Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

web.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 373 posts

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

#51

Post by JumpCrisscross »

namrog84 wrote: post #38
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 learned my lesson to not talk about such things 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. This is going on your permanent school record! /s That's great. I know even as of recent of 2021 I've seen some places that had 0 security on things.

> 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.

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

#52

Post by wyre »

belval wrote: post #23
not2b wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "if there is any truth to it" remark was unnecessary. The author was very well known on the net when it was a much smaller place (the old Usenet days), and implying that he made it up is, to say the least, impolite. His Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Earnest

You may know him but I did not, so I erred on the safe side and added the "if there is any truth to it" as it's a much safer default to assume that everything I read on the Internet is possibly made up.

I don’t think assuming stories as untruthful is using good faith. I think this line of thinking heavily contributes to this post-truth society we live in; if everything online is a lie that leaves the individual to create their own truth from the lies leading to this idea of post-truth. Obviously there is more nuance than this because websites need views for ad revenue and people like lying online for imaginary internet points or attention, but I see little reason to lie on HN unless it’s for a company’s PR.

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

#53

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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 was punished three times for computer curiosity before I learned my lesson. No good deed goes unpunished, especially when it makes somebody powerful look bad.

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

#55

Post by vkou »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #34
vkou wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the important take-away, here. If he were dabbling with radios at the age of 11, in 1942, he'd have ran into the same kinds of problems. Hell, simply being of the wrong ethnicity was more than enough to dump a world of problems on your head in that time period. 120,000 people were sent to internment camps for doing literally nothing, and we're wringing hands over a kid getting a house call from the FBI.

Hell, simply being of the wrong ethnicity was more than enough to dump a world of problems on your head in that time period. 120,000 people were sent to internment camps for doing literally nothing, and we're wringing hands over a kid getting a house call from the FBI. Actually, wring hands at both things. The camps were atrocities, even if they didn't match quite the enemies' atrocities. But they were also doing thi…

On the scale of hand-wringing, this doesn't even register. Nothing bad happened to him. The police looked into it, decided this was probably not an issue, filed it, and moved on. No laws were broken. No procedures were violated. Nobody's fundamental human rights were curtailed. The procedures or laws in place weren't unfair or excessive.

This isn't the Rosa Parks, or the Rodney King, or the George Floyd of police abuse. This isn't the springboard for broad, or even narrow reform. This is the system working. I understand that a tinkerer may feel offended by the fact that the police even looked into this in the middle of a world war[1], but if that's the poster child of your problems with the police, you are in a staggeringly privileged position, compared to on-going, actual problems, affecting millions of people every year (outside of the context of, well, a world war.)

[1] That was in large part won by intelligence and counter-intelligence.

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

#56

Post by anikan_vader »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #51
namrog84 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I learned my lesson to not talk about such things 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. This is going on your permanent school record! /s That's great. I know even as of recent of 2021 I've seen some places that had 0 security on things.

> 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.

> 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.

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

#59

Post by dekhn »

in case you're not aware, the author of this is a known (but not well-known) AI researchers from way, way back.

He invented the "finger" protocol. I chose the university I went to based on the qualitty of the plan files so in some sense, he's the reason I ended up at UCSC.

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

#60

Post by gojomo »

dheera wrote: post #39
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 didn't change a thing, just LOLed and told someone > Oh well, 2 week suspension God damn, these idiot school people have no fucking clue that someone who points out a security flaw to you without inflicting any harm is actually doing something good, and that behavior should be encouraged and rewarded .

BRB, preparing my YC S22 application: "BugBakeSale"

"We're bug bounties for America's school districts: HackerOne for the K12 market. The product is free if you let our corporate partners, who also fund the bounties, recruit the winners."

Post reply on HN