that I built myself as a teenager was an AMD Duron, right around 2001. Which to be fair, I guess I am a hacker as far as my mother is concerned, so they were right!
I got a Duron 650 together with a Geforce 1 back in 2000. That Geforce was really expensive butw a dud, it was slower than the cheaper/older TNT 2`s all my friends had...
This does bring some memories. Also Matrox looked like something out of this world at the time with their multiscreen support.
Check out the link "raising him well" -- If this really is from 2001, then I'm quite surprised that link is still valid...
the oldest snapshot of this story i can find in archive.org is from november 2003 (https://web.archive.org/web/20031114161830/http://www.adequa...) , but it seems that yes, it is from 2001
It definitely is, I vividly recall this from my university days.
One of those reviews is dated 2005(!!)
Ahahahaha.
I remember (vaguely) pinging AOL's irc servers with hays cmdset commands and as a result my parents getting a letter to the effect that I was a computer criminal and we were on some 'blacklist' forever, fortunately this apparently blacklist didn't seem to be shared between ISPs so I was back causing chaos within days >_<
And now here I am, mid thirties, children, and I wonder if I would let my kid play DOOM when he is 8 or 9.. I think I'll let him play the original ones, but the newer games seem to be much more intense (maybe that's just down to the graphics/music?)..
Or I just let him play everything.. I dunno, grand theft auto (granted, the top down one) did me no harm when I was around puberty heh...
I'm not a parent (yet), but I do wonder about how I would enforce some of the double standards -- I was playing DOOM at age 8 and looking at somewhat questionable content online (my parents had no idea), and I like to think that I still turned out somewhat fine.
Would I really want to use my hacker-grade computer knowledge to enforce a parental control jail on my childrens' ability to consume this meaningful information about the real world at a young age?
(Being the naive developmentally-delayed kid in the peer group who was overly-shielded by parents also is VERY bad.)
One would even argue that DOOM jumpstarted my CS career.
I monitor and control our 8 year old son's Windows laptop using software I wrote myself. I update it from time-to-time based on feedback from him and my wife and observed needs.
He objects to it. He doesn't mind so much the monitoring, the thing he doesn't like is when it locks him out because he has been using it too much, and we tell him he has to do stuff (like his homework) to get more time. He thinks he should be able to use his laptop as much as he wants.
He tells me he is going to hack it and remove it. I told him I'd be happy if he learned how to do that. It would actually be pretty straightforward to disable. (It runs as a Windows service, and he has an admin account, so `services.msc` or `net stop` would do it.) And if some day he actually works out how to disable it, I'd be impressed. Since it is custom software, not off-the-shelf, he can't just download some script kiddie tool to do it automatically, he has to actually develop some understanding (e.g work out the Windows service name).
That said, while it would impress me if he worked out how to disable it, I'd soon get to work on working out how to harden it against that somehow. (e.g. lock his IP or MAC out of the network if the software isn't pinging a central server). And then see if he can break the hardening. I think such a game may be fun, and educational too.
My own plan: shield them until they are old enough to understand the concepts of trust and respect.. then pull back the safety net, but maintain quiet vigilance (like montoring (read only) the dns queries or system logs, and maybe keep access time window restrictions).
If that really want questionable content, it will be cat and mouse game. Build trust and respect... Give them enough rope to hang themselves... Occasionally do responses without admitting knowing... then punish if they cross your safety threshold, but then they will know you somehow know.. so a cat and mouse game will begin if they are not responding to the mutual(ish) trust plan.
That’s one thing I decided already not to do is spy on them. I could easily view his entire online life and sure maybe it would protect him somehow if he was getting into some really dark porn or talking to some pedophile or something, but it’s such a massive invasion of privacy I think I could never forgive myself and the justification is bullshit.
There are no shortcuts to good parenting, spying on your kids traffic is a massive intrusion into their life.
I hope at least to get to the point where they can talk to me about weird shit going on instead of me having to detect it for them right?
I see it differently.
I watch my kid at the park now. When he is older, he will get to go further with less intervention/overwatch on my part. Eventually of course go without me.
Same for online. At first I will be beside him. I will educate what to watch for, what the motives of the actors are and how to work with them. Baby steps.
Later, he will get to go online without me watching every move. But I will review DNS logs. And I will let him know I am doing so, preferably in front of him.
Eventually, he will go without me. Although I will likely have a traffic shaping thing so I can have some bandwidth too!
Tried that for a time with eldest daughter. Afterwards she went down hill fast.
