Dear Hacker

LETTERS

TO THE EDITOR

OF 2600

Emmanuel GoldsteinD

ear H

acker

Goldstein

LETTERS

TO THE EDITOR

OF

26

00

$29.95 US/$35.95 CAN

EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN saw his fi rst letter to the editor published in The New York Post at the age of eight. Immediately he was addicted to the discourse that occurs in a “letters” section.

In high school during the late 1970s, Goldstein became enchanted with computers. His infatuation soon got him into trouble as he discovered he could access things he shouldn’t. A few years and an FBI raid later, he co-founded 2600: The Hacker Quarterly as an outlet for stories and tutorials from hackers around the world.

Since 1988, Goldstein has hosted Off the Hook, a hacker-themed radio talk show airing on WBAI FM in New York City. In 1994 he organized the fi rst HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference, held every other year, which attracts attendees from points around the globe. Goldstein served as technical consultant for the 1995 feature fi lm Hackers, and has testifi ed before Congress on the issue of hacking and where the threat actually lies.

To this day, Emmanuel Goldstein has never taken a course in computers.

2600 is the beating, thrumming lifeblood of the militant arm of the information hobbyist world. They are as dangerous as an idea and twice as infectious.”—Cory Doctorow, blogger, journalist, author, and coeditor of Boing Boing

You are hearing voices from under the fl oor-boards of telecommunication here. Scholars should treasure this.”—Bruce Sterling, author, one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fi ction

It’s always interesting to hear what the 2600 community has to say, whether it’s discussing some new cool exploitation method or revealing more information about a hacking topic that someone has written about. During the Free Kevin movement, I remember reading all the supportive letters and comments in 2600 which raised up my spirits in such a diffi cult time.” —Kevin Mitnick, computer security consultant, author

From consumer advocates to criminals, the readers of 2600:The Hacker Quarterly are a diverse and dedicated lot. Corporate spies, adolescent rebels and their worried parents, computer geeks, anarchists, survivalists, private eyes, representatives of law enforcement — they read the magazine, and they write letters. Amusing letters. Insightful letters. Letters that reveal genius, and letters that frighten you out of your socks.

Whether you’re a subscriber or merely curious, they will entertain you, enlighten you, enrage you, and quite possibly, alter your perspective forever.

THE CATEGORIES:

Visit our Web site at www.wiley.com/compbooks

COMPUTERS/Security/General

• Question Upon Question

• Tales from the Retail Front

• The Challenges of Life

as a Hacker

• New Technology

• The Magic of the

Corporate World

• Our Biggest Fans

• Behind the Walls

• A Culture of Rebels

• Strange Ramblings

Hard-headed rebels, hate mail,

hacker hijinks, and hopeless paranoia

— read all about it!

The hacker — god or demon? One’s point of view determines the answer, but one fact is irrefutable — hackers feed on questions. Questions are the portal to new worlds of knowledge. Questions get them in trouble. Ques-tions are why Letters to the Editor is the most popular feature of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.

Since 1984, 2600 has been the voice and forum for the hacker subculture, and thousands have raised their voices in letters to the editor. Now you can read the best of them, from the simply curious (“What does ‘2600’ mean?”) to the slightly paranoid (“For years I have been hearing voices saying they are the Secret Service telling me what to do….”), along with 2600’s responses.

It’s entertaining, challenging, and sometimes, just plain scary. But you will discover what makes a hacker tick. You will recognize the rebel, the insatiably curious, the visionary determined to push the envelope. You may recognize yourself.

The landscape has radically changed over 26 years, but the tone and attitude of the 2600 letter writer remains as fresh as ever.

ISBN 978-0-470-62006-9

““

“

Pho

to b

y D

ave

Buc

hwal

d

620069ffirs.indd 2 5/3/10 2:52:30 PM

Dear Hacker

620069ffirs.indd 1 5/3/10 2:52:30 PM

620069ffirs.indd 2 5/3/10 2:52:30 PM

Dear Hacker

Letters to the Editor of 2600

Emmanuel Goldstein

620069ffirs.indd 3 5/3/10 2:52:30 PM

Dear Hacker: Letters to the Editor of 2600

Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.10475 Crosspoint BoulevardIndianapolis, IN 46256www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-0-470-62006-9ISBN: 978-0-470-88978-7 (ebk)ISBN: 978-0-470-88979-4 (ebk)ISBN: 978-0-470-89020-2 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher and the author make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies con-tained herein may not be suitable for every situation. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. The fact that an organization or Web site is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the organization or Web site may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet Web sites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.

