Pardon the UTF-8 post. The post below is something I wrote a long
time ago for cat (baud.baby). Screwtape's recent reading of my 2022
gopher post on warez made me remember this one, as it bring up some
similar nostalgic feelings, so I figured it's probably time I share
this one with everyone. It's not as well written as the warez story,
as it wasn't really intended for public consumption, and as such, it
is also a bit long-winded, but i hope someone gets a chuckle out of
it regardless. This whole thing was in response to cat's super duper
cool Hackers card game, which you should most definitively check out
over at baud.baby.
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▁▃▆▆▇▆▆▆▆▆▄▁ ┓
▗▆█████████████▆╸▃▁
a ▗████████████████▇█▁
_ _ _ __ ▐█████████▛▀▔▅▅▜███▀▙ ▁
|_| /\ / |/|_|_)(_ ▝████████▙▅█▛▀▀▀███▙██▀▜▖
| |/--\\_|\|_| \__) ▂▄▅▄▛███▛▃▄▆▆██████▙██▎
▖▀▀▔▄▟█████████████████▌
story █▆▆▇████████████████▉▀█▘
▜████████▜██████████▉▂▔ ╺
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ▜████▙▅▅█▛▀▀████████▌ ╻
▜████▛▔▂▄━╸▃███████▉▁
We've all done some dumb shit as ▍▗▆▆▅▅▄▂▂▁▀███▁ ▔▀▄▇█████████▏▜▆▄▁
teenagers - especially those of ╸ ▔▀▀▜▜▄▀▀▚ ▀███████████▛██▕▛ ▝█
us who were teenagers back when ▁ ▄▂▁▁▔▁▁ ▜██████▛▀▔▐▛▔▟▏ ▐▋
the internet was still young and ▖█▜█▚██▎▀▘ ▔▔▔▔▔ ▀ ▕▛
cracking stuff was more about ▕▆▛▄▛▀ ▖ ▔
learning, pulling pranks, and ▂▂▂▃▃▅▖▅▖╸
looking l337 with your friends ████▛▀┻▀▘ ╺
than it was about cybercrime and ████▘ ╶ ▜▄
extracting money from people. ▀▀▔▔ ▝▀
It was a more civilized time, and like the internet itself, the old
scene got ruined when money got involved. That, and most of us had
to get real jobs, which is pretty fucking lame, haha - For some
reason, your super cool card game got me thinking - what was the
most hackers-movie like moment in my life. There was one, albeit not
quite as spectacular, but it's more about the vibe, and thus only
really makes sense in the context of the time, because most of my
computing experiences in the 90's had that vibe. So here's a few
loosly connected memories that try and capture the hackers vibe. I
apologise in advance if this sucks hahaha - I never was good at
writing,... or talking.... words!
Prelude:
As a six or seven year old kid, I loved visiting my uncle. My uncle
did some work related to video/photo or something at the time, and
he had a really awesome setup with a commodore 64 and a few other
machines, I was too young to know which, and several monitors, and a
few of those tiny crt production monitors. It looked like a magical
wonderland. He let me play galaga on the c=64 using a little custom
made joystick. The joystick was of transparent plastic material, and
had a few switches soldered on a pcb - the fact that he could make
his own input device like that immediately made me want to learn how
to do the same. Eventually, some years later, he passed the c=64 and
little joystick to me. I was around 9 or 10 at the time, and I had
figured out that the c=64 joystick port really just lets you short 2
pins and it will detect this as one of the directions the stick is
pointing. Immediately, I realized I could use this for other stuff,
so, I soldered some long wires to it and attached a switch to the
door of my room and used it as a door alarm. (I had learned some
basic by then, from the c64 manual, some magazines, and reading the
source code to some games I would play. ) (Yes, my parents let me
play with soldering irons as a young kid. - That's just how things
were back then where I grew up I guess).
In any event,... my grandfather had a radio and TV repair business
for most of his adult life, all the way up until he retired. He was
very knowledgeable when it came to electronics, and one day,
probably on some sort of holiday - he gave me one of those electro-
kits where you attach wires to springs. It looked like it was from
the 70's or so --
*** does some googling - it was this exact one:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/324877383980 ***
-- and needless to say, I wanted to learn all that stuff too! all
of this set in motion the path of what was to come.
