Loompanics Unlimited
PRESENTS
Our featured Author
Carolyn Meinel
Hackers have a “bad boy” image. Most of us visualize youngish, geeky looking guys with an unhealthy pallor about their skin, obese from junk food diets eaten while glued to their monitors or skeletal from not bothering to eat at all, as they attempt to break into the Pentagon or steal credit card numbers from web sites or simply to create havoc on your personal computer system for the fun of it. This is also the image we get from the TV news and films.
 Carolyn Meinel, author of Überhacker! How to Break Into Computers, is neither geeky nor obese. She is a grandmother, so we can also cross off the youngish aspect of the stereotype, as well. Female hackers, while not as rare as they once were are nevertheless scarce. Female hackers over 50 are scarcer yet! Following the stereotype, she is likely to be found at her computer in the wee hours of the morning poking around here and there, but not to create havoc, rather to ferret out weaknesses in somebody's system. Daylight hours will likely find her out horseback riding or gardening. It would be difficult to fit her into any stereotype.
Our Loompanics author first got interested in computers in 1971 when she took a Fortran programming course at the University of Arizona. She recalls her first assignment was to sort an alphabetical list. Unable to stop when the assignment was completed she went on to write some error checking code to go with it.
In those early computer days, conversations with programmer friends led her to understand the term “hacker” to mean “finding unique, though often 'crufty' or 'kluged' ways of getting a program to run faster.” She would hear the rare tale of how someone had used a deck of punch cards, to take over the CPU of a mainframe computer. However, the real prank with punch cards wasn't to occur until the presidential elections of the year 2000 when they were used to take over the country.
1971 was also the year the criminal element, or the black hats, in the hacker scene began to come of age. The underground magazine of the Youth International Party's Technical Assistance Program revealed how to trick phone company computers into giving away free long distance phone calls by using “blue boxes' which emulated the whistling sounds used by Ma Bell to control the phone system. Ramparts magazine was forced into bankruptcy when it published instructions on how to build one of these babies. The state seized all the copies it could of that issue, claiming it was illegal to give out this information.
By 1974 the Plato system, an early attempt to create an Internet, was in full swing. A half a dozen or so terminals sat in a room at the University of Arizona, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (a.k.a. DARPA) experiment. Carolyn had a password, although she hadn't gotten it through the accepted channels. It meant she couldn't use the system when the professor who monitored it might wander the room, yet she still managed to be one of the few thousand who were able to access that early system, even if it had to be just once or twice a week at 2:00 AM. The “Olympians” who ran the system decided to whom they would or would not grant a password. Access to it couldn't be bought.
On Plato Carolyn used the first flight simulator program in history. She flew Phantoms, MIGs and even an X-15. “One day, the starship Enterprise few in, shot us all down and bombed our airports into oblivion. Plato had been hacked.” Carolyn recalls, “It was a fun, harmless hack, the kind I admired.”
The next year she was taking systems engineering courses. “These gave me passwords to a DEC-10. I was programming interactively on a Tektronix terminal. Fascinating programs floated around in the directory space of that magical DEC-10. The program 'Sex' brought up a screen that warned 'Playing with sex can be hazardous. Are you sure you want to play? “Y/N” Who could resist hitting the “Y” key? That brought a burst of imagery, followed by the message, 'Proceeding to delete all files.' It didn't actually delete files, but it sure was good for livening up the computer center with yelling and profanity.”
“In 1975, with help from some fellow space enthusiasts,” Carolyn launched the L-5 Society. The name was “a nerdy joke”, that meant “a place in space, equally distant from the Earth and Moon-as everyone knows.” Thousands soon joined the society. The L-5 magazine was published out of a three-room office that was a popular stop for hackers. The Society's high tech, hope-filled view of the future appealed to a wide variety of “on-the-edge technologists”.
“Well do I remember the day in 1977 that a battered VW bus pulled into the driveway”, says Carolyn. “Out poured a scruffy gang. 'Carolyn!' shouted their tall, bearded, Einstein-haired leader, Roger Gregory. 'We're Xanadu! We've come to help out L-5!”
“Sprawled about my office, they explained their vision of what, 14 years later, would become the World Wide Web. 'It's going to be the universal operating system. All anyone will need to have is a computer, and they will be able to access all of the knowledge of the human race.' Gestulating wildly and munching candy bars, they talked of their dreams…Their minds were so far into the future, it was as if they hardly existed in this world. It was a future we have come to call cyberspace.”
In 1983, after completing a Masters degree with research in computational complexity (encryption) Carolyn got a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It, being a think tank, allowed her to work on projects like mining asteroids, and writing programs to simulate new ideas for how surveillance satellites could work.
It also allowed her in 1986 to get an account on ARPAnet. “Hundreds of computers, all networked and all free.” It was supposed to be for military use only, but” Carolyn says, “ARPAnet was a free wheeling place because its owners at DARPA knew hackers were an asset. By 1986, hackers had already invented e-mail and Usenet news groups, to mention just a few achievements.”
That was the whole point of ARPAnet: Turn loose lots of people, don't hold their hands when things go wrong and see what shakes out.”
“What shook out was the Internet.”
Carolyn Meinel began the Happy Hacker Newsletter and writing her “Guides to (mostly) Harmless Hacking” in July of 1996. She didn't anticipate the animosity she would incur by giving hacker knowledge to “newbies”, those who hadn't entered the hacker community by way of the hackers form of hazing. Her Happy Hacker e-zine made fun of Black Hat hackers and gave out break-in tips without restraint.
In Carolyn's words, “It all began in August of 1996 when a small and shifting alliance of criminal hacker gangs with interesting relationships to Federal Law enforcement agencies decided that I didn't belong on the Internet.”
She figures that she is a threat to the black hat hackers' power base. By publishing the details of computer hacking and teaching people to use those secrets safely and legally, she and her many hacker allies are destroying the criminal hackers' near monopoly on such knowledge.
Carolyn says that “most hacker battles begin in tiny ways; an insult here, a slur, or perhaps just a misunderstanding.” The war that started then continues to this day, making Carolyn Meinel one of the most controversial players in a war that shows absolutely no sign of slowing down, even now. She published her book The Happy Hacker giving the basics of hacking to anyone with rudimentary computer savvy and incurred a huge amount of cyber venom in response. Her latest book, Überhacker! How to Break Into Computers, published by Loompanics Unlimited takes readers to the next level of hacking and includes a virus filled CD to start one's own hacker lab. Knowledge is power on the Internet just like anywhere else. Carolyn maintains that knowing what the Black Hat hackers know can put you in the position of being a White Hat hacker yourself.
Carolyn Meinel's Featured Author interview ends with some interesting questions posed by our author: “The computer security industry in some ways now resembles a protection racket. Who are the criminals? Who are the defenders? Is the US Federal Government actually encouraging flashy web site hacks in order to persuade the public to fund their war on Cybercrime?” I guess we'll have to wait and see on that one.
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