For general information on our other products and services please contact our Customer Care Depart-ment within the United States at (877) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010926616

Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates, in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

620069ffirs.indd 4 5/3/10 2:52:30 PM

This book is dedicated to those people who always feel the

need to speak out about whatever is on their mind. For my entire

life, letter writers have been an inspiration to me. These are the

people who actually make changes because so few of us take the

time to compose our thoughts into a written form. Even today,

when online forums are everywhere, it’s those people who think

it through and present their thoughts in a cohesive style who

really wind up getting through to the rest of us. With all of this,

it’s no wonder that the individuals who have written letters to

2600 over the years to express their opinions, ideas, or outrage

have comprised the most popular part of our magazine. It’s this

explosion of ideas that has made the whole thing so worthwhile.

620069ffirs.indd 5 5/3/10 2:52:30 PM

AbouT THE AuTHor

EmmanuEl GoldstEin (emmanuel@goldste.in) has been publishing 2600

Magazine, The Hacker Quarterly, since 1984. He traces his hacker roots to his high

school days in the late ’70s, when he first played with a distant computer over high-

speed, 300-baud phone lines. It didn’t take long for him to get into trouble by figuring

out how to access something he wasn’t supposed to access. He continued playing with

various machines in his college days at the State University of New York at Stony

Brook. This resulted in an FBI raid, as he once again gained access to something he

really shouldn’t have. It was in the midst of all this excitement that he cofounded

2600 Magazine, an outlet for hacker stories and tutorials from all over the world. The

rapid growth and success of the magazine was both shocking and scary to Goldstein,

who to this day has never taken a course in computers. Since 1988, he has also hosted

Off The Hook, a hacker-themed technology talk show on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York

City. In addition to making the hacker documentary Freedom Downtime, Goldstein

hosts the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conferences in New York City every two

years, drawing thousands of hackers from all over the world.

You can contact 2600 online at www.2600.com or by writing to 2600 Magazine,

P.O. Box 752, Middle Island, NY, 11953.

620069ffirs.indd 6 5/3/10 2:52:30 PM

CrEDiTs

Executive EditorCarol Long

Project EditorMaureen Spears

Production EditorEric Charbonneau

Copy EditorMaryann Steinhart

Editorial DirectorRobyn B. Siesky

Editorial ManagerMary Beth Wakefield

Marketing ManagerAshley Zurcher

Production ManagerTim Tate

Vice President and ExecutiveGroup PublisherRichard Swadley

Vice President and Executive PublisherBarry Pruett

Associate PublisherJim Minatel

Project Coordinator, CoverLynsey Stanford

CompositorChris Gillespie, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

ProofreaderJen Larsen, Word One

indexerJohnna VanHoose Dinse

Cover imageJake Tilson/Getty Images

Cover DesignerRyan Sneed

620069ffirs.indd 7 5/3/10 2:52:30 PM

ACkNoWLEDGMENTs

This book started off looking relatively simple but grew more and more complex

as the sheer size of the project became apparent; we print so many letters in every

issue of 2600 and we’ve been publishing the magazine since 1984, which means we had

a huge amount of source material to draw from. On top of that, it was no small task

to figure out the best way to sort them all into various categories and decide which

of those would be the most interesting. Because of the size of this collection and the

incredible number of pieces that it includes, many letters didn’t make the cut despite

each letter being precious in its own unique way.

In our last book, I thanked a whole ton of people who helped the magazine get off

the ground, stay afloat through difficult times, and remain relevant to this very day.

Without repeating those words precisely, I’d like to reiterate the tremendous contribu-

tions of 2600 cofounder Dave Ruderman back in our early years, cover designer and

photographer Dave Buchwald who continues to add magic and creativity to every

project he undertakes, our layout artist Mark Silverberg who makes the current issues

of 2600 look sharp and attractive, and our office manager Mary Nixdorf who manages

to keep the entire operation running smoothly, despite the odds.