Sk001 sux:
Me, 12 years old - in the Belgian sk00L-system, at 12 years old is
when you move on from basic education into something somewhat more
specialized, and it is the first time you have to pick some sort of
direction you want to go in. There's basically these options:
* ASO - general secondary education
* TSO - technical secondary education
* BSO - trade school
* KSO - art school
The school my grandfather went to, still existed at the time (now it
doesn't, and it's actually an abandoned property, in the middle of a
big city (Ghent), yet also taken over by nature/weeds - it actually
seems like it'd be a fun place to urbex - some parts of it got re-
purposed as artist studio's at least / but it's wild and weird to
see a big complex of several buildings where you spent so much time
in get taken over by nature - makes you feel kinda old haha) - there
was no question about it, I wanted to go to the same place he did.
Schools had these 'open house' days where you could come and visit
and check out what it's like there. I went to one of those and was
blown away. They had labs,... a lot of them... and electronics kits
that made mine look like a piece of shit. I spend a few hours messin
with one of them, it was similar to the spring thing, but with logic
chips, and digital displays - it was pretty cool. They also had a
radio/tv lab that was all dark except for the glow of many crt's and
blinkenlights - but then there was the computer lab. The demo's they
had running there were stuff that could have been some of the best
of the demoscene. In one demo, they had a 3d version of the school
with the camera flying through it - you have to remember, this was
in the early/mid-90's, on 386 pc's, in dos - I spoke to the dude
that wrote it, and he explained how he had to write the entire thing
in turbo pascal, but it pretty much became all assembly. At that
point, this place looked like heaven, and I wanted to go there no
matter what. - one glitch - this school was a TSO school. When
my grandfather went there, the {A,T,B,K}SO distinction didn't exist
yet. This was a problem because kids don't normally go to TSO first.
It's considered "lesser" than ASO. Kids normally start in ASO, and
if they fail/suck, they drop down to TSO, if they suck there too,
then they go to BSO (or KSO) - at least that was the really dumb way
society looked at the whole thing. - But I didn't care, fuck it,
I wanted to go there.
- was - I - dissapointed -
The whole thing ended up a long hellish nightmare. None of the
things demo'd during the demo day were things I got to mess with
duing my time there. And because most of the kids there were
basically ASO rejects, a lot of them were little rough around the
edges to say the least. I was bullied relentlessly, pretty much my
entire time there, beaten up, threatened with a knife to my throat,
and went to school with some kids that aspired to be criminals or
terrorists (not kidding, some of the turkish kids wanted to join or
were already in the grey wolves, a turkish ultra-nationalistic far-
right group) - it was very very rough. And I was just a geek that
wanted to mess with computers man - At the end of the 4th grade
(which is when you're like 16-17 years old typically) we were
supposed to choose again, and enter 5th grade in a more specialized
direction - this is where you pick to go do IT, or business, or what
ever else) - of course I wanted to go do IT - I wanted to make them
sweet demo's! Learn assembly, learn C++ ; Alas, the school wanted to
thwart me again, because the teachers knew I wanted to go do IT in
the following year. You see, some of the teachers actually partook
in some of the bullying - some of them were young, and believe it or
not, wanted to be popular teachers too. - one day - our normal maths
teacher was going to sub for our physics teacher, and he was doing a
thing on optics - I got excited, because I loved that shit - I had a
big box full of lenses of all kinds that my uncle gave to me when he
stopped doing his movie/photo stuff - I wanted to make lasers and
shit. Anyway, I brought this box for the class for the teacher to
use, he never gave it back. Then he blatently told the other kids
that I was never going to see that again, because they are worth
some money. So yeah - cool - teach' stole from me. Nice. Needless to
say, all this made me lose interest in school pretty fast, and while
I generally got decent grades, math is just something I always
sucked at - and at the end of my 4th year, I just didn't get enough
points to move on to the next grade - Now, normally when this
happens, the teachers gather in some sort of council, called
'deliberations', and then either give you an A, B, or C attest.
A: Basically means, you "passed", and can do anything.
B: Passed but with restrictions (usually this means a downgrade)
C: Didn't pass, you have to repeat your year without advancing.
I learned, (after the fact, because, one teacher actually liked me
and she was so appaled this happened she had to tell me about it)
that the maths teacher basically veto'd the entire vote and wanted
to prevent me from going to the IT class. So they gave me a B with
the restriction that I could do ANYTHING I wanted (including upgrade
to ASO) - except - take the IT class. His reasoning was that you
need to be good at maths to work with computers - even though they
all knew I knew more computery things than the teachers at that
point. So, being stubborn, I decided to repeat my year instead.
