Ran a `netsend` once from the school library. Saw it pop all over everyone's screens, and immediately :homer:'d out of there. Unfortunately don't remember the text I sent.
I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
171–180 of 373 posts
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#172My 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…
> they didn't shadow protect their password files Could you please explain what this means? Googling didn't reveal much.
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#173How does one find out that you have an FBI record?
I assume the easiest way is to do something that would cause you to get one.
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yeah, I'm not certain of the year but yeah.
Edit: no, she was 88.
From brown? Afaiu that was the main program.
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#175Isn'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. Howeve…
Well, maybe not anymore, but the Secret Service used to be charged with investigating computer crimes. I was the victim of one of their covert raids at the Pentagon City mall way back in the early 90s.
They dressed up like mall cops and searched us all. It even ended up on the front page of the Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/11/12/h...
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#176My 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…
> they didn't shadow protect their password files Could you please explain what this means? Googling didn't reveal much.
The UNIX family of operating system (Unices) historically stored passwords in /etc/passwd, which was readable (but passwords were soon hashed, i.e. passed through a one-way function to obfuscate them).
Eventually, shadow passwords were introduced to have the passwords themselves stored in another place with stricter access rights (readable only by the sysadmin or their group), so even the hashed versions were inaccessible to normal souls, whereas other information traditionally kept in /etc/passwd - e.g. the user's full name - could and can still be retrieved from that file by making it widely readable - just without the passwords, which were moved to the "shadows".
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passwd, section "Shadow file" for more details.
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#177Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#178Earlier 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…
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.
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Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#179It makes me wonder -- does everyone end up investigated for their interest in HTTPS and trying to think up encryption methods? It seems even having a passive interest in computer science or cryptocurrency would inevitably lead to one taking a class or buying a book on these topics. The business person in me always brainstorms the various potential business applications of any technology -- and that inevitably leads t…
May I suggest, a brief reading of the Wikipedia article on Crypto Wars[0]:
The Crypto Wars is an unofficial name for the attempts of the United States (US) and allied governments to limit the public's and foreign nations' access to cryptography strong enough to thwart decryption by national intelligence agencies, especially the National Security Agency (NSA).
Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)
#180A 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…
I wonder how much of that was just regular Stasi bureaucrats trying to keep their job. If everyone on their watchlist was a potential spy, then maybe their bosses stay scared enough to keep them employed? Or maybe that was the metric they used for promotions, and it inevitably became a target, resulting in a massive inflation of potential "spies" within the bureaucracy.