Hacker Perspective: Byeman
I work in the high tech industry. Despite my coworkers' backgrounds, they still view hackers as lazy millennials living in their parents' house not paying back their $150,000 in student loans who use their idle time to steal from those like us who sit in conference rooms all day wondering how we're going to make the next installment on our $150,000 mortgages.
I too am a hacker. I didn't always embrace the label. In fact, I often ran away from it. I've made a few trips around the sun having been around for most of the Nixon administration (if you're one of these who believes life begins at conception, I was around for the tail end of the Johnson years). Since the early-1980s, I understood the distinction between "hacker" and "criminal who uses technology to commit crimes." I was your typical self-conscious, high-strung, 13-year-old who looked down upon those comic book loving, Dungeons & Dragons playing, VIC-20 owners. They were the hackers, I was the normal one. Right? Thankfully, I outgrew that narrow definition and lately have been reflecting on my hacker roots. Why, you ask? I'll tell you why.
My career has taken me all over the world. I was sitting in an oyster bar in Guadalajara with some coworkers and one of them asked how I came to be so curious and knowledgeable about the world around me. Their inclination was to head to Chili's for familiar food and Coke. I insisted instead on us visiting that hole in the wall a few blocks away with damned good food and real tequila (not the crap found in most frat houses back home). I don't speak Spanish, but I don't care. I plow through my mangled español with gusto. It occurred to me amongst other talents that I'm also a language and travel hacker. An unfamiliar language and marginally different culture isn't something to avoid, but to crack apart, understand, and misuse until I finally master it. I really think the hacking skills I began to develop with I was five years old continue to serve me forty years later.
The day I turned five was a momentous event. Actually, it probably wasn't, but I was to start kindergarten shortly after and my grandparents saw fit to present me with a clock radio. Because, you know, it's never too early to get your firstborn grandson indoctrinated to the whole 9-to-5 routine. My birthday candles hadn't been lit before I took a screwdriver to it to figure out how it worked. How did this plastic box know to flip the mechanical number to the next value every minute? How did it magically go from 59 back to 00 and not 60? I saw a litany of gears and moving parts and figured out which ones controlled the minutes and which the hours. I also got introduced to what 120 VAC feels like. That evening I was still geeking out, this time with the radio. It was AM only and I started hearing stations that weren't there earlier in the day from cities I had never heard of. I found my dad's road atlas and discovered just how far away the likes of KRLD, KOMO, WSM, and WLS were from my house. This was my gateway drug. I started learning about electronics, I read how nighttime radio propagation works, and I became more methodical in my exploration. I figured out there was 10 kHz spacing. I would actively seek less active spots on the dial to see what I could pull out of the static. Besides igniting my curiosity, I believe this taught me at an early age to ask questions, go to the library, and learn, learn, learn.
My parents were generally supportive, but I did bump up against the parental proxy server which made me only more curious and more determined. I had come across my mom's pregnancy books and she didn't think an elementary aged boy should be reading about ovulation cycles or how a placenta works. This is a rather graphic example, but just goes to show to what lengths the system will go to so it can "protect" children from "harmful" knowledge. And I proved once again how fruitless such efforts are. Had my mom shrugged it off, I probably would have tossed the books back in the box. Instead, I became more determined than ever to learn.
It was after a move from the Deep South to the banks of the Ohio River where I found the previously unpacked box of my mom's books. I also found our "rabbit ears" TV antenna. We were in rural Appalachia where cable television was a necessity. I connected the antenna to an old telephone and could hear the Voice of America coming from the speaker. My parents were stunned and compared me to the professor on Gilligan's Island. I now know I didn't do anything spectacular. In reality, we weren't too far from VOA's Ohio transmitter site and any length of wire and speaker could pull in their signal. This lesson came home over ten years later while in college when I bought some new stereo speakers, only to learn when I moved them to opposite sides of the room, creating an antenna with the speaker wire, the local 50 kW flamethrower would bleed through.
Speaking of cable television and parental firewalls, we didn't have a cable box. Instead, various Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia TV stations were mapped to channels 2 through 13. This being the 1970s, we didn't have nice things like digital tuners. I noticed a flicker when I switched between channels 6 and 7. This intrigued me. I did not see that flicker between any other channels. I fiddled with the knob until it was halfway between 6 and 7 and I had a commercial-free movie. It was titled Eat My Dust! and starred Ron Howard whom I knew to be Richie Cunningham from Happy Days. There was a scene where a woman, who might have been naked, got into the shower with "Richie." This brought down the roof, my parents demanding to know what I was watching. I explained what I had done and I got a lecture about watching "inappropriate" shows and "stealing" HBO. Although it didn't stop them from watching Orca later that evening or asking me for help getting the knob just right between those two channels.
Hacking doesn't always involve technology. Despite the stereotype of the straight-A nerd, I liked sports. I just wasn't very good. The one sport I excelled at was running, so I joined my high school's cross country and track teams. By this point, I had a Tandy 1000 computer. I wrote a Pascal program and used it to log my times from races and I noticed quite a bit of variation from week-to-week. "Why?" my inner hacker asked. I started logging my splits, my training during the week, what I ate, how much I slept, etc. In my case, it was food that most affected my times. Since my meets were in the early evening, I left right from school on a bus and went to the venue. My mom would buy me canned food that I could eat there. This opened a plethora of sophomoric male jokes, but when I ate chili, my legs (or other parts) seemed to propel my body to the finish line the fastest. So that became my pre-race meal and it's what got me on the varsity team.