Tried looking into what she had been up to. Burned the dammed phone.
Shit you’re giving me the fear…
Edit: I mean… any tips?
No social media.
It destroys mental health of many teenage girls.
No unsupervised texting.
Let them have friends at your place.
I was that teenage girl. It doesn't have the effect you want it to. My parents weren't "preserving my innocence" or "sheltering me from the bad bad world." They were just teaching me to hide better and to perform for them. I would get cash back at "safe" stores to avoid my purchases being monitored, my boyfriend bought me a prepaid phone, I hung out at the library all the time to use social media, I stayed the night at my girlfriends' houses and they would help me sneak out.
I'm now an adult in therapy dealing with all the coping mechanisms and trust issues I developed and unsurprisingly I have a very distant relationship with my parents.
What do you think they did wrong and might they have done better?
I guess one approach would be to tell them that you will be able to see their traffic. Even show them that servers have logs etc. After a time, show them how to use computers more privately, and tell them when you stop keeping logs.
Why would you want to do this? I will warn my children (when they are old enough) about pedophiles and let them know how pedophiles might try and manipulate then, by pretending to be friends or by threatening them or even by convincing them to send naked pictures and blackmailing them. I will let my kids know that no matter how deep they go they can always, and should as soon as needed, come to me or their mother for help. I don't see the need to spy on them or see what they might be searching for or looking at.
I could see this changing if I notice bad behavior. If they're hanging out with bad influences or ordering drugs online or something I might intervene electronically. I'm still undecided about whether to enforce electronics limits (I use mine a lot). It doesn't seem like you should default to intrusive parenting though.
This. Trust is key.
Depending on how you want to influence your kids interests, a friendly cat'n'mouse game might give them a very real education.
"No wifi access until you figure out how to spoof your MAC to this."
Lock down your network so well they're forced to become a l33t hax0r.
'Popular hacker software includes "Comet Cursor", "Bonzi Buddy" and "Flash"', well, technically they were all used to hack, just in the opposite direction.
Did exactly this, and it’s so far going pretty well.
Anything questionable, I can confront, or be prepared for, they know it’s happening, I’m good with it…
And then my punk ass teenager decided to change the id on the phone to get past the controls.
I’m mad, but more proud. Way to think around the problem!
You’re grounded.
“Hacking” has real world consequences if you get caught. Try harder, padawan.
The key to parenting is knowledge. If you don't know what they're doing you can't keep them safe or fix things. But if you punish them for being truthful you won't know what's going on. It's all about trust. So when my son spent $1000 using my credit card instead of shouting at him I told him it would be fine and I sorted it out. Getting really angry with him wouldn't have taught him anything useful. Meanwhile he now knows that even if he does dumb stuff I won't throw him under a bus
That’s the dilemma right, I had no filters… I mean, I had the anarchists cookbook at 11, people are being jailed in .co.Uk for possession of that these days.. I have the best intentions, but any kind of censorship is the antithesis of what I had growing up, and so the question becomes: I got that level of access to information because my parents had no idea what information was out there, and it spawned a lifelong interest in tech, infosec, and learning. So if I want my kid to have roughly the same, but yet I know there are also such things as pedos and brainwashing message boards, can i in good conscience let my little dude have the same level of access?
I mean, things have changed a bit. I would absolutely let him on the internet of my youth, but the internet of today is massively different..
I don’t have an answer for this yet…
Thanks to my dad attempting to restrict my internet, by installing a Disney Circle, and restricting all the streaming sites, meant that I learnt what ARP spoofing was, and how to avoid it (using the arpon tool). I learnt just a little bit more about computers and networking, by finding my way around restrictions.
(If anyone was to restrict their kids network, make it fair for them by installing lunix on their machines, so they have a fighting chance!)
Easiest way to beat a Disney circle is to go to 192.168.1.1 in your browser, find its IP and ban it.
Exposure builds resilience. All shielding does is turn people into hysterics who cannot see through the artifice, and assume everyone is duped by it into being murderous zombies.
I have to say, as a kid, all these games and movies were much more harmless than the news.
The news had actual blood on the streets, from real people who had actually died there, real violence, real panic, real bombs and real war. If you shut off the TV, it does not go away, it's taking place somewhere out there, in the real world. A game is a joke in comparison.
I don't worry about games for those reasons, I worry about them because they're extremely seductive and attention-capturing while producing almost no real benefits or skills. I quit video games cold turkey around the age of 16 after I realized that soo often, I'd find myself sit down to play counterstrike after school, and in a blink of an eye it would be 1AM.
