from elsewhere on the internet: hacking, cracking, and phreaking
(some comments in light of the News Corp scandal)
by Dr. Mojo PhD:
"A hacker is somebody who writes code for whatever intent, ie: they "hack" the code together. Originated in older programming circles with people that would get together and work on early operating systems and other programs together, hacking together complete working products from different bits they produced.
A cracker is somebody who subverts computer security and encryption by whatever means, including by hacking (ie: they produce a program to cause certain behaviour to evade or subvert the security), or by other methods like buffer overflows, where a program writes something to memory and exceeds the memory buffer, screwing up the adjacent memory (basically allowing whatever you want to be written to that memory). They may use reverse engineering, in the case of warez or application/game cracks, like the scene -- the warez scene -- like Razor1911 and other groups.
A phreak is what News Corp is actually being accused of here, interfering the telecommunications data or radiated signals. Captain Crunch, Joybubbles, Steves Jobs & Wozniak -- these guys were phreaks. Phreaking was the first thing I was ever arrested for (I built a blue box, and then implemented it with impunity). Phreaking might be more specifically said to have evolved into anything that involves signals in transit, as cracking and phreaking become more intimate, but phreaking has always been more closely related to hacking than cracking. Early examples include using pitches and tones to emulate linesman's handsets to make free calls, and now includes Van Eck phreaking, which can pick up the radiation from a CRT or LCD monitor, and remotely reconstruct it into a viewable image."
"Joybubbles, born Josef Carl Engressia, Jr., was a blind boy with perfect pitch who, at the age of seven, discovered the various signal tones in the telco system -- by whistling them. Joybubbles changed his name legally after childhood sexual abuse traumatized him, as he wanted to remain innocent until the day he died. Later hobbies included Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, of which he was an avid fan.
Seriously underrated character actor David Strathairn (who played Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, and Pierce Patchett in L.A. Confidential) portrayed blind, pitch-perfect hacker, cracker, and phreaker "Whistler" in the Robert Redford movie Sneakers, based directly on Joybubbles.
2600: The Hacker Quarterly, is named for the 2600Hz tone that Joybubbles and Captain Crunch discovered could be used to phreak telco lines. John Draper, aka Captain Crunch, discovered through use of a toy bosun's whistle from Cap'n Crunch cereal that he could place these calls, as the bosun's whistle produced a tone of 2600Hz.
Matthew Lillard's character Cereal Killer in the abysmally awesome film Hackers
...is named in homage of Cap'n Crunch, and at one point gives his name as Emmanuel Goldstein, an obviously overt reference to Orwell's 1984, but also the pseudonym of Eric Corley, one of the publishing partners of 2600.
Razor 1911, one of the oldest scene/demo groups still extant, was originally founded as Razor 2992. Even going back to the 1980s, kids were still obsessed with tagging their screen names with things like "666". Seriously amused by this trend, they changed their name from Razor 2992 to Razor 1911, which is 777 when converted to hexadecimal.
In one of the many round-ups of crackers, hackers, scene groups, and phreakers, the United States Secret Service targeted Steve Jackson Games, creators of GURPS, a modular roleplay ruleset designed to be used in any environment or play scenario, partially because they were producing GURPS Cyberpunk, which they apparently thought was some sort of hacker manual, and partly because one of the people working on GURPS Cyberpunk, The Mentor, ran an underground zine called Phrack that distributed administrative contact information on the E911 system. Fearing that this information, which BellSouth sold to the general public for $13, could be used to compromise the E911 system if somebody acquired it for free and decided to contact the people that ran it, combined with the hacker manual GURPS Cyberpunk, resulted in the judge of the case chastising the Secret Service for, among other things, requiring a "better education".
In 1999, Neal Stephenson, author of the incredibly awesome Snow Crash, wrote a less sci-fi, more techno- and cryptothriller book called Cryptonomicon (buy it). Serving as both a prequel and a sequel to his later The System of the World series (which also delves into the subject of cryptography), Cryptonomicon deals with both Bletchley Park code cracking in WWII and a modern (though still pre-millennium) data haven set-up, and the whacky adventures the characters get into along the way. More so than its later-published, earlier-set System, Cryptonomicon features entire, functional Perl scripts to design your own cypher (the solitaire cypher, based on a deck of cards). Cryptonomicon also contains a fairly detailed, if spare on the materials aspect, description of Van Eck phreaking, the method by which CRT or LCD monitors can be read remotely by intercepting and reconstituting their electromagnetic emissions, and which has been used, as a proof of concept, to compromise electronic ballot secrecy.
System of the World, on the other hand, teaches you how to count to 1,023 on your fingers -- as opposed to the normal ten -- with the simple and elegant method of finger binary. Impress children! Confuse your wife! Make your parents feel stupid!