Even before my running days, I had "hacked" our county's bus system. I'm using the term "hacked" here loosely. I never made the buses run faster or cracked their fare system. We had since moved to Florida by this point and, as with most Sunbelt cities in the 1980s, it was car-centric. Even the state of Florida wasn't insane enough to license 12-year-olds to drive cars. Where I couldn't go on my bicycle, I was able to ride the bus. For a mere 25 cents, I could get anywhere in the county, which happened to be slightly larger than Rhode Island. To a preteen boy who really needed to get out and explore his space, figuring out the bus system was a godsend. I would ride to the mall to buy radio magazines (2600 didn't exist yet). I'd go to the airport to plane watch. I'd hang out downtown and visit cool shops we didn't have out in the suburbs. I developed a feel for college campuses by hanging out at USF. I was very tall for my age, well over six feet tall, so I passed as another baby-faced freshman. This gave me access to their library, student center, and bookstore.
Buses? Sure, they're boring. But it was my hacker mindset that sent me down that path. When I did eventually start driving, I already knew my city like the back of my hand. I was shocked that many of my friends didn't have life skills I took for granted like getting from point A to point B. Buying groceries. Talking to adults, asking questions, getting directions. Hacking is what separated me from being a lonely, homebound, angst-ridden, latchkey teen who would starting making bad decisions with respect to drugs and alcohol out of sheer boredom.
Those quarter bus rides started to add up, so I mowed lawns to fund my habit. I used to joke that a kid could make a lot of money in Florida cutting grass or selling it. I wanted to stay legal, so I used my dad's lawnmower. Like with all tools, the mower didn't always work when I needed it to work. I learned the hard way that taking the mower in for repair could eat up a week's pay and left me unable to mow lawns. So I disassembled the mower, engine and all, and figured out how it worked as I put it back together. If I could only have read women like I read power tools, I would have had it made. I could hear every unusual ping, feel every unexpected vibration, and knew what I had to do to go fix it.
<TMI> As an aside, I wasn't completely inept with women. They just happened to all be much older than me. Most of my teachers were women. From my years of acquiring "carnal" knowledge, I knew their moods would change in a predictable and periodic manner. I was at the time about 6' 3" and athletically built, and I was able to sweet talk certain teachers during certain weeks when my assignments weren't quite actually all the way done (or even started). I've told this to some women and all of them have told me I'm full of shit. But it did seem to work much of the time and taught me valuable lessons about social engineering. </TMI>
But my life as a hacker hasn't always been fun and games, nor has it always worked to my advantage. While in college, I worked for a major telephone company. Email was still an odd beast and many folks at work still relied on intra-office mail, paying someone to hand carry typewritten pieces of paper on company letterhead from one floor to another, only to have it read and thrown out in less than 20 seconds. I was already familiar with username@domain.tld and, when back at school, I started emailing my coworkers who actually used email. Overnight I was that college kid who hacked into their computers. Some of the saner heads prevailed after I demonstrated their email system wasn't internal, but rather connected to a global network. Soon I was the go to guy when someone needed to know how to email an old friend living in Italy. It's a good thing I never took a copy of 2600 to work with me.
After graduating from college, I started my first "real" job. Throughout college, I used UNIX almost exclusively and it was a shock to be thrown onto something as archaic as Windows 3.1. I found a sys admin and appealed to his ego by praising all that is UNIX and getting an account on "his" system. It took me no time at all to find the /etc/hosts file, giving me the names of various servers to go explore. Most allowed anonymous FTP access, even from outside the company's network. I found an unencrypted text file containing the name, address, date of birth, Social Security Number, employee number, and rate of pay of every employee. I reported this and was immediately thanked and given a corner office with a window. Oh, who am I kidding? I was accused of "hacking" and told I would lose my UNIX account. My account didn't go away until that machine was decommissioned years later. And as for the file of employee records, it continued to be available and was regularly updated. Nothing else happened to me, but this shows once again (as discussed between these covers every single issue) that it's those who expose the truth who find themselves on the receiving end of management's anger, not the incompetents who made the mistake in the first place.
No, I never accessed Pentagon computers. I never changed grades or stole credit card numbers. My hacking was far more mundane, but when I look back at it I realize it has made my life much more interesting and has made me a better problem solver and, best of all, a better person.
If you're reading this and you're young enough to be my daughter or my son, don't wait for someone to give you permission to learn. Today, most of you carry the world's knowledge in a palm-sized piece of metal, glass, and silicon. Enter the make and model of your microwave oven so you can learn how it works. Find a way to get to a local college. See if you can sit in on classes. Watch their website for any seminars or guest lecturers who might impart knowledge you know you want. Start talking to adults. I don't mean the ones who drive windowless vans with "free candy" handpainted on the side, but your parents' friends, neighbors, teachers. While we might not look the part, many of us are hackers at heart and would enjoy passing on our knowledge.
The author is still a reluctant hacker working in the manufacturing industry and still continuing to travel the world. When he's not working his day job, you'll likely find him at home reading, hiking Austin's trails, or catching Pokemon with his son.