Hacker Perspective: metaknight
We waited for the clock to signal the end of detention.
The second hand moved as though it weighed ten stone three. This being the early nineties, security cameras and guards were not yet a paranoid fixation of high school administration. So when our period of enforced life wasting expired, we dispensed ourselves from the tomb with alacrity. Out of the bunch, my friend Richie and I were on a mission. Our destination: the library.
We were free to roam the halls of the otherwise empty school, dodging only a few administrators. Earlier that day, Rich gave me a 3.5-inch disk covered in black Sharpie and silver paint marker to hold. We were going to install its viral contents into the library computers. At this time, my only experience with computers was back in second grade (circa 1985) in a room filled with tan behemoths and screens covered in green text of yesterday's lore (what kind of computers?).
Anticlimactically, we snuck into the darkened library - a place I'd only been a few times in four years - and turned on the two computers (couldn't tell you what type - still off my radar) and Rich went about injecting whatever virus was on the disk. I later found out that it rendered the machines permanently unusable. Back then I believed such things. I had the disk in my possession for a few years after that, never used it (didn't have a computer until 1999), and ended up throwing it away.
Rich was also responsible for exposing me to two other interesting things, the first being the infamous "2600 box." In the cafeteria was a payphone. He would put the little speaker of the box to the microphone of the receiver, hit the 9 button on the box if I'm not mistaken (superimposed memory?), giving us tons of credits to call someone he knew out in California.
He also taught me that on any payphone you could make it call itself, ringing endlessly until someone picked it up. I forget the three numbers used - something like 259 or whatever. In any case, one would get the dial tone, dial the three numbers, hang up the phone, pick it up for half a second, and then leave it hung up. The phone would then ring forever. This was endless fun in public places when you're a group of teens hellbent on causing trouble. "Hello... helloooo!?" Watching people get annoyed at no answer was hysterical. Redial and repeat.
I am metaknight and I am a hacker.
Yes, I am named after the enemy character in Kirby. My sword is usually an USB drive and my armor is anonymity. Metadata is my energy source. I explore networks like one would explore a Castlevania map, though by nature I am an audio engineer. If you met me, you would think this description juxtapose. (Well, perhaps not the readers of this zine.)
So many people not in the know either associate hackers with criminals, as they are routinely trained to do by mass media, or with skinny, glass wearing geeks. Well, I used to think that hackers were just nerdy types. Only after having my ignorance of the proper definition removed, as is often the effect of education, did I come to have a broader understanding of what hacker means.
The above mentioned mischief with Rich does nothing to illustrate what a hacker is per se, but they were important seeds that were planted in my head that would significantly contribute to who I am today and how I've come to handle situations of varying degree with a hacker's mindset. I was part of a different group of kids in school. I did not spend very much time with Rich before we drifted apart, and since then I have never seen him again.
I come from a background with no money, divorced parents with a family history of alcoholism, depression, and suicides. I suffer from the on/off switch that suicidal thinking is, a switch that randomly does what it wants, regardless of what mood I'm in. After moving around from place to place until I was 13, I went to live at my rich uncle's house - a poor kid living in a rich neighborhood. Around the time of the library virus, I was transitioning from wigger to death metal kid - wearing Cannibal Corpse t-shirts with Karl Kani jeans - it just doesn't look right. Constantly being made fun of builds a strong will to avoid people and opens up one's self to his own creativity, along with a combination of having no money and having a stoner father that you have no relationship with - even enough to get a ride to any friend's house miles away.