That’s a pretty hardcore level of self awareness to have at 16, you must be crushing it :)
This is a brilliant observation. As a 50+ "adult" I avoid the news media. My parents used to sit and watch the news with us, I would never do that today. It's not that the world is a worse place these days (It's actually safer), just that the media thrives by presenting all the bad in the worst possible way.
Do you have a public broadcaster? I find their news to be good, no hyperbole as they don't need eyeballs for ads. Just a somewhat balanced set of domestic, international and cultural affairs.
Sit with your child and MST3K the media
Imho the real damage from games is the addiction aspect. A secondary problem is the 'Good guy is allowed to do anything because he's good' attitude, but that's shared by a lot of tv and books. The actual violence isnt much of a problem.
It depends upon the child. I've seen children who accept the world is nuanced and can be exposed to a bit more of it, and I have seen children who need to be shielded since they will either glorify or fear things that they do no understand. Know you child, then make a decision accordingly.
I let my son play Doom with The Simpsons mod so it wasn't that scary. He was Homer Simpson fighting clones of his neighbors. I also taught him how to build PCs and use Windows 98 at that time.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm young enough to have grown up playing Halo: Reach, Minecraft, and Battlefield 3, and I mostly turned out fine so far, I think.
8. Is your son obsessed with "Lunix"?
BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War.
...
Lunix is extremely dangerous software, and cannot be removed without destroying part of your hard disk surface.
Meanwhile Windows is all too happy about overwriting any bootloader you may have with its own, if you happen to run its installation or, I think, even some disk-checking programs (don't remember if only `format` did it, or something `chkdsk`-related too).
That's why I keep Linux and Windows in completely different drives and disconnect the one that I'm not using.
Might as well boot from the linux drive and add a grub entry for windows.
But you missed out on the thrills of getting a triple-boot XP/7/Linux system working, with both XP and 7 calling their own drive "C"!
And the joy of booting your XP and 7 systems in Linux by attaching your partitions to a VM.
*Lunix
in Russia, computer programs delete you!
wtf I love lunix now
Ah, a classic! I remember reading this as a kid thinking it was sincere and just getting madder and madder as I read
The exact same happened to me! I was terrified this was the type of thing my parents were reading. I think ability to spot satire like this is one of the most stark differences I notice between myself as a child and as an adult.
It was particularly believable to me because I think it was about the same time that the whole apple computer satanic panic thing was going around...
Which in retrospect may have also been satire
It was all completely believable until they got to the part about demanding computer books be removed from local bookstores. Even after that I think it still echoed exaggerated versions of the fears of my parents in the late 90s/early 2000s.
My only lament with this is that the link prominently has ‘humor’ in it, so I can't subject unsuspecting friends to the text. Guess I'm off to one of the ‘archive’ sites, with more cryptic urls.
Edit: here it is https://archive.is/e0diF
Or https://web.archive.org/web/20040612092245/http://www.adequa...
One of the finest trolls Adequacy.org produced, and that's not a small pool nor an easy race to call.
It needs to be up-voted that this is satire and not a real post from a 2001 concerned parent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequacy.org#Notable_stories
You don't say?
It seems like a majority of the comments here are not aware of this.
“Linyos Torovoltos” gives a pretty solid clue it was a satirical article :’)
Not necessarily. It seems like the kind of misspelling/misunderstanding of a foreign name my parents may have had. They were especially suspicious of anything that sounded remotely Soviet in origin (like Linyus, but Torovoltos is Greek to me).
When I learned to buy things online (with my own money) and started ordering gadgets from China my mom was worried the mail carrier would think I was a communist.
This also struck me as plausible. Many European names have default patterns for being presented by speakers of other European languages. This just looked like the Greek version of his name to me.
We did have a bunch of great content. My most popular one was "Not Just Harmless Fun" :)
"If your son is using Quake, you should make hime understand that this is not acceptable to you. You should ensure all the firearms in your house are carefully locked away, and have trigger locks installed. You should also bring your concerns to the attention of his school."
Holy moly!
Having firearms stored safely and appropriately does seem like generally good advice, regardless of whether your child plays Quake.
But if he/she is a hacker, surely they know how to pick locks... right?
