I had the french secret service come and interrogate me in ~88 (bad cop/good cop) because I had doctored a RS232 cable to be NULL modem, to be able to connect to the X25 "transpac" network using a terminal.
I was 'drafted' in the army back then, basically unpaid slave labour, and I was risking 40+ days in prison for sabotage. I 'escaped' due to a coupe of forward thinking officers who didn't think that was a way to handle a smart 18yo kid.
I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
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Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#122A person I know studied in East Germany in the early 80s via a very limited exchange program. After the wall came down, she requested her Stasi file. It was fascinating what was in the file - lots of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. For example, she was upset when the Challenger exploded, and this mystified the Stasi informers who had previously identified her as a pacifist (in their minds, the Shuttle was 1…
but has never been able to get a copy of her FBI file
This can be confusing because there are various bewildering options, some of which are slower (or outright ineffective for personal records) than others but getting FBI records is comparatively straightforward once you've navigated the maze. I did it a few years ago and they sent me a CD's worth of stuff, plus a note of things they had not sent me or had redacted with instruction on challenging their decisions on these.
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#123My FBI file was for hacking into my school district's AS/400 that handled my school's attendance and grading system. Somehow using a public IP address with no access restrictions allowed a clear telnet path in from home. Compounding username and passwords that were all the same for every employee. I didn't change a thing, just LOLed and told someone. Bad mistake. This was the late 90s. Oh well, 2 week suspension and…
I was in junior high early 90s when I got into trouble with my school's networks. Setup was Novell Netware, DOS 6.x. I was never a Netware expert by any means, but by that time I'd been using DOS at home for quite a number of years and knew my way around pretty well. Anyways, the network crashed. I got accused of causing the crash because a teacher had seen me with "a black screen open", aka a DOS prompt. Our Netware setup didn't allow for direct DOS access; we had a limited set of DOS apps from a menu we could run. Well, among those apps was WordPerfect for DOS. There was some function key combo that'd suspend WordPerfect and dump you at a DOS command prompt (I forget the key combo, but we all had those keyboard templates at the time that listed out the various commands helpfully, right in front of you, at school, even!).
Well, being at a DOS prompt was enough circumstantial evidence for me to get suspended for a week (no FBI record, AFAIK). My parents, despite being strict, were also fair and asked me point blank, "Did you have anything to do with what you're being accused of?". Told them no, I was just at a DOS prompt (probably to play either nibbles or gorillas - those classic BASIC games). To their credit, their opinion was if I was going to serve the time, I might as well know how to do the crime (know, not actually do). I had already been tagging along to continuing education computer classes my mom was attending, but my parents started buying me more and more computer books. It got me started down the programming path. I'd already been pretty friendly with our sysadmin at school and he knew I had nothing to do with what happened and hadn't accused me, but the school needed a scape goat, and I was it. He felt bad for me and choose to help me out with my learning, too, instead of continuing the punishment. He gave me a copy of the software he used for after hours remote access over direct dialup. Think it was called Carbon Copy? It was basically just telnet over dialup that allowed me direct access to his PC on the network after hours before I even knew what telnet was. So, I'd connect after dinner and play around for hours as network admin. It wasn't multiprocessed, so I had to be patient. Typically when I'd log in, he was running a nightly backup manually that he'd kick off before he left for the night. I just had to wait for it to complete, then I could do whatever I wanted. I had full access to the grading/attendance system. I could message teachers as other teachers, etc. I could have granted admin access to anyone, but I was smart enough to never touch my own account, instead, created fake admin users and used those, instead. I'd hide files in plain sight using the ALT+255 trick to embed a nonprintable character in file/directory names. You could see them, you just couldn't directly access them without renaming them for most programs. Fun times. I never did anything destructive, though I could have easily.
Security in the 90s was a joke. They were good times, indeed :)
I continued my shenanigans into college. College was my first encounter with Windows NT networks & l0phtcrack. I remember one night, walking into my dorm room with the SAM file from a lab PC on a floppy. I popped it into my own PC, started cracking the passwords, expecting it to run all night. As I got up from my PC to head down for dinner, I was surprised to see that I'd already cracked the administrator password. It was just a 5 character password that was the building code & room number for campus IT. I already knew better than to do anything from my own PC, only ever worked from different lab PCs in different buildings and under assumed accounts. Never reported anything, either, for fear of reprisal.
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found entire, functional computers thrown out. My first web server was a 386 built from dumpster-dived parts, quickly upgraded to a 486 as I found new stuff. I still have those computers, too. It's amazing how wasteful people are with tech. People, please don't throw out working computers if you can avoid it. Take them to a thrift shop or a specialized place that will fix them up and sell them, like Free Geek. P…
A year and a half ago, I found an entire HP Elite 8300 standing by the dumpster in the rain. It was only missing a hard disk (likely removed to be shredded). I brought it in, checked it for rust or damage, let it dry for several days, and ordered a hard drive for it. It runs fine, and I use it as a repo/build server.
Nice. I have an SGI Indigo that I will probably never be able to use again because I forgot its login credentials years ago. And I think the monitor was proprietary to SGI and I tossed because it took up too much room.
Then again, I could probably find a downloadable OS for it somewhere online.