In my wiggerdom, I was pseudo-mixing nineties hip-hop records, making "mix tapes" with a setup I hacked together. Actually, it's not really at all an impressive hack, but it started me on my trek to bigger things. Anyway, I had to simulate the effect of two records going back and forth, something I figured out by listening to the way Funkmaster Flex mixed on the radio, not from someone telling me that that's how it's done. I had one of those turntable-cassette deck-8-track combo units. So I would dub the record onto a cassette tape, run it, and rewind it in the player while using the modeselektor (wink) to switch back and forth between the record and the tape white mixing the record, simulating the sound of two records. With practice, I was able to nail the tempo and not ruin the mix. I used loose-leaf paper as a record slip. I lined out the mix to the line-in on my favorite Panasonic boombox and recorded mix tapes for people at school, which were admittedly terrible. Eventually I got a Gemini PMX-2500 4-channel mixer, a Sony SL-D2 direct-drive turntable and a Technics 1200 from a friend - just in time to make a musical transition that led to my disinterest in rap.
I started to learn bass and guitar. Within six months, I learned how to play both well enough from playing along with my new favorite bands that I was starting to write my own material. I needed a way to record it, though. I wasn't able to form a band because I wasn't good enough to play with my amazing friends. I did not have a consistent ride to get anywhere anyway, and I couldn't afford to get bigger, better equipment in order to play live. Did I mention that I was playing death metal? No one wants to do that. It was time to hack together something.
I did not know what a 4-track was yet, but I knew I could make use of the mixer and the tape decks somehow. I connected the guitar to the distortion pedal, and its 1/4-inch cable to channel 1 of the mixer and recorded the first guitar, panned left into the boombox. Then I took that tape, put it into the tape player on the turntable unit, ran it through channel 1 of the mixer while running a second guitar through channel 2, panned right into the boombox. Then I took that tape, switched it with the other again, and ran it through the mixer while recording bass. Now I had a full song with two guitars and a bass. But I did not have a drum set yet.
In my uncle's living room (the one no one actually sits in) was a Yamaha Clavinova electronic piano that had other instruments including drums in it. I took my setup into that room and ran a guitar cable from the piano's headphone jack into the mixer and dubbed drums into the mix. Bam! Now it sounded like an actual song. I took it all back to my room and overdubbed some terrible growls through a cheap ten dollar Realistic microphone from RadioShack. I repeated this songwriting/recording process until I had a six song demo - recorded on my infinite track setup. I was ecstatic! I had never spoken the words "4-track," "recording studio," or "guitar lessons" in my life before this time. I instinctively knew to measure the j-card of a factory produced cassette, cut paper to size, and draw a band logo on it. Then I glued pictures to it, and ran off copies in the school's library copy machine, then distributed some of the finished demos to my friends. I was asked what band it was and when I said that I had done it all, they did not believe me. Some thought it was terrible and to hear it in comparison with what I can make today, it is embarrassing. But that's not the point. I consider this story a prime representation of the hacker's mindset."But there was no computer involved!" the uninitiated would decree. Ah, but there was - the one we're all born with. For some it's turned on, for others it's not.
In writing this article, I thought I would use computer-related examples as illustrations. But when I rewound my life reel to the beginning of my hacking, there weren't yet any computers, and that seemed nostalgic and less pretentious as subject matter. I became a hacker out of a necessity to accomplish tasks with limited resources. I had to make things work that were intended for other purposes. Hackers aren't confined to computers.
Still high school era, I was suspended for a week out of school when I was accused of stealing another student's car with a group of friends. We all took turns driving it, neutral dropping it, etc. Actually, the reader will laugh. It was the aforementioned Rich's Cougar, long after we had drifted apart. I did not drive the car off of school grounds, so I did not steal it. The dean was particularly nasty, using colorful language forbidden towards students when addressing their misdeeds. Case in point: I needed to highlight both this and my argument of innocence to absolve myself from punishment by both the school and my apathetic, short-tempered father. I decided to rig up a way to record a phone call with the dean.
While on suspension and home alone, I experimented with ways to record phone calls. Using the Realistic microphone made too much feedback in the speakers and I needed more than two hands to accomplish being able to hear and record simultaneously. The phone was an old tan thing with push buttons and had a receiver attached with the usual slinky wire (real technical descriptions, I know) that sat on two buttons each in their own U-shaped holder. I rigged up the receiver in a way that it was upside down on the base and so I would only have to tilt it to get the dial tone. I took a pair of over the ear Pioneer headphones, disconnected one side from the headband, and rubber banded it to the receiver, screwed on the 1/4-inch adapter to its plug, jacked in to the mixer, hit record on my boombox, and called the school.