Plot twist: the article is a stealth PSA about firearm safety
I guess I was hacking at a young age then. Obtaining the pak1.pak file from a friend who had the CD automatically turned the freeware version into the full version of the game. The tough part was transferring it over a 28.8 baud modem. Took all blasted night on my dads "borrowed" Pentium 90. Oof...kids with broadband these days don't know how easy they have it.
I remember boobs.jpg loading one... line... at... a... time
Do you recall how you transferred the file? I'm curious. You likely didn't dial each other up, or did you? Did you employ some kind of p2p utility? IP-based? I don't know much what was achievable as a kid or teen back then.
You would just dial the other person’s modem and that would give you a bidirectional steam of bytes from one machine to another. Anything you typed showed up in their terminal and vice versa. Then you could initiate a file transfer using a protocol such as Zmodem, which would stream the file in checksummed chunks so that parts could be retried if line noise corrupted them.
I used to use hyperterminal as a child to transfer if we didn't both have unlimited hour ISP access.
Dad, where did you say your BFG was?
Also hide your nail gun.
Quake sounds like Cake, for any Brass Eye fans.
Watch out for the end of level Czech Neck
>DOSing involves gaining access to the "command prompt" on other people's machines, and using it to tie up vital internet services.
I didn't like most of it, but that bit cracked me right up.
Is your son or daughter safe from the Russian menace "Tetris"? Some common symptoms include them attempting to organize their room into well fitting shapes such as neatly fitting boxes.
True Hackers use Compuserve or Prodigy.
Overheard in the office a few years ago:
"Did you know that Tetris was originally written in Haskell?"
"Really? I thought that it was originally written in Russia?"
Hah.
Reminds me of a Facebook post I saw the night after working on a class project at a friend's apartment. I think it was "you know you live with CS people when you come home and hear people talking about the difference between Pickles and Sea Pickles" (CPickle).
You laugh, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
I had this when I played Minecraft a lot. My wife and I (who both played for hours on end almost daily, running servers together) both started the see the world as blocks. It changed our perception quite a bit. It didn't bother us, we thought it was cool. It didn't interfere with anything. We maintained our understanding of reality vs game. Until a creeper blew up our house IRL. That was unusual.
This nearly killed me with Trackmania a few years ago and learning to drive a real car. In Trackmania you had to slam the steering to one side when turning. On a highway... not so much
I had a persistent problem with racing games, because analog sticks always seemed too lightweight and fickle, and basically I mostly could either turn or not turn. Until I finally learned with PS Vita's minuscule sticks to hold the thumb crooked in mid-air and fiddle the stick just a little.
Meanwhile you can't even use 180° wheel controllers with e.g. rally games because that's just not enough precision—you need something closer to 900°, or the car will about-face too often.
It's also weird how little of muscle memory immediately transfers between racing games, specifically sim-ish ones. Each time I switch from one to another, I'm driving like a drunk monkey again. Plus there's plenty of difference between more arcadey handheld games and more involved desktop/big-console ones. Not much surprise that with all this, games barely approach actual driving feel and skill—I've heard that only Assetto Corsa has some magical feedback for steering wheel controllers, that conveys the feel of a car riding on asphalt.
Also, Tetris taught me this: https://media.sketchfab.com/models/c4df0c4fb6904e9e80c13ef8e...
When Call of Duty 4 came out, I played it so much I would have vivid dreams almost nightly of playing "paintball" with friends, suddenly realizing we were using real guns and ammo, and we would continue "playing" even after we realized the death and carnage that was resulting.
Prodigy spoke ppp, was reasonably priced, and still had news access in 99/00 and a good feed at that. At some point they underwent a series of mergers/sell-ofs/rebrands until Yahoo owned them. I think their nntp servers still worked when I switched to cable internet in around 03.
Prodigy offering $400 off a $399 computer at Best Buy if you signed up for a 3 year service agreement was why I had my first modern computer.
Amazing! "If your son has requested a new "processor" from a company called "AMD", this is genuine cause for alarm. AMD is a third-world based company who make inferior, "knock-off" copies of American processor chips. They use child labor extensively in their third world sweatshops, and they deliberately disable the security features that American processor makers, such as Intel, use to prevent hacking. AMD chips are never sold in stores, and you will most likely be told that you have to order them from internet sites. Do not buy this chip! This is one request that you must refuse your son, if you are to have any hope of raising him well. "
I saw that too and was shocked. I am not the biggest fan of Sunnyvale California but calling it 3rd world seems overly harsh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices#First_t...
I did some phone phreaking when I was a kid. Wrote a Basic program to control the modem to randomly try out local numbers that can call long distance because most of the cool BBS with lots of warez were long distance at that time.
