111–120 of 135 posts
Dad allegedly showed her how to find bugs in C source code and exploit them. It was all harmless and Kayla had only been using the Internet to talk to friends on MSN. But she began looking into hacking, and learned scripting languages like Perl... I've always known C was just a gateway to the dangerous stuff.
Wait, Forbes actually linked to http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Lulz ? HAH.
This could very likely be a carefully (and cleverly constructed) identity. This girl might not exist; but because we all really really want a 16 year old girl to be the hacker the discrepancies are glossed over (the art of a good lie is not giving too much detail and letting other people's imagination fill the gaps). On the other hand the personality strikes me strongly as female, so if it is an facade it is a very w…
That last bit makes absolutely no sense. It's easier to learn SQL injection than the many, many different ways that memory management can go wrong. References to her memorising Windows Opcodes sound like a random phrase thrown in for credibility (you do after a while remember certain functions - 11 years after writing my first ARM shellcode I still remember it, even though I'll probably never use it).
The whole description of how she progressed just doesn't sound right. You can be up and running with SQL injection in less than an hour, learning buffer overflows and understanding them properly probably takes about a day and a bit at best (and that's assuming that you know C, how to use a debugger and how a compiler works). The Micro-SD strategy also seems a little extreme (but is viable, our testing gets done under a VM, there's no reason why that couldn't go on a micro SD card).
I'm calling BS on Kayla being a girl, mainly because the story just doesn't fit right compared to the application of Occam's Razor - that this is someone else trying to cover their tracks.
FML, I have a CS degree and still can't program ASM.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. What was your motivation?
I'm big on systems and testing and generally more interested in people than the technical nature of technology. I just wanted to see if it would work. I did this off and on from the time I was 14 to 17 or so. I lived literally in the middle of nowhere, where the nearest town had about 27 people. It was an interesting way to spend time in high school. To me it was a big experiment to maximize conversion and minimize d…
This is a text book usage of social engineer. Putting in divorced parents, single child getting all the attention from the engineer dad making the kid an above average amongst his/her peers, and then putting in a girl, so to make you focus less on the flaws in the story and drool over the hot-geek image more... evergreen combination.
I would doubt though that Forbes came up with this on their own. Rather, it could very much be someone from anon, just having little more fun.
Each night she wipes every one of her web accounts and deletes every email in her inbox. She has no physical hard drive and boots her computer from a microSD card. “I could hide this card anywhere or chew into a million pieces in a few seconds,” she says by e-mail. She keeps her operating system on a USB stick and uses a virtual machine (VM) to carry out her online shenanigans. And people call me paranoid. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. What was your motivation?
I'm big on systems and testing and generally more interested in people than the technical nature of technology. I just wanted to see if it would work. I did this off and on from the time I was 14 to 17 or so. I lived literally in the middle of nowhere, where the nearest town had about 27 people. It was an interesting way to spend time in high school. To me it was a big experiment to maximize conversion and minimize d…
I'm not particularly close to this issue, but the sexism I'm seeing here is pretty astounding. If this were a 16 year old guy, no one would bat an eyelid. Seriously. Look at Mafiaboy back in 2000 -- he took down Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE, eBay, and CNN. I'm not even sure that he was 16 yet (I don't have his age offhand). Is this a crazy and possibly fake story? Of course. Does that mean that it can't be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely older than Hacker News. I got it from Reddit, and I think Reddit got it from UseNet (possibly via 4chan or IRC). I paraphrased though, and the grandparent post must have a better memory (or better Google skills) than me, which is probably why you can't find an exact match...
The oldest versions I've heard went something like “Welcome to the internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents.” Example from 2001: http://www.bash.org/?2832 Pretty sure the line goes back further than that though. My guess is that it’s a parody of A Prairie Home Companion’s line about “Lake Wobegone, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the chi…
Which is presumably itself a parody, I'd guess of some standard line from a Western. But I couldn't pin it down to exactly where.
This could very likely be a carefully (and cleverly constructed) identity. This girl might not exist; but because we all really really want a 16 year old girl to be the hacker the discrepancies are glossed over (the art of a good lie is not giving too much detail and letting other people's imagination fill the gaps). On the other hand the personality strikes me strongly as female, so if it is an facade it is a very w…
I fail to pickup on how the personality in the interview seemed strongly female. Could you give an example?