After doing the 4th grade at the school-from-hell for a second time
I was finally able to pass and do my 5th year in IT like I wanted.
( Repeating years was very common in Belgium, more than 50% of
students have to repeat a year at some point at that time. )
- was - i - dissapointed - again - (I'm going somewhere with this,
eventually - i promise)
I finally was where I wanted to be- 5IT... and maaaan, was it a very
weird experience. One one hand things got better. The bullying died
down for the most part, other than the occasional verbal remarks and
some people were actually starting to hang out with me because they
recognized I was good with computers. During one of the usual verbal
bully sessions in class, some other guys actually stood up for me
and basically told the other dudes to fuck off. This is where I met
madc0w and neur0t1k. Then there was also Christiano, and that other
fellow. Christiano was a very tall dude with frizzly-curly-rasta
hair - which is relevant because he looked cool, I thought, like a
proper cyberpunk. Little round sunglasses, old worn combat boots,
always carying some random device or piece of electronics, - He was
also good with computers. On one occasion I heard him talking to his
other friend (who's name escapes me), about perl, which was a big
thing at the time. And of course I had to join in on the convo, as I
also was quite fond of perl. We also talked about assembly - he was
quite good at it and thaught me a few things. Not a lot of things,
but just a few seeds that ended up allowing me to study more and
create awesome things. - Anyway, I was also into radio stuff, and at
some point, a local old dude I met via cb radio gave me an extra
kantronics modem he had - That thing was cool, I could connect my
shortwave radio to my computer with it, and receive and decode telex
text messages, which the press agencies at the time still used. I
showed this device to Christiano one day, and he was intrigued, and
invited me to demo it during one of their gatherings.... I'm like...
there's gatherings? - he explained that a bunch of local hackers
had regular meetings at this place, where they'd prepare talks and
share knowledge. He wanted me to give a talk on this modem. I'm like
wow - I got very nervous about the whole thing - I'm not good at
talking to people.... He showed me where it would go down and it was
the coolest place - a little bar that was almost spaceship-like
looking. Kind of like a mini version of the famous German c-base, in
Berlin, but not quite THAT cool, but still, to 18 year old me at the
time, this was wild. I had never interacted with people interested
in the same stuff like me in this way before. The talk itself went
down relatively uneventful as most people didn't show up like they
were supposed to. Yet I felt I was just shown a glimpse of a secret
underground of like-minded people. Christiano started a drum'n'base
band (which was kind of a new genre at the time) with his friend,
and kind of ... vanished... I've never seen him again.
- Back to madc0w and neur0t1k - they were in my class, and ever
since the day madc0w had first stood up for me, we became buds. We
started hanging out more and more. One day, we decided to have a lan
party at madc0w's place. I remember my mom driving me there, and
she's like, where the fuck does this guy live - this is like a fancy
h00d... turns out madc0w was the son of a rich french family. He
just never mentioned it. their house was huge. This house was
surrounded by pine trees, very picturesque... His grandfather lived
in with them, on the second story, which is also where his room was.
We all dragged our huge crt monitors up to his room, and basically
spend the entire night blasting Metallica (before they sold out) and
playing Quake. Good times were had.
BO2k & sub7 shenenigans:
- neurot1k and I would walk home from school to the tram station the
same way, every day. On the way to the tram station was a big media
store. They sold books, cd's, tv's, software, and had a few demo
computers set up connected to the internet. We'd always spend like
an hour (or more) on these public internet computers, since using
the net at home was rather expensive. Unlike madc0w, neur0t1k and I
came from a more modest nest (read: poor) - I lived with my mom, who
never really had a lot of money. - Good times were had in the store.
This is where we'd do some research, and download software, which we
would then store on floppies, to try out at home. Sometimes we'd go
to the library instead. Often we'd just sit there for hours waiting
for some downloads to complete, and we'd bring a big stack of disks.
Every single one of those floppies was like gold. An entire new
program to explore, often software that enabled us to create more
stuff. Being kids, we'd also download cracking tools, port scanners,
rats, and so on and so forth. Eventually internet got a little
cheaper (although still expensive, we'd pay by the minute connected,
as belgium never had flat-rates for dialup) - One day we discovered
BO2k (Back Orifice 2000), a popular rat at the time, with a built-in
scanner. We'd dial in, scan entire ip ranges for infected hosts, and
then see if they had any cool warez, games or whatever, and mostly
just pull pranks like opening the cd tray on people's computers.
