B) Old school hacking/history: Now we will take a small break from your hard work and I will explain some history to hacking as best I can. I, obviously, was not around for all this, but I will explain it as best I can. The earliest stages of hacking began with another art called 'phreaking' which is basically hacking the telephone system. Phreaking has been around as long as the telephone system, in fact, the first people arrested for any sort of hacking, no matter how prehistoric, was in 1897 when a few friends manipulated the existing phone networks to get free calls (well, telegraphs). Phreaking (as it is now known) really started in the early 60s when hippies wanting free calls figured out how to make a pay phone connect the call AND return the payment. Soon after, people figured out that the phones could be tricked into making free calls by emulating the 'confirmed' signal at 2600khz. Phreaking got more and more complicated and developed into what it is today (fun, but not the focus of this text). Hacking developed in the labs of MIT on their mainframe networks. MIT personnel made what they called 'hacks' to bypass complicated steps (and/or security). They where harmless as the only people who used that hacks where the people who had created the complicated steps. They bypassed their own security systems. But, in 1969, the largest, most significant event for hacking occurred in the small city of Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, inside the dim-lighted computer labs of the University of Illinois. ARPAnet was born. ARPAnet was a small network of about 20 or so computers, all hooked together for the first time, communicating and sending data using packet based networking. This was a huge step as now small 'hacks' of MIT geeks could be run over networks and gain information from many, many places, all at once. There where terminals all over the campus, people could ask for time in half-hour intervals to program and do various tasks. People used to program games ('StarTrek Adventures' was apparently popular). A few friends wanted to send messages to one another quickly across campus and to other buildings housing terminals. It was a brilliant idea, but they could not get authorization to make such a project, so they did it anyway. They quickly made their little tool and were happy with themselves. A way to communicate without using the phones and where able to do it quickly, cheaply, and efficiently. They called their invention electronic mail, or 'email'. Cool huh? Zoom forward a few years to 1981. This was a new era. An era when computer networks where good enough to have companies hooked and buying them to store data over mainframes but the networks where new enough to lack any kind of reasonable security. Thus large, penetrable networks (such as telenet) were common and soon thereafter crawling with hackers. These hackers where mostly harmless, not always because they where moral, but because little in the way of sensitive data had been moved to the computer. The U.S. government, the people who FUNDED the entire thing, where quick to pick up on the idea. Soon they created their own networks for various things, the most famous being MILnet for the military. Then in 1986 Congress sent a message to all hackers, indeed all people, with the 'Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act'. This gave anyone convicted of unauthorized access to any computer data 5 years in prison. Still though, hacking remained strong through underground BBSs and secrecy until it lost all credibility in 1993-94 when many people were busted by the Feds for doing very illegal acts. The harmless penetration was the majority, but it went undetected and no one heard about it. The ones the masses heard about where like Vladimir Levin, arrested by Russian police for stealing 10 million dollars from Citibank via the computer. An outcry against hackers erupted and the FBI engaged in a witch-hunt to root out all hackers. The people who had created hacking, the legends, where either arrested or went so far underground they where no longer heard from. This had a devastating effect on hacking. Now thieves flooded into the hacking world looking for riches. But without elders to learn from, they all became lazy script kiddies who wanted everything but gave nothing. No more great hacking texts where written, which fried all legit newbies efforts to learn (that's why I'm writing this now! =) ). Computers made huge progress. Hacking still popped up occasionally in the news and in magazines, but for the most part, the days of glory are gone. And so here I am now in 2001. Perhaps though I am getting worked up; for memory always glorifies the past and the people who tell their stories of the 80s may simply be living a dream... BAH! Enough of this! Lets get back to how to hack!