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BC-APN--Hackers-I, ADV 29-3 Takes,1071
$Adv29
AGENCIES AND RADIO OUT
For Release Sunday, Jan. 29
From AP Newsfeatures
(APN SUNDAY ILLUSTRATIONS: Mailed print subscribers get 1 b&w photo.
ColorFoto subscribers get 1 35mm slide.)
    
    EDITOR'S NOTE - Guardians of the nation's linked computer networks
were shaken up last year by a now-famous ''virus.'' It was spawned
within the narrow, and to outsiders mysterious, world of hackers.
What's it like, this esoteric subculture? Occasional mischief
notwithstanding, could it be a national treasure? A reporter opens
the computer file on the prodigies of the terminal. First of three
articles.
    
By SID MOODY
AP Newsfeatures Writer
    SUBJECT FILE: Hackers. Computer hackers.
    DEFINE: Misperceived as an electronic subculture of humans who
noodle at computers 40 hours a day - subsist on Cokes and takeout
Chinese food - typically young, smart males who rarely become nose
guards - often found at schools whose initials end in 'T' for Tech -
nerds with acne who devise fiendish booby traps to blow the fuses of
the republic's vital computer systems.
    ENTER: Caution. Don't believe everything you read. Hackers are more
likely a national treasure.
    ---
    Seated at a terminal in the computer lab at the University of
California-Berkeley, Jef (one 'f' has been sacrificed for aesthetic
purity) Poskanzer, a longhair of 30 years, is poised like Vladimir
Horowitz about to bring magic from a keyboard. 
    Plockety-plock-plock. Suddenly on the screen appears a detailed
portrait of the Earth's moon. Every 20 minutes throughout the 28-day
lunar cycle the portrait changes to update the sunlight's progression
from fingernail sliver to complete illumination at full moon. Jef
programmed the computer to do this during several nights when the
machines usually doze.
    Neat.
    But why did Jef do this? For about the same reasons that
Michelangelo painted ceilings, Columbus went sailing or
Hillary-Tenzing worried up the ice of Mount Everest.
    ''What use is a newborn baby?'' replied Ben Franklin when a
rain-soaked fellow onlooker asked him in Paris in 1783 what possible
purpose Jacques-Alexandre-Cesar Charles could have had in mind in
launching a huge balloon up into the clouds.
    Poskanzer's moon is an intellectual descendant of that balloon and
is, in the purest sense of the term, a hack.
    ---
    Hacking can be called an attitude toward problem solving, a human
urge to outwit conventional wisdom, an exploration of limits, not
always absent - whimsy. 
    When Caltech students at the 1961 Rose Bowl rearranged the code of
the cheering section's half-time show so their synchronized cards
spelled ''CALTECH'' instead of ''HUSKIES'' for the University of
Washington, then spelled Huskies backward, this was a hack.
    Since Robert Morris, a 23-year-old Cornell grad student, was
strongly suspected of planting a ''virus'' last fall - actually a
''worm'' but don't bother your head about the distinction - that gave
6,000 interconnected computers electronic hits, hacking has become a
nasty word. Should it be?
    According to Steven Levy, the Herodotus of hacking in his estimable
history, ''Hackers,'' the word stems from MIT at the dawn of the
computer age in the late '50s. The incubator was the Tech Model
Railroad Club.
    In The Real World, defined by ''The Hacker's Dictionary'' as a place
whose inhabitants wear ties and are thought of as ''not unlike
deceased persons,'' hacking was how Henry VIII solved his marital
dissonances or what inept golfers or unfelicitous writers do. 
    At MIT, where ingenious students had long since advanced from
reassembling Model A Fords in a professor's room, hacking at the
Railroad Club meant creating something of great panache and ingenuity
without necessarily an ultimate utility. Circuits could be rewired
not to make the tiny trains run on time, but to make them do it more
elegantly.
    When computers began showing up on campus, some railroaders were
immediately drawn to them like moths to a diode. They set behavior
patterns which abide. They lived by night when computers were idle,
neglected families, food, studies, sunlight, soap. The last may
account for the scarcity of female hackers.
    Early on, hackers, marked more by preoccupation than misogyny,
ignored girls because they considered them unprogrammable. Poskanzer,
however, backpacks, plays soccer and admits he has a girl.