(For those who don't know, microphones and headphones are essentially the same thing, formatted for different applications; a small speaker in a headphone will act as a microphone when plugged into a mic input, but you'd blow a microphone trying to pump audio through it.)
I pretended to be someone else when I called the school in order to get the dean on the phone, which probably wasn't necessary, but still fun anyway. The dean answered the phone. I had to bait him past his apprehension of my calling him in order to argue something that, in his eyes, I was clearly guilty of doing. In defining my non-participation in the initial theft of the car, his temper was aroused and out came the venomous language, all perfectly captured on a 60 minute TDK cassette. This worked wonders for getting him reprimanded and suspended himself, but did nothing to get me out of trouble. As a result, I ended up missing out performing in the only high school play I ever would have acted in (Guys and Dolls), though my name remained on the printed rosters, and since my character ironically did a phone call in the play, something that would have made me invisible to the crowd anyway, I still received compliments on my stellar performance by people unaware of my absence. Kudos to Vas500 for covering that role. Eventually, I went on to record some hilarious prank call tapes by calling the help wanted.
I'm purposely sticking with high school era stories for a reason. The younger readers and newcomers to hacking will have more enthusiasm and open-mindedness than us old seasoned pros. At the same time, it's something I wanted to touch on in order to show that hackers don't just do computers, and to appeal to the part of us all when this type of exploring and learning was new and fresh, before we called it hacking. I also wanted to represent the lot of us that, even though we mean well in our explorations, are prone to causing trouble.
This story could mirror computers in the sense of it exposing user information and security issues: I had gotten a new tape recorder with a mic input and level control. I took the Pioneer headphones and attached them to the mic input, put another set of headphones in my ears, pressed record, play, and pause all together so that I could hear what was happening without wasting tape space, and turned the mic level and headphone volume all the way up. I then took the over the ear cup headphone acting as the mic and placed it next to the number dial on my locker at school, spun the dial three times to the right then slowly left until I hit the first number, studying the sound it made - a minute "tick" - made when you just miss the number, not stop on it. I thought of this idea after seeing one of the locks disassembled and studying how it worked. Once I knew the sound I wanted, I moved on to the locker next to mine and within a few minutes had it open.
You may be wondering how I had the chance to do this and also have perfectly quiet conditions in a school. My locker was right across the hall from the room used for detention. When we are all dismissed, the small hallway in a remote corner of the building stays lonely until the next day. Most of my friends and I got detention on purpose just so we could all hang out together after school and roam the grounds.
Anyway, I went back a bunch of times and wrote down the combinations to all the lockers in that little hallway, about 40 or so. Then I went back with a tagging marker and wrote all of the combinations on each of the lockers, luckily never getting caught (I kept my locker empty of contents and wrote its combination as well - using another locker upstairs to keep my stuff in). I witnessed the custodians installing new locks the next week. They installed a patch without addressing the underlying cause of the issue, leaving it open to a repeat. The motivation for all this ridiculous work was that someone had gone in my locker and stolen my Starter jacket, and also because I just wanted to see if I could get into all of them!
One more! Our favorite: social engineering. My home life until school ended was a never-ending atrocity - yes, in the rich quaint neighborhood.
(Kids: don't do what I am about to write, especially now that cameras are small enough to fit in your pee hole and located every three feet to capture everything everyone is doing. You're also more likely to face legal recourse for doing what you're about to read in this era of paranoid security. If you end up in the Feds, there is no room to maneuver out of doing time.)
