"Rushkoff, Douglas - Cyberia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rushkoff Douglas)

you, but you're not done with them yet--you're still working on the thing for some company
or another. But if you've got access to, say, twenty or thirty Unix systems, you can pop in
and out of as many as you like, and change the order of them. You'll always appear to be
coming from a different location. They'll be shooting in the dark. You're untraceable.''
This hacker takes pride in popping in and out of systems the way a surfer raves about
ducking the whitewater and gliding through the tube. But, just as a surfer might compete for
cash, prizes, or beer endorsements, many young hackers who begin with Cyberia in their
hearts are quickly tempted by employers who can profit from their skill. The most dangerous
authoritarian response to young cyberian hackers may not be from the law but from those
hoping to exploit their talents.
With a hacker I'll call Pete, a seventeen-year-old engineering student at Columbia
University, I set up a real-time computer conference call in which several other hackers from
around the country could share some of their stories about a field called industrial hacking.''
Because most of the participants believe they have several taps on their telephone lines, they
send their first responses through as a series of strange glyphs on the screen. After Pete
establishes the cryptography protocol and deciphers the incoming messages, they look like
this (the names are mine):

#1: The Purist
Industrial hacking is darkside hacking. Company A hires you to slow down, destroy,
screw up, or steal from company B's R&D division [research and development]. For example,
we could set up all their math wrong on their cadcams [computer aided design programs] so
that when they look at it on the computer it seems fine, but when they try to put the thing
together, it comes out all wrong. If all the parts of an airplane engine are machined 1mm off,
it's just not going to work.

#2: The Prankster
There was a guy in Florida who worked on a cadcam system which used pirated
software. He was smart, so he figured out how to use it without any manuals. He worked
there for about a year and a half but was fired unfairly. He came to us get them shut down.
We said Sure, no problem.'' Cadcam software companies send out lots of demos. We got
ahold of some cadcam demos, and wrote a simple assembly program so that when the person
puts the disk in and types the "install'' or demo'' command, it wipes out the whole hard disk.
So we wrapped it up in its package, sent it out to a friend in Texas or wherever the software
company was really from, and had him send it to the targeted company with a legit postmark
and everything. Sure enough, someone put the demo in, and the company had to end up
buying over $20,000 worth of software. They couldn't say anything because the software we
wiped out was illegal anyway.

The Purist
That's nothing. That's a personal vendetta. Industrial hacking is big business. Most
corporations have in-house computer consultants who do this sort of thing. But as a freelancer
you can get hired as a regular consultant by one of these firms--say McDonnell Douglas--get
into a vice president's office, and show them the specs of some Lockheed project, like a new
advanced tactical fighter which he has not seen, and say, There's more where this came
from.'' You can get thousands, even millions of dollars for this kind of thing.

#3: The Theorist
During the big corporate takeover craze, companies that were about to be taken over
began to notice more and more things begin to go wrong. Then payroll would get screwed up,