We never would have succeeded without all of the writers, office managers, system

administrators, HOPE Conference organizers, radio show participants, and artists

that have worked with us over the years and helped to make this thing we do unique

and unparalleled. Special thanks also go to Robert Barat, who helped sort through the

many pages of letters in piles of issues to find the best ones. Finally, I must acknowl-

edge the inspiration and encouragement of Kyle Drosdick, whose appreciation and

skill in the fields of technology, history, and unbridled fun is a perfect summation

of what the true hacker spirit is.

I’m pleased to have once again worked with the folks at Wiley, particularly Carol

Long and Maureen Spears, who make it all so enjoyable. I also want to thank my

agent, Cameron McClure, without whose diligent efforts, this book would likely

never have come to fruition.

Last, but certainly not least, a big round of thanks to all of those many thousands

of people who decided to put their opinions into writing and compose a letter to the

editor of 2600. Whether it was praise, hostility, the sharing of a personal story, or

the discovery of some new security scandal, you’re the people who created the magic

of interaction that our magazine has become famous for over the years. I hope you

continue to use the magic of words to get your message out.

620069ffirs.indd 8 5/3/10 2:52:30 PM

Contents

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  xi

1 Question Upon Question  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2 Tales from the Retail Front  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

3 The Challenges of Life as a Hacker  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97

4 Technology  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

5 The Magic of the Corporate World  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

6 Our Biggest Fans  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

7 Behind the Walls. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  373

8 A Culture of Rebels  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 409

9 Strange Ramblings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  507

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 549

620069ftoc.indd 9 5/3/10 2:52:41 PM

620069flast.indd 10 5/3/10 2:52:51 PM

IntroductIon

A fter we put out The Best of 2600 — a nearly 900-page collection of some of our

best articles of the last quarter century — in 2008, you might be wondering

how another large book has come to be published so quickly. It’s an interesting story.

In fact, the answer might surprise and even enrage you.

The fact of the matter is that all of that material, informative and provocative as it

was, didn’t comprise a single character of what has always been the most popular part

of the magazine. Don’t get me wrong—the articles have always been our backbone, and

they have turned a great number of heads and caused a fair amount of whiplash over

the years. We would be nothing without them. They endure to this day, and so much

of our technology—and even bits of our society — has been irrevocably changed as a

result of their publication. But...there’s more. A rather significant amount, actually.

Any decent magazine has a variety of sections and/or features. And while articles

represent the semiformal presentations of our writers on their particular fields of

expertise, we had another somewhat more informal forum for those who just needed

to get something off their chest or ask a quick question. I refer to the letters of 2600.

I’m not entirely sure when we realized that this thing was taking on a life of its own.

It was definitely within our debut year (1984). In fact, our very first letter was pub-

lished in our second issue and, within a few months, letters to the editor had become

a regular feature. Over time, it became our biggest and most popular feature.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always liked the kind of discourse that’s attached

to the type of back and forth communication that you see in a letters section. As a

kid, reading the letters in the daily newspaper was a bit of a thrill. I actually got my

very first letter published in The New York Post at age eight! (I also collected baseball

cards to retain some air of normalcy among my peers.) It just seemed so magical

to be able to write something, have it appear on a piece of paper, and be read by an

untold number of people somewhere. That was really my first foot in the door of

publishing.

When I first got involved with computers in high school, I experienced the thrill of

letters to the editor on a totally different level. Our school had a “high speed” 300 baud

connection to a service called LIRICS Timesharing, a Board of Education operation

that ran minicomputers for schools throughout Long Island. Using printer termi-

nals (CRTs were still too new for us), we’d connect to the network and do various

620069flast.indd 11 5/3/10 2:52:51 PM

i ntroduc tionxii

things with the computer. Some kids learned programming in languages like Basic,

Fortran, and Algol. I liked to play games, use a “talk” program to send messages to

other terminals throughout the network, and explore the system itself. (All of those

activities were forbidden, incidentally. I found my niche almost instantly.) But there

was another feature that attracted me right away. It was the Reply program. You’d

first run the Question program by typing R QUESTION at the prompt (which, on the

DEC-10 computer we connected to, was a dot). We’d then be able to enter a question

for the system administrator. The question would be signed with the PPN (Project

Programmer Number) for the school or class—ours was [410,3] and, later, [410,4].