Sometimes I just needed to not be home - or at school. My neighbor and BFF Vas500 had an alarm on his house. Of course, they wouldn't tell me the code, so I wrote down the alarm company's phone number (conveniently written on a Post-It next to their phone) for later reference. One day at school, I decided I wanted to cut half the day. So I went to the phone in the cafeteria (without Rich's box), called the alarm company, told the woman that answered that I'm calling from school, about to have an early dismissal, that I couldn't reach my mom, and that I don't remember the alarm code. She asked me my full name and birthday, along with a million other questions - so I gave my friend's information. She gave me a four-digit code and also the word that you use on the phone with the alarm company when they call you in the event that you'd accidentally set the alarm off yourself while at home. Social engineered!
My friend kept his house key in his backpack in his locker, which I remembered the combination to after looking over his shoulder one day as he opened it (yet I did not ever see him entering the alarm code!). I got the key and walked the half hour home, opened the door to his house (because I knew when his parents were not home), turned off the alarm, made a can of Chef Boyardee, and watched TV up in his room. When he returned home, I timely opened the door to greet him. Because obviously I'm a moron, I did not understand how he could have been pissed. He did not tell his parents about this, but I got in serious trouble with them anyway. You can't wait to know how.
The Chef Boyardee can that I ate I rinsed and put in the garbage. The bowl I used was washed and returned. However, the can should have gone in the brown paper bag that his mother (meticulous with everything) set up for recycling. She came home and found it in the wrong bag - and then out it came about what happened. Because I did not ever tell my friend that I had also made food, he must have been annoyed enough to spill the beans. You see? One little mistake and it's in trouble you get.
I obviously never got that because I'm writing this from jail years later fighting a case that, for once, I'm not actually guilty of (inmates are some true hackers - article in the works). I could fill a large book with all the stories of things I did and got away with. There's a rebel in all of us. The line between hacker and mischief for me is a slight shade of gray. More times than not, I'm just trying to get into or at something just to see if I can do it, but I have a bad habit of trying to get away with too much.
It's important that some of you - the ones who look in these pages because you want free money, want revenge on someone's Facebook account, or ways to break laws in secret - read this perspective. When you cross lines for personal gain - i.e., break into things to get money, someone's identity, etc. - you are then a criminal. I just happen to be a hacker with criminal tendencies. I'm not purposely trying to break any laws.
If we all were able to be conscious of our ability to resourcefully alter the use of things to accomplish a task of any kind, socially or physically, we would all recognize our own capabilities as born hackers, and perceive difficulty and adversity as challenges instead of excuses. As a direct byproduct, the misperceptions of hackers as represented by news and news publications, politicians, and victims of identity theft alike, would be replaced with a knowledgeable differentiation between criminal with hacker capabilities and hacker.
There should be groups one could attend once or more, even in schools, where qualities of a hacker are revealed and nurtured within the attendees who otherwise have no experience. By citing stories for a group, as done here, it would trigger stories of their own, their brains automatically parsing their history to locate a relevant experience to label "qualifies as a hack." Then, by drawing the inference to creative problem solving - not problem causing - skills, this would unveil a revelation in that person which would facilitate the building of a meaningful personal view of one's self as a hacker, an effect that is automatically positive and forwards a desire to explore life with this "new" gift of capability. By drawing out something in someone that gives them an opportunity to parade it to other people, you create fuel for them to advance their self-image.
One could worry that with such an influx of new "hackers," the word "hacker" would be synonymous with "hipster" in its overuse, popularized by an over-saturated field of inexperienced individuals romping around under a false pretense of the sobriquet. But leave judgment and elitism aside and clean up the scene first, no? Now we have only the definition of hacker as criminal to outsiders. To those in the know, even they are unaware that one in four hackers is a snitch. That's a federal statistic from case law!
We all feel we lose something of our exclusivity when too many people like or do the same things as us, especially if they start term dropping, like when you're at a show and groups of people are just band name dropping. I hate that.
What other way to gain people an understanding of who and what we all are then if not to draw them into our world; inviting them to the possibility of discovering their inherent and creative flow as born hackers?
Hacker -n. - a person who possesses and uses instinctively creative and unorthodox means to both explore his surroundings and the contents therein, and improve upon them.
Explore. Investigate. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Hack the future! Skal!