Later we 'upgraded' to Sub7 which had some more features.
neur0t1k got involved with some warez scene folks, and would spend a
lot of time scanning for pubs - ftp servers with public write perms
which we could use as temporary bulk storage. We'd also scan for
Irix boxes, because they typically ran with vulnerable sendmail,
which was easily compromised, and as an added bonus, they tended to
have a lot of storage as well - which is really all we cared about.
More storage to store our gamez and moviez and music..
One day neur0t1k says on IRC he found this huge network of connected
computers while scanning with sub7 - not just some dude with an
infected client. This is a company who's entire network is infected.
I'm like, huh, neat - don't see that every day. We poked around a
bit, but eventually brushed it off, since there wasn't anything cool
on them like games. The next day I get a panicked phone call from
neur0t1k - SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT ALL DOWN! I'm like, wtf dude?! What
is going on? Calm down! He explains he's in BIG trouble over the
company "hack". He says some dude contacted him on ICQ, and knows
that he's been the one messing with their network, and that it would
be reported to the police. "The dude's a real hacker man, not some
skidd13 like us!" he says in a panicky voice. How the hell did he
get my ICQ number?! FUCK! FUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
At this point I start getting worried, since I had also briefly
connected to this network. Neither me nor neur0t1k ever scanned for
bo2k or sub7 infected hosts ever again. Thankfully, weeks went by, &
neither of us ever got in trouble over it. My best guess is that
neur0t1k grabbed a sub7 infected sub7 client (those were out in the
wild) and encountered someone who wanted to scare the shit out of him
:) Getting the ICQ number off of an infected client was one of the
sub7 features, so that'd make sense. Either way, the mystery of who
scared him is much more exciting than actually knowing what happened
there so I take solace in the fact that we'll never find out. :)
Anyway, that was my most hackers-like moment. I haven't heard from
neur0t1k or madc0w or christiano in over 20 years, but wherever they
are, I hope they are well.
epilogue: Let's not go to Camalot, it is a silly place.
Oh yeah - I forgot to mention why 5IT ended up being -weird- ... the
sub7 incident and new friends aside, it ended up being nothing I had
hoped for. I had spent all this effort enduring years of torture to
get to the point where I could take that class, and it turns out the
exact year I started, they changed the sylabus, got rid of C++ and
replaced it with fucking visual basic of all things - it being a
lame language aside, I was already familiar with it because, well,
it's easy - and because I took a vacation job coding some medical
software for a tiny local software company, which was all in VB and
MSSQL (the horror). The only interesting class was Pascal, which I
also already knew everything about. The pascal teacher didn't know
all that much and was basically just teaching from whatever her book
said. She wanted us to work on one final project, that was supposed
to last the entire school year. We could choose what the project
would be. Since we could pick anything, I decided to pick something
wild, and chose to write a window management type system for DOS.
( Basically, something that looks like Windows, but runs under DOS
and will launch applications and stuff from a GUI menu )
I had finished it in the first couple of weeks however. The entire
thing was pretty much written in assembly, which technically counts,
because pascal had the ASM statement. It was all 'green-texted', as
we'd call it - because everything between ASM... END; would turn
green in the TP7 text IDE. The teacher said it couldn't possibly
work when she saw the code (because assembly language was basically
gibberish to her) - I hit run, she saw it worked, she walked away.
Then she said I can basically just take a nap in class for the rest
of the year because she didn't have anything else for me. While that
sounded cool at first, having spent all this time, and endured all
this suffering to get into this class, only to spend it napping, is
not exactly my idea of a good use of time. I ended up dropping out,
and I transferred to art school instead, because at least that'd be
teaching me something new.
They made me repeat that year in art school too, because they said I
didn't have a background in it. L o l..... I took a year hiatus,
then tried again in a different art school but at that point I was
like a 20 year old in a class of 17 year olds, and basically gave up
and decided to call it quits. Best decision ever.
Learned way more by myself than I ever could in school, which I was
the biggest waste of time in my entire life.
Theeeeeeeeee end - I hope it was at least mildly entertaining! :)