And... yeah. That's it. I like this topic, as you can see."
by Dr. Mojo PhD:
"A hacker is somebody who writes code for whatever intent, ie: they "hack" the code together. Originated in older programming circles with people that would get together and work on early operating systems and other programs together, hacking together complete working products from different bits they produced.
A cracker is somebody who subverts computer security and encryption by whatever means, including by hacking (ie: they produce a program to cause certain behaviour to evade or subvert the security), or by other methods like buffer overflows, where a program writes something to memory and exceeds the memory buffer, screwing up the adjacent memory (basically allowing whatever you want to be written to that memory). They may use reverse engineering, in the case of warez or application/game cracks, like the scene -- the warez scene -- like Razor1911 and other groups.
A phreak is what News Corp is actually being accused of here, interfering the telecommunications data or radiated signals. Captain Crunch, Joybubbles, Steves Jobs & Wozniak -- these guys were phreaks. Phreaking was the first thing I was ever arrested for (I built a blue box, and then implemented it with impunity). Phreaking might be more specifically said to have evolved into anything that involves signals in transit, as cracking and phreaking become more intimate, but phreaking has always been more closely related to hacking than cracking. Early examples include using pitches and tones to emulate linesman's handsets to make free calls, and now includes Van Eck phreaking, which can pick up the radiation from a CRT or LCD monitor, and remotely reconstruct it into a viewable image."
"Joybubbles, born Josef Carl Engressia, Jr., was a blind boy with perfect pitch who, at the age of seven, discovered the various signal tones in the telco system -- by whistling them. Joybubbles changed his name legally after childhood sexual abuse traumatized him, as he wanted to remain innocent until the day he died. Later hobbies included Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, of which he was an avid fan.
Seriously underrated character actor David Strathairn (who played Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, and Pierce Patchett in L.A. Confidential) portrayed blind, pitch-perfect hacker, cracker, and phreaker "Whistler" in the Robert Redford movie Sneakers, based directly on Joybubbles.
2600: The Hacker Quarterly, is named for the 2600Hz tone that Joybubbles and Captain Crunch discovered could be used to phreak telco lines. John Draper, aka Captain Crunch, discovered through use of a toy bosun's whistle from Cap'n Crunch cereal that he could place these calls, as the bosun's whistle produced a tone of 2600Hz.
Matthew Lillard's character Cereal Killer in the abysmally awesome film Hackers
...is named in homage of Cap'n Crunch, and at one point gives his name as Emmanuel Goldstein, an obviously overt reference to Orwell's 1984, but also the pseudonym of Eric Corley, one of the publishing partners of 2600.
Razor 1911, one of the oldest scene/demo groups still extant, was originally founded as Razor 2992. Even going back to the 1980s, kids were still obsessed with tagging their screen names with things like "666". Seriously amused by this trend, they changed their name from Razor 2992 to Razor 1911, which is 777 when converted to hexadecimal.
In one of the many round-ups of crackers, hackers, scene groups, and phreakers, the United States Secret Service targeted Steve Jackson Games, creators of GURPS, a modular roleplay ruleset designed to be used in any environment or play scenario, partially because they were producing GURPS Cyberpunk, which they apparently thought was some sort of hacker manual, and partly because one of the people working on GURPS Cyberpunk, The Mentor, ran an underground zine called Phrack that distributed administrative contact information on the E911 system. Fearing that this information, which BellSouth sold to the general public for $13, could be used to compromise the E911 system if somebody acquired it for free and decided to contact the people that ran it, combined with the hacker manual GURPS Cyberpunk, resulted in the judge of the case chastising the Secret Service for, among other things, requiring a "better education".
In 1999, Neal Stephenson, author of the incredibly awesome Snow Crash, wrote a less sci-fi, more techno- and cryptothriller book called Cryptonomicon (buy it). Serving as both a prequel and a sequel to his later The System of the World series (which also delves into the subject of cryptography), Cryptonomicon deals with both Bletchley Park code cracking in WWII and a modern (though still pre-millennium) data haven set-up, and the whacky adventures the characters get into along the way. More so than its later-published, earlier-set System, Cryptonomicon features entire, functional Perl scripts to design your own cypher (the solitaire cypher, based on a deck of cards). Cryptonomicon also contains a fairly detailed, if spare on the materials aspect, description of Van Eck phreaking, the method by which CRT or LCD monitors can be read remotely by intercepting and reconstituting their electromagnetic emissions, and which has been used, as a proof of concept, to compromise electronic ballot secrecy.
System of the World, on the other hand, teaches you how to count to 1,023 on your fingers -- as opposed to the normal ten -- with the simple and elegant method of finger binary. Impress children! Confuse your wife! Make your parents feel stupid!
And... yeah. That's it. I like this topic, as you can see."