It went well for a while. But then one of my parents’ friends called my home and couldn’t get through because my program ran for hours tying up the line. He called the phone company to complain. The phone company investigated and my parents got mad at me, and that’s the end of my phreaking career. I was mad at that friend for snitching.
Oh man, I'm lucky my father never would have believed this stuff. In 2001, I was putting together tens of 486 and 386 based PCs out of a heap of old parts donated by a family friend and the neighbors thought I was some kind of hacker.
I fondly remember dad spending his tax refund to buy me a brand new Dell the next year, and coming home from work to find me at the kitchen table with it in parts. He said nothing at first, but from the look in his eyes, it took him about 30-40 seconds to remember that I knew what I was doing already.
Adequacy.org is just... it's from a different generation of the Internet. As someone who read this close to publication, and was fifteen at the time... what a read, haha.
Nah. My son just listens to a lot of Manson, plays a lot of Quake, and has penchant for stylish trenchcoats. He's a good kid.
He would never become a dirty hacker.
This constant linking to other things is a bit annoying. I found most of them are older books. I clicked the spanking link to maybe find a book on why you should/shouldn't spank your children and instead got a porn site.
Who is this guy?
> The Adequacy authors began as trolls on Slashdot and Kuro5hin, other technology-oriented discussion sites.
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying.
either *BSD or Alan Thicke
The post is from 2001. The spanking.com domain name was probably owned by someone else at the time and might not have been NSFW. The books are all going to be 20 years old at least.
What scares me is that I can picture some parents having read this and thinking it was good, serious advice.
15 year old me read this headline as - how to be a hacker - do everything they're warning you about in here
"how to be a hacker" not to be confused with http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
All it's missing is the pacifier
>Popular hacker software includes "Comet Cursor", "Bonzi Buddy" and "Flash"
OK i have to admit. This made me laugh.
Can we get away from the politics and get back to the topic at hand? The dangers of Quake as a hacker training ground for young impressionable minds?
Don’t get me started on the potential pitfalls of AMD processors.
Related story: I one time almost got our internet shutoff by trying to telnet into various ISP (EarthLink) IPs when I was like 13.
In an age of "post-truth", out of control "political correctness" and all the other daemons, it's hard to read this and even realise it is supposed to be satire.
Please don't hijack the conversation to whinge about political correctness.
The internet today is unarguably much less innocent place than it has beennin these times. I don't think it is off topic to reflect on the changes in culture that happened since then.
With the masses the internet (like every medium before it) became much more propagandistic and propaganda is the art of supplying people with stories they want to be true, because they express a big lie they tell themselves about their lives. This wasn't different, when the Nazis gave people the Volksempfänger and Germans went to the cinemas to look at the newest reels of Wochenschau and every story told them how they (and they alone) are special people and others (jews, roma, sinti, gays, communists, ...) were to blame for all that was wrong.
I don't see why it should be improper or forbidden to reflect on the cultural changes within the internet in a post about an episode about its past — other than political agenda yet again.
Ha, I was one of the editors of Adequacy.org back in the day, my "Not Just Harmless Fun" story was the second most commented on the site after this one. My name is even there on the Wikipedia article thanks to the "naked and petrified" guy getting annoyed with us at one point IIRC.
This story got so much traffic it broke the site numerous times and in the end we had to disable commenting entirely, so it's entirely possible it would have had more responses if our server had been able to handle it.
That's a work of art!
Thanks, I was very happy with it, it had the right balance of being outrageously inflammatory while containing plenty of clues that it was a troll. And the images were the icing on the cake lol.
Covered by Martin Sargent of TechTV here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkLtXfsPqVQ
Thanks for that link. I have not seen a ScreenSavers clip in many years. I loved that show and watched it with my father. Everyone was in love with Morgan. What a strange, brief time when cable television could have a show dedicated to the internet and computing.
I wonder where Leo Laporte is now.
Leo Laporte owns and operates a podcast network, TWiT.tv with his wife.
You forget to mention that the coverage was in 2002. Which makes me vaguely curious about the content.
Edit: alas it's just a reiteration of the text, pretty much what I would expect from a modern Youtube clip on a channel with a name like ‘TechTV’.
A visual 1993 guide: https://imgur.com/a/KhUINw1
Now this brings back some memories. I remember finding this when I was still a teenager and found it funny. I cannot really remember if I thought that this was legit, even it looks like a joke now. It could have been written by an adult, when looking from teenagers point of view. After all, adults had some stupid rules.
