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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)

#151

Post by giantg2 »

windexh8er wrote: post #128
avgDev wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dif…

"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."

I bought some lions mane mushrooms from a grocery store, which cost $10-12 per lbs. The cashier rang them up as "regular" (button) mushrooms at $2 per lbs. I pointed out the mistake and she tried to correct it but chose the button mushroom again. I brought it up a second time and she selected a different incorrect mushroom at a slight increase ($4/lb?). At that point, I gave up. She's the one ringing it up. I tried.

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

#152

Post by bravetraveler »

I've wondered if they've kept tabs on me since I was young/dumb...

Back before SSL/TLS became a thing, ARP poisoning was all you really needed to find out some fun details. It was basically pretending you're both the network gateway and a client.

This and some poor decisions on my part ended up with an expulsion my senior year, never had a phone call like this - just angry people from the state.

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

#153

Post by RotaryTelephone »

lokimedes wrote: post #46
torpid wrote: 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…

Had a similar problem with feeling betrayed by authority figures when I was called in to be questioned about a hacking incident while in middle school just because I was good at VB in programming glass. Can really ruin a kid's confidence for years to come in case anyone in such position is reading this now.

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

#154

Post by 908B64B197 »

pixiemaster wrote: post #63
anikan_vader wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> American public schools are quite adept at teaching distrust in authority, particularly in bureaucrats. It's an important lesson to teach kids while they're young! Strange, though, how you never see it on the formal curriculum.

it’s a hidden lesson, only for privileged kids.

How is that a lesson for privileged kids only?

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

#155

Post by angst_ridden »

pvg wrote: post #122
angst_ridden wrote: post #115

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…

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…

I'm not positive, but I seem to recall she said that she requested files, but just got back a folder of redacted sheets only showing a few dates and her name scattered throughout.

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

#156

Post by angst_ridden »

joebob42 wrote: post #143
angst_ridden wrote: post #115

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.

Did she study in Rostock in '86?

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

#157

Post by kromem »

BizarroLand wrote: post #137
belval wrote: post #3

This story (assuming it's true) should serve as an excellent example of why you need privacy even if you think that you don't. In peace time the NSA is only looking for "terrorist" and leaves everyone alone, but in case of war they would start creating lists for any and everything. All it takes is one "tough" agent trusting their gut feeling/algorithm based on your browsing history and shopping habits to put a target…

Seems like the safest bet would be to fully inventory every human, know everything about them as well or better than they do, and then, once you're highly assured of their safety to the commonwealth of the country monitor them for even the slightest changes in their disposition or regular pattern of activity. Of course, you would have to completely disregard any concept that people would have a freedom to privacy to…

Where this apparatus gets really interesting is the addition of AI.

Suddenly cross-referencing pockets of activity in the giant trove of permanently stored data can be done for every citizen, not just ones of interest.

You can start modeling and simulating behavior off that data to predict future actions like in Minority Report.

But if you look far enough into the future on that trend and link it into Microsoft's recent patent on resurrecting dead people as AI chatbots from social media data, the treasure trove of all online activity for every citizen becomes a curious anthropological artifact as the people in it die off.

Did you have a nuclear scientist on the verge of a fusion breakthrough die before they could finish their paper? Just feed the entirety of their digital life into the system and extrapolate the non-digital using generalized "human experience" models built off everyone else to resurrect a copy of them (or many copies) in a simulated continuation of their day to day thinking and working.

Very few people fully understand the extent of the digital footprints we are leaving behind in the context of trends in big data.

The data we are leaving behind in mass collection will eventually take on (literally) new life.

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

#158

Post by Teknoman117 »

lokimedes wrote: post #46
torpid wrote: 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…

I was in high school from 2007 to 2011. Half of it in rural Alabama, the other half in the Bay.

Even being in the tech capital of the world, the school administration's views on technology and information access were so backwards. Our school basically didn't allow accessing any websites that weren't on some allowlist. Teachers had accounts to bypass the content filter.

We had a game design class that happened after school. Usually that period was reserved for making up classes you failed, but ROP courses that didn't align with the district's curriculum goals were taught as well.

Needless to say, pretty much every resource we needed was blocked. So the teacher would give out his content filter bypass credentials, because the school wouldn't entertain any exceptions to students not being allowed to have them even though they knew there were classes on campus that would have tremendous difficulty. A couple of times a student would leak the credentials to others on campus and it'd take all of 5 minutes to get to everyone on campus via social media.

They'd always treat everyone who knew the bypass accounts as "guilty unless proven otherwise". I ended up in detention a few times for even knowing it. Parents complained to the school a bunch, school just always blanket said "bypassing the content filter as a student is against policy for any reason. No exceptions."

Makes me think back to 1st grade in 1999 when I was first given internet access and being told not to use Google because "it wasn't safe". Couldn't have been that bad because it took another half decade for me to inadvertently end up on the "adult" part of the internet.

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

#159

Post by not2b »

champagnois wrote: post #95
not2b wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not any more, but back in the 1970s and before cryptography was considered the province of the military and spies, not for civilians to mess with, in the US and the UK. State-of-the-art crypto was treated much like tech for nuclear weapons. The pioneers of public key cryptography had to fight for their right to publish.

I cannot imagine an entry level class in Web Development (or even a coding bootcamp) not dedicating some time to crypto and SSL / SSH. Anyone doing a deepdive on these topics would seemingly be put on a list. It is absurd.

Netscape was required to severely cripple SSL to be allowed to export it in the early 1990s. Since "export" included putting software on an FTP server, this meant no open source crypto software could be on US servers. GNU addressed that problem by hosting some software in Europe.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

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

#160

Post by rootsudo »

lokimedes wrote: post #46
torpid wrote: 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…

Public network shares, cain&abel, learning about NTLM downgrading and well, these were the days when Wifi was "new" and wireless B and G was considered wow, 54mbps.

Back then, everything really felt like magic.

Old netsend trick, pre windows xp SP2.

There were enough stories at this time online that I knew it was best to say nothing. Did nothing bad, just explored, learned quite a few things and well was surprised how really easy it was to do things.

Nowadays, I feel kids won't/don't get that chance to explore - which is sad. Internet is curated through apps and "enagement" user experience and cloud services/SAAS.

Maybe they can spot a lifetime link to a google sheets master password document. ;)

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