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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)

#141
post #27

My 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 had sysadmin rights on my school’s Windows servers after some very simple social engineering (for a 10 year old). The real irony was that I was called to the principal’s office on multiple occasions because I seemed to be able to fix things on the network that the local “admin” (e.g. music teacher) couldn’t. Fun times indeed. It completely ruined my respect for authority figures. Which in retrospect has been the mo…

> It completely ruined my respect for authority figures.

It sounds like they were right to trust you? Doesn't sound like you ever did anything bad with admin credentials. And you even used it to fix stuff.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#143

A 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…

Hey, my mother was in almost exactly the same situation and has been talking to people about it. They should get in touch, although I'm not sure how to do that.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#144
post #67
post #27

My 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…

I met someone many years ago who bragged that they did this with sales tax. They purchased expensive items at Costco in Oregon, paying 0% sales tax, and then returned those items in Washington and received a full refund plus 10% sales tax. This was the first time I met a person who appeared normal but lacked social mores against fraud.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#145

Did anyone else look into his Stanford biography page? Pretty insane stuff. https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/ http://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/bucket/ In a section headed by an anime girl, he claims to have, "figured out when and how a bunch of other fantasies got into our DNA and will shortly post an article on this web site that will explain how that happened, why it is causing modern humans to make billions of…

Let me die a youngman's death not a clean and inbetween the sheets holywater death not a famous-last-words peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73 and in constant good tumour may I be mown down at dawn by a bright red sports car on my way home from an allnight party

Or when I'm 91 with silver hair and sitting in a barber's chair may rival gangsters with hamfisted tommyguns burst in and give me a short back and insides

Or when I'm 104 and banned from the Cavern may my mistress catching me in bed with her daughter and fearing for her son cut me up into little pieces and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman's death not a free from sin tiptoe in candle wax and waning death not a curtains drawn by angels borne 'what a nice way to go' death

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#146
I'm sure more than half of HN has an FBI profile. I know that from an early age I would do internet searches for everything and anything I found fascinating, including hacking, piracy, anonymous proxies, nuclear energy, wilderness survival, firearms, communism, cults, wikileaks, snowden, assange, and a multitude of conspiracy theories.

I grew up fine and have never broken the law. But I sometimes wonder if some computer system or agency sees me differently, just based on keywords.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#147
post #2

Fun story but the fact that he totally lost touch with his childhood friend over something so silly makes me sad.

It makes me even more sad that we haven't remedied that sort of thing everywhere by giving children rights, including free association with others. In other words, parents cannot govern friends and romantic partners.

Are you a parent?

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#148
post #54

Isn't it weird for Americans to know that their own secret service is monitoring their kids?

Generally, the secret service doesn't monitor kids unless they believe that they are somehow a threat to the president.

If you read the story, you'd know that the FBI wasn't "monitoring kids", they were investigating an incident that _could_ have had something to do with international espionage, colored significantly by wartime paranoia. They were obviously embarrassed when all of their leads pointed to a kid.

However, even today, the FBI doesn't monitor kids. Tech giants and social networks do that for them.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#149
post #27

My 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 had sysadmin rights on my school’s Windows servers after some very simple social engineering (for a 10 year old). The real irony was that I was called to the principal’s office on multiple occasions because I seemed to be able to fix things on the network that the local “admin” (e.g. music teacher) couldn’t. Fun times indeed. It completely ruined my respect for authority figures. Which in retrospect has been the mo…

>It completely ruined my respect for authority figures.

It looks like they realised they were out of their depth and found someone who could help. Were they wrong to trust you?

Edit: I may have misunderstood your post. Did you mean:

A. The principal and the music teacher asked you to help out a few times because they knew you were skilled

B. You were always the first suspect when anything went wrong

I understood it as A. If so I really don't see how you'd lose respect for them over that.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#150
post #27

My 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…

> because their egoes were too fragile

If anyone else reading can learn vicariously, this line is almost universally true and manifests itself in a multitude of ways.

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