I've looked for this off and on for a long time. What a relic. It belongs in a museum.
Thank you so much for finding it.
A true classic, thanks for reminding me of this article.
If I remember correctly, the "hacking manuals" section is what inspired my reading for much of middle school. I wonder how many other 12-year-olds turned in a book report on Neuromancer to a horrified teacher because of this post?
The line about "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" slayed me.
Wow, amazing satire. Can someone provide some context - what is this website? I tried to go to Front Page but I think we're hugging the site to death.
I think the best pithy description of adequacy.org I got was "Graduate school for slashdot trolls"
Yes, it was the best of slashdot trolls who decided to form a special club and truly hone their craft. The results were .. amazing.
Around 2000 Slashdot was the premier tech forum and had a feature where you could have "hidden" comment threads, around which evolved a community of trolls who would compete to craft the most ridiculous and successful trolls and then post them for others to enjoy. My favourite being "The moon - a ridiculous liberal myth".
Anyway, at some point someone had the idea to set up our own site which we would position as a deeply serious technology and political opinion site, which was Adequacy.org. Stories were mostly from the editors, who could also post comments only visible to other editors, sadly lost to history.
The author of the linked story wasn't one of the original trolls from Slashdot that made up the site's initial editors, they were someone who got the joke and became an editor. And for scale I think I had the second most commented story on the site, and it doesn't come close - and we had to disable commenting after a while due to the site crashing from the load every half-hour or so....
Whilst it might be, the same traits were being used in active propaganda campaigns by those tech companies invested in killing off Linux (you know who)
Playing Quake doesn't make you a hacker, it makes you rad as fuck. But if they play Rocket Arena, your child is a G.G. Allin-level lunatic.
And they grow up to teach computer hacking classes to sysadmins and law enforcement.[1]
[1] https://www.sans.org/cyber-security-courses/hacker-technique...
Did he ask for one of these for his birthday? https://surplus.gov.ab.ca/OA/ItemDetail.aspx?AuctionID=31633
I'm assuming that this is obviously satire. Looking at some of the comments on HN tho, it makes me feel like it might not be. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I thought this was a joke too. I got a kick out of the idea of some high schooler or college freshman’s satire causing a bunch of parents to force their kids to remove flash in 2001 because its a “computer hacking tool”.
The other stuff like “you can’t remove Linux without damaging the hard drive” and that you have to send it back to the manufacturer to be replaced just seems so cheeky...
I once had a scammer call me, claiming to be from Microsoft support and trying to convince me to install a RAT. When he asked if I was using Windows or Mac, I replied "Linux." He was aghast, saying that was "illegal" and he would be reporting me for breaking the law unless I complied with his directives. Had a good laugh at that one.
I told him we didn't have a computer. That didn't register at all, he still tried to get me to install something, somehow, despite my insistence.
"Okay, let me toggle the bootloader in. Call me back in about an hour."
> and that you have to send it back to the manufacturer to be replaced just seems so cheeky...
This reads to me like some scripted item a jaded customer service representative reads to a computer-illiterate customer complaining about something on their computer, who of course believes it.
>does your son use Quake
I lost it.
If your son can backtrace a firewall through a series of tubes, he's definitely a hacker
tracerT for you and me!
I remember having read this back then. I can't believe 20 years have passed...
It's a bit sad how many of the links in the article don't work anymore.
I can't tell if this was legit fear, outright propaganda or satire. Having had a computer in my life since the age of 8, this seems like one hilarious cliche on top of another, the kind of thing you'd expect to see as an ad playing in the background of the 1995 cult classic: Hackers :D
It's bad satire, making all the obvious jokes and taking itself too seriously. It's a one-liner dragged out to three pages.
When this first appeared I thought I remembered it had been picked up by the mainstream press, but I can't find a mention of it on news search.
You can imagine how easily the masses would have accepted this in 2001.
I recall thinking back then that hackers were mysterious and cool. Fast forward to becoming a computer programmer and spending my life reverse engineering basically everything to be able to do my job and it seems laughable how much fear people have of basically anyone that spends time understanding anything they don't.
Look! A witch! :D
Also, I guess if you were a girl, you had a free pass, because if this article was anything to go by, hackers could only be boys(?)
I suspect it's also a nod to the prejudice of the father, if he had been real.
Something being picked up by the "mainstream press" does not mean it is not satire.
