"Hugo Cornwall "The Hacker's handbook"" - читать интересную книгу автора

unsuccessful log-on attempt I (and presumably several others) had all
the pass numbers. While the BT staff were busy with other visitors to
their stand, I picked out for myself a relatively neglected viewdata
set. I knew that it was possible to by-pass the auto-dialler with its
pre-programmed phone numbers in this particular model, simply by
picking up the the phone adjacent to it, dialling my preferred
number, waiting for the whistle, and then hitting the keyboard button
labelled 'viewdata'. I dialled Holland, performed my little by-pass
trick and watched Viditel write itself on the screen. The pass
numbers were accepted first time and, courtesy of...no, I'll spare
them embarrassment...I had only lack of fluency in Dutch to restrain
my explorations. Fortunately, the first BT executive to spot what I
had done was amused as well.
Most hackers seem to have started in a similar way. Essentially
you rely on the foolishness and inadequate sense of security of
computer salesmen, operators, programmers and designers.
In the introduction to this book I described hacking as a sport;
and like most sports, it is both relatively pointless and filled with
rules, written or otherwise, which have to be obeyed if there is to
be any meaningfulness to it. Just as rugby football is not only about
forcing a ball down one end of a field, so hacking is not just about
using any means to secure access to a computer.
On this basis, opening private correspondence to secure a password
on a public access service like Prestel and then running around the
system building up someone's bill, is not what hackers call hacking.
The critical element must be the use of skill in some shape or form.
Hacking is not a new pursuit. It started in the early 1960s when
the first "serious" time-share computers began to appear at
university sites. Very early on, 'unofficial' areas of the memory
started to appear, first as mere notice boards and scratch pads for
private programming experiments, then, as locations for games.
(Where, and how do you think the early Space Invaders, Lunar Landers
and Adventure Games were created?) Perhaps tech-hacking-- the
mischievous manipulation of technology--goes back even further. One
of the old favourites of US campus life was to rewire the control
panels of elevators (lifts) in high-rise buildings, so that a request
for the third floor resulted in the occupants being whizzed to the
twenty-third.
Towards the end of the 60s, when the first experimental networks
arrived on the scene (particularly when the legendary
ARPAnet--Advanced Research Projects Agency network-- opened up), the
computer hackers skipped out of their own local computers, along the
packet-switched high grade communications lines, and into the other
machines on the net. But all these hackers were privileged
individuals. They were at a university or research resource, and they
were able to borrow terminals to work with.
What has changed now, of course, is the wide availability of home
computers and the modems to go with them, the growth of public-access
networking of computers, and the enormous quantity and variety of
computers that can be accessed.