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I like how you shared how you learned lesson to not share mischievous activities with people in the same post you then go and share more things you haven't been caught for American public schools are quite adept at teaching distrust in authority, particularly in bureaucrats. That doesn't mean distrust in everybody.
The American public school system likes to teach that they are an authority that should be trusted.
That must be reverse psychology. /s
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#126Please sir max-width: 100%; overflow-x: none; Edit: sorry completely messed up my css
Anyone know what unholy magic generated this page's HTML? Microsoft Word -> "Export to HTML" or something?
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#127My FBI file was for hacking into my school district's AS/400 that handled my school's attendance and grading system. Somehow using a public IP address with no access restrictions allowed a clear telnet path in from home. Compounding username and passwords that were all the same for every employee. I didn't change a thing, just LOLed and told someone. Bad mistake. This was the late 90s. Oh well, 2 week suspension and…
When I was 11 or 12 we had a bunch of old Windows (2000?) boxes with a shared network folder — all the students' files were in the same folder. I had just learned about basic batch file "programming" so I made one called Change Your Grades Click Here!!.bat which asked for your username and password (we had individual accounts on the Mac computers) and saved them to a hidden text file in the same folder. Most people didn't fall for it, but I got one girl's login that actually worked, which scared the shit out of me, and I deleted the program. (I really wanted to tell her that "emma" is not a good password, but I thought it wouldn't turn out well for me.)
A few years later, I cracked the admin password (with a Ophcrack live USB) for a silly reason: they had the machines mostly locked down, and I wanted to change the desktop background hahah. I remember being quite disappointed in the sysadmins that the admin password for all the machines in school was a common dictionary word, cracked in 30 seconds.
Oh, once I met a guy who identified as a "hacker" (in the sense of breaking into systems illegally) and he told me (then a young teen) to "have my fun" before I turned 18 and then to stop, which in retrospect was very good advice.
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#128My FBI file was for hacking into my school district's AS/400 that handled my school's attendance and grading system. Somehow using a public IP address with no access restrictions allowed a clear telnet path in from home. Compounding username and passwords that were all the same for every employee. I didn't change a thing, just LOLed and told someone. Bad mistake. This was the late 90s. Oh well, 2 week suspension and…
This reminds of a Costco bug I discovered, it appears that they fixed it lol. So, Costco runs AS/400 in stores, and their online store is in .Net MVC. I worked with both technologies and often have to communicate with AS/400 devs and they are close to their retirement so little fucks are given. Plus, working with DB2 is annoying in general, the .NET data provider from IBM is expensive and sucks. Now onto the bug, whe…
Costco still has issues of resolving discounts on a return. I won't state the bug explicitly but I had a conversation with them about how they refunded me a significant amount I never paid on a large purchase and showed them the delta via receipts. Local management was appreciative but didn't seem to have an idea of how to proceed to make things right. Ultimately they said my account would be flagged as owing the difference so the next time I shopped I would be charged for the incorrect refund. The problem is that that didn't work either and I don't shop there often. I tried to do the right thing but ultimately it ends up being their responsibility to handle it when the customer is standing right in front of them showing their loss of revenue.
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#129A friend of mine in 1997 got arrested for poking around in air force computer systems. He was charged with a felony not because he did any damage but because it cost $40k to track him down. He also had to pay that back.
https://attrition.org/~jericho/works/security/crime_punishme...
"Once again, when computer crime enters the equation, circumstances seem to change. In May of 1997, Wendell Dingus was sentenced by a federal court to six months of home monitoring for computer crime activity. Among the systems he admitted to attacking were the U.S. Air Force, NASA and Vanderbilt University. What is different about this case is the court's order for Dingus to repay $40,000 in restitution to the Air Force Information Warfare Center (AFIWC) for their time and effort in helping to track him."
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, thank god for through hole parts, otherwise I don't think I ever would have made it this far. VLSI is killing poor kids' ability to get started with electronics. What did you do your soldering with? My first soldering iron(s) were simply screwdrivers in the stove :) I even recycled the solder but it took a while to understand that you need flux as well as solder to make a good joint.
I don't think heating up a screwdriver ever occurred to me! My first soldering iron was huge! I don't remember who gave it to me, but it was clearly not for electronics. It had a small wooden handle and a tip that looked like a large, bent flathead screwdriver. It could remove parts, but not much else. Ha! gotta love google. It looked something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Soldering-Handle-Chisel-Point-Copper/..…
Interesting thread this. You made me re-live a whole bunch of my past and I noticed something funny (or at least, I think it is funny): to this day I can't help myself, when I walk by a dumpster or the garbage before it is picked up I am still scanning for TVs, tape recorders etc. It's so automatic that if not for this thread I would not have caught on to what that was all about, it's simply a habit.
And I still can't stand waste.
One day we will look back to this age and wonder: how on earth could we have been so wasteful that perfectly good stuff ended up in a landfill.
That soldering iron of yours looks like the perfect tool for some SMD work.
I recall those in the hands of stained glass workers, either that or gas heated ones.
My first upgrade from a screwdriver looked like this:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/pEUAAOSw621hLQqd/s-l1600.jpg
Which actually worked well enough for tube based electronics, (not even hole through, just built up in the air on metal frames). And it held the heat a lot longer than the screwdrivers, which tended to carbonize after a while.