There are all kinds of satire and hoaxes that have been reported by the mainstream press as truth and reality...
Yes, my point was that especially in 2001, it would have been easy to not have the technical acumen to realize the story was satire, and to write a serious news story about it.
I am not sure if it was a satire or an actual article from someone concerned.
> I attend their teen parties with them to ensure no drinking or alcohol is on the premises. I keep a fatherly eye on the CDs they listen to and the shows they watch, the company they keep and the books they read. You could say I'm a model parent.
Um, no, not a model parent. Draconian.
thatsthejoke.tar.gz
I remember reading this in 2001 ... I swear I read this on theonion.ca...
This is hilarious!! I met almost all the list criteria and turned out ok.
Old Gold. This is what I grew up imagining what all hackers are like.
"son"
Because women can't be hackers, I guess?
It's a satirical article from 2001, calm down
women are smart enough to hide their tracks
Wait, this is article isn't sarcastic?
oldie but such a classic
At Mark Zuckerberg's school I remember a story about him getting in trouble for PHP. The school had a zero tolerance drug policy and PHP was confused with PCP.
> The school had a zero tolerance drug policy and PHP was confused with PCP
This just shows that even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I got banned from our schools computers for installing "hacking tools." I had NetHack in my personal drive.
This is after I got in trouble for "plagiarism," for including a hyperlink in an essay.
I know some one in Northern Ireland who got into trouble using FTP :-)
FTP is common Protestant insult to Catholics.
In reverse, I wonder how well known Irish and British slang is in the USA: “Bumming” can mean to obtain or make use of something that belongs to someone else by begging; “fag” can mean cigarette; “for the craic” (“craic” pronounced “crack”) is “for fun”.
(And thanks to the very early part of my mother’s Alzheimer’s, I also know that an archaic meaning of “glory hole” is a cupboard for miscellaneous items, and the etymology of the sexual reference is that both are where you put your “junk”).
Bumming is pretty common here. We don’t say the other word.
The first time you heard her casual use of glory hole must have been alarming, and later hilarious.
(I’m sorry to hear about your mother, my condolences.)
Absolutely, and thank you.
Mark is actually an old school AOLer and AIMer and used to program CC chat programs and punters.
http://patorjk.com/blog/2013/04/09/was-mark-zuckerberg-an-ao...
A friend nearly got expelled from high school when the VP accused him of hacking grades.
His offense? He had a shortcut to Notepad in his shared folder, which was seen as a scripting tool.
The Linux being an illegal operating system is only a slight exaggeration of the FUD being put out by Microsoft at the time.
Any time Microsoft publicly talks about their love and support of Linux, someone in the room should point out their multi-pronged, multi-year, highly-funded, campaign to poison the well.
And we may remember the "Linux is a cancer" (https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca...), or more subtly the SCO "suicide attack" attack against open-source: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2563673/update--micros...
Microsoft has been around a long time and they seem to adapt pretty rapidly. I wonder what percentage of the company today was around during Ballmer days, and how the culture has changed over time within the company. Naturally it's going to be driven by the market, but I wonder, are older MS folks moving with the culture shift? Or is it newer hires that are pushing for the open source ethos?
As a Mac and Linux user, I really like Microsoft these days. VSCode, WSL, Rust, containers, Surface, .NET Core, all are pretty sweet.
I think a lot of the culture of Microsoft remains the same as it was when Balmer left. As much as it’s fun to laugh at his “developers, developers, developers” sort of thing, his real legacy should probably how Microsoft formed its Business-2-Enterprise strategy under his rule.
When AWS first blew up they sort of struggled in European Enterprise because they originally went Google route or automating everything while taking a “our way or the high-way” attitude toward legalisation and localised agreements. This is basically why Azure was capable to fill the void that AWS was struggling to fill. Modern AWS has learned a lot from Kim that though, and are now ahead of Microsoft in many areas. I still can’t get a guarantee that only European citizens working in the EU will be the only people who work on my Azure cloud like I can from Amazon.
But as a whole, the sort of setup where I can call Redmond directly when shits hit the fan, and they will even give me hourly updates via phone until the issue has been resolved. That’s a Balmer sort of thing. And so is the financial aspect of how much more sense it makes to chose the Microsoft option once you’re already in bed with them. If anything that last hit has only grown under the new Microsoft.
I mean, how can I justify to my political leadership that I need to buy a Microsoft Teams competitor when it’s already included in our office365 setup? I can’t, and this just snowballs over time.
I’m not unhappy about this by the way. Through the past many decades Microsoft has been one of our best business partners as far as Tech goes. Which is very likely why AWS has adopted the approach.
I always thought it ironic that Linux killed Sun rather than Microsoft.
Ex-Sun employee here. I'd be interested in your reasons for that statement.
Ok, here’s my layman’s take from being in the general vicinity at the time - let me know if this has any merit. Linux was billed as the Microsoft killer when it began to gain prominence, but it never made real inroads in the desktop market. It also turned out that orgs who had implemented MS Server products were not culturally or technically great candidates to shift their back office to a Unix-based OS. However, companies that had invested in top of the line Sun boxes (at a top of the line price point) were very intrigued at the prospect of running something on wintel architecture that may give them 70% of the benefit at 10% of the cost. Those companies were already invested in a Unix-based environment and when Redhat became popular and offered a corporate wrapper to Linux, it was the beginning of the end for Sun. The big data centers also realized they could just string together a bunch of wintel machines running linux and get the same performance as a huge Sun box at a fraction of the cost. The reason I find this ironic is because Sun was one of the largest proponents of open source software and the arguably most successful open source software ended up killing their market.
As an aside, my wife worked in M&A for Sun during the height of the dot com bubble and I attended some amazing acquisition parties all around the Bay.
"invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War"
That should be a dead giveaway.
> If your son has requested a new "processor" from a company called "AMD", this is genuine cause for alarm. AMD is a third-world based company who make inferior, "knock-off" copies of American processor chips. They use child labor extensively in their third world sweatshops, and they deliberately disable the security features that American processor makers, such as Intel, use to prevent hacking. AMD chips are never sold in stores, and you will most likely be told that you have to order them from internet sites. Do not buy this chip! This is one request that you must refuse your son, if you are to have any hope of raising him well.
I can’t tell if this post is serious or satire? Was this actually the consensus back in 2001?
In 2001 children soldered each logic gate by hand. /s
Just kidding. It's satire. It's supposed to be funny because a chip fab is a very clean environment, not a "sweatshop".
AMD being dangerous knock-offs was one of the recurring themes we had, and in fact when we closed the site in 2002/3 we changed it to a blank screen with just a message we'd received from an AMD employee threatening to "shut us down" :)
Yep. AMD processor? Straight to jail.
Alternate questionnaire.
Does your child have interests outside of sports and video games? Does your child work independently on projects? Does your child look outside the box and solves difficult challenges? Does your child question the status quo and seeks to find answers outside of their domain?
If you answered Yes to any of these questions then you are a good parent. Just make sure they aren't doing anything illegal and they will turn out okay.
The first few sentences were okay-ish, but the more I read,the more it sounded just plain absurd,border line controlling behaviour+ lots of silly assumptions.
Going back to the topic itself, the vast majority of parents wouldn't even know where to start, not even mentioning if a kid has really became a haxor of sorts. Taking away computers, sending them out to the church,or doing others 'let's fix this quickly the adult way' things unlikely to help. I'm not a hacker but by the time I was 16 I was doing things on computer my parents won't ever comprehend or know how to put an end to it. By the time I'm 18,nobody can say anything to me anymore.
The only real solution to this is to build trust in the family in a way that kids would know that no matter how bad they screwed it up, parents won't go after them but will work with them trying to undo it or at least learn from those actions so they won't happen again.
Ok, so he missed the satire, but I give points for stating some simple truths.
Despite being satire, it's an important topic and "trust in the family" (and in your parents in particular) is the keystone issue here. Everything else is secondary.
Fair enough, I definitely missed it being a satire: shouldn't have skimmed the content:)
Sometimes the best commentary comes from taking satire seriously on accident. I thought your comment was great.
Every one of the outrageous behaviors listed have definitely been someone's actual reality, and for some people it was several of those things. Equally outrageous is how often the parents have no clue what awful things their kids are doing. Not the warez, pr0n, turf wars, freaking, hacking, etc.
It's the stalking, harassment, and deeply seated psychological issues that are guaranteed to get worse by pulling a power-play and declaring victory. That is going now require extra work to correct. That other stuff is more likely to land your kid a great job/career than destroy opportunities to form relationships.
I actually went and searched for some of the text in this comment because it reminded me so strongly of real responses I saw to this article 20 years ago
This was copypasta before the term existed. This and bash.org were staples of early internet 'hacker culture'
This is a classic troll text.
It’s a joke …