

Myspace's Tom Anderson was an 80s "WarGames" Hacker - dmix
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/30/myspace-cofounder-tom-anderson-was-a-real-life-wargames-hacker-in-1980s/

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tlrobinson
My respect for MySpace Tom almost rose significantly, until I got to this
bit...

 _"Anderson obtained or guessed the passwords necessary to get through the
first level of security and, once connected, changed at least two passwords to
prevent bank officials from accessing the system. The group also created
fictitious accounts, and Anderson, using the Lord Flathead name, left a
message saying that unless he was given free use of the system he would
destroy records."_

Not cool. Pretty stupid too.

~~~
dmix
14 years old hacking into a major banks computer system in the 1980s, with a
group of (40+) hackers looking up to him.

At that age he was bound to let that go to his head and get a little too
confident.

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iamdave
That was actually a damn fine article. Informative, and completely devoid of
that TechCrunch fluff. I've got a whole new look at Tom now..

~~~
Prrometheus
The things you find out about your friends...

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DaniFong
I used to think that Myspace left open the possibility for embeds by sheer
ignorance. It now seems a lot more likely that they knew what they were
doing...

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GavinB
Part of the thing that people think is fun about myspace is the feeling that
they're hacking it by customizing their profile.

~~~
DaniFong
Exactly. Customization pushes a very fundamental human button.

I'm reminded of some archaeological studies of human culture, using gene
studies and recovered tools and a million other pieces of evidence. They
determined that clothes were developed nearly 70,000 years ago, whereas spoken
language, as we now know it, arose around 50,000 years ago.

In other words, fashion predated language.

~~~
josefresco
clothing != fashion

~~~
DaniFong
Good point. As wikipedia informs me, "the oldest art objects in the world: a
series of tiny, drilled snail shells about 75,000yrs old, were discovered in a
South African cave," yet any indisputably fashion art from that period would
be irrecoverable by now.

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ig1
+1 for techcrunch doing actual investigative journalism.

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btw0
Smart people tend to do smart things that keep surprising the rest throughout
their lives.

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acesamped
I wonder if he hacked into his schools mainframe and altered his academic
record (like in the movie). hmmmm...

kids...

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Hexstream
I don't see what's so interesting about this article...

~~~
Hexstream
Anyone care to enlighten me?

edit: I just reread the article... Let's see, Tom Anderson created MySpace,
did war-dialing in the WarGames times, got access to the Chase bank system
(apparently with a default or weak password), told 40 of his friends how to do
it, and they all got raided simultaneously.

Public figure + black hat hacking in the past = interesting?

There's _one_ thing I found really interesting:

"One of the reasons Anderson would hack into living room sized mainframe
systems was to get access to computers that could run a C compiler to learn
programming. There were no open source or free C compilers at the time, and
personal computers had very limited memory and processing power, so hackers
would try to access them on other systems."

~~~
tlrobinson
I think most people assumed the MySpace guys knew just enough PHP to get
MySpace off the ground and then got lucky. It's interesting to see there's a
little more to it than that.

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ichverstehe
Dialing into a no password-system is hardly any tougher than knowing a bit of
PHP.

~~~
migpwr
What's tough about it is that he was 14 and it was the 80's... way before it
was popular to take pot shots at PHP.