    ---
    Gifted children have long been prodigies in music and math. Add,
now, computers.
    ''The young don't know there are walls,'' says Glenn Tenney who is
39, still hacks but knows he must buy foodstuffs in The Real World.
''It's easier to spend 40 hours a day hacking when you're a kid than
when you're middle-aged.''
    A hacking prodigy can be called, often unjustly, a nerd.
    The source of the term nerd is obscure. In a very informal poll, the
only characteristic a majority agreed on was that nerds usually wear
plastic pencil holders in their shirt pockets.
    In a lacrosse game, this writer once faced off against an MIT
defenseman whose stick was twice the length of mine. Rather than
snarl that he'd split my skull the next time the ref wasn't looking,
this student engineer observed:
    ''Quite a disparity in leverage, isn't it?''
    The remark was probably nerdistic.
    ---
    The hacking instinct in the years B.C. - before computers - might
have expressed itself in the souping of hot rods. But this is dirty
work. Computing is clean. There's a whole world at your fingertips.
You don't have to risk rejection when the neighborhood gang chooses
up sides for one o' cat.
    ''Years ago these kids would have been tipping over decrepit barns
or the like,'' says Don Parker, an authority on computer crime at SRI
International in Menlo Park, Calif., and once an expert in barn
demolition. His childhood mates would almost saw through the supports
of an abandoned barn, tie on ropes, then collapse the structure
before the startled eyes of the owner roused from his bed by the
adolescent clamor. Delinquency, perhaps, but with a flair toward a
hack.
    ''Most kid hackers are not socially skilled,'' says Dave Flory.
''They socialize through the computer.''
    ''It's a way to nudge the system, impress your friends, say, 'Here I
am,' '' says Tom Mandel, a hacker who also wears a tie in The Real
World as a futurist at a Silicon Valley think tank.
    Dave Flory tracks down computer malfeasance as head of the fraud
squad for the San Jose police. Although 50, he hacks in his spare
time but was not amused when someone, possibly a nerd, filched his
password and ran up an $80 bill on his phone playing computer games
long distance.
    ---
    ''I was never popular, just a loner,'' Mark Duchaineau, a former
high school hacker, told Levy. ''You feel a oneness with the
computer. (Without it) there would have been this great void...like
you didn't have your sight or hearing.''
    ''There are a lot of bright kids, not socially well-developed, who
are miserable in junior high,'' says Mark Crispin, an author of ''The
Hacker's Dictionary. ''They are naturally drawn to computer hacking,
something where they have complete control over the results. Humans
have basic needs and, if they don't get them out of society, they'll
get them elsewhere, and computers seem a better answer than drugs.''
    ---
    Tenney is hacking in his basement in San Mateo. It looks like the
command module of a space capsule the morning after a Saturday night
linkup with some vodka-toasting Russkies:
    ''Computers are my hobby and my living. Hackers do it because they
enjoy it. That doesn't mean you can't think about money.''
    He speaks from experience with a wife and kids upstairs and a diesel
Cadillac with a blown head in the driveway. He programs
professionally to keep them respectively fueled.
    ''Hacking is the key to Silicon Valley. Woz (Steve Wozniak, the
legendary hacker who created the first Apple computer in a garage)
did it because he was interested in the challenge. Steve Jobs (Woz's
partner who turned the Apple into a multibillion-dollar orchard) saw
where it could go from the garage. That happens all the time out
here.'' A sum greater than its arts: synergy.
    ''If any company tells you they don't have any hackers on their
staff in the Valley, they're lying,'' says Leo Schwab, a young
hacker-programmer near San Rafael, Calif., a reputed wizard at
computer graphics.
    In hackerese, a wizard is a person permitted by the gods to do
things denied ordinary mortals.
    ''Hacking is a proud culture and rightly so,'' says Don Ingraham,
somewhat surprisingly since his job as assistant district attorney
for Alameda County (Oakland, Berkeley) is to track down computer bad
guys. ''These hackers working all night in their garages in Silicon
Valley and basements at MIT have pulled off miracles. They may well
be the salvation of our technology.''
    Japanese trains run on time but not because they've been hacked.
Nippon, collectively, makes great robots. America produces great
tinkerers, although a Japanese