Every day you could type R REPLY at the prompt and see answers to questions from

the various PPNs around the island. If your question was actually replied to, you’d

experience a brief feeling of elation. There’s not even a hint of sarcasm here—we all

took this very seriously. It was great fun to see someone get flamed for asking a stupid

question, or to actually learn something interesting about the system through an

answer. While not technically an editor, the system administrator was like a god to

all of us. I found out later he was just another high school student from a different

district who really knew his stuff.

Also in that same year, I was involved in an underground newspaper for my high

school. It was called Revelations. In that publication, after becoming somewhat estab-

lished and developing a bit of a following within the school, we started our own letters

section. It was like a fantasy to see people actually start to write to us. Suddenly I was

one of the people in the position of answering the questions, and not just someone

hoping to get answered myself. The more we did this, the more people wrote in. It

felt great.

All the while, I was always writing letters to various newspapers and magazines,

everything from the local papers to The New York Times and Newsweek. Sometimes

I’d write in to radio programs (yeah, you used to be able to do that) and hear my letter

get read over the air. So few people apparently took the time to do this that it increased

the chances of those who actually went to the trouble of putting their thoughts on

paper. I never saw this illustrated better than the time in college when I decided I was

opposed to the local school budget being passed and wrote a letter to The Three Village

Herald, our weekly paper at the time, to express my thoughts. My letter was actually

in reply to an editorial of theirs that supported the budget. In addition to printing

my letter, they wrote a new editorial in that issue saying they were now convinced,

as a result of my letter, that the budget should be defeated! And the next week it was.

If I had ever doubted the power of the pen, those days were forever gone.

620069flast.indd 12 5/3/10 2:52:51 PM

i ntroduc tion xiii

It shouldn’t be very surprising then, that after getting involved in the launch of

2600, my passion for this sort of thing would lead to more letters getting published,

along with a great deal of back-and-forth with the readers. Only in the world of hack-

ers, the enthusiasm was multiplied about tenfold. Everyone loved to write in and,

in all our years of publishing, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t absolutely thrilled

when their submissions were chosen for publication. There’s just something magical

about the whole process that continues to the present.

As the years went on, the letters became the most popular part of the magazine,

partly because of the MTV generation’s short attention span, but mostly because they

gave the reader interesting dialogue and fun facts. If you knew a particularly weird

phone number that you wanted to share, the letters page was more than happy to

oblige. If you had a question about a computer system or needed to know how phone

phreaks operated a particular function of the telephone network, odds were you

would get an answer by writing a letter to 2600. Sometimes, of course, you would get

a somewhat sarcastic reply, particularly if the question came across as overly naive or

laced with criminal intent. We were there to inform, but also to entertain. We tried

never to be cruel or closed off to other people’s perspectives. But we also displayed

a healthy cynicism of any “facts” we were told, and we encouraged people to always

question everything they heard.

Our attitude got a lot of people angry. Over the years, we’ve been accused of nearly

every offense imaginable: being too political, too technical, not enough of either, left-

wing, right-wing, protecting criminals, helping the government, etc., etc. It was a

rush. If we were able to get so many different people angry at us for so many distinct

reasons, we had to be on to something. We had great fun veering into topics that

had absolutely nothing to do with hacking, including debating the proper names of

controversial countries, 9/11 conspiracies, gun control, wars, history, even time travel.

It all involved questioning beliefs and applying a default amount of skepticism to any

topic. The hacker attitude melded very nicely with this means of communication.

Sometimes, people used the letters pages to simply gripe about something going on

in their lives, most always related in some way to hacking or technological clueless-

ness. It was really important to know that we filled that particular need in our culture,

because most of the time it’s all about getting information out to people and making

sure that someone hears your despair and frustration. Kids who got busted by their

schools for opening a browser on the class computer, people arrested and sent away

for ridiculously trivial crimes, whistleblowers needing an audience to hear about a

company’s transgressions involving privacy violations...there were just so many places

in people’s lives where we were needed to simply listen—or to offer advice.

620069flast.indd 13 5/3/10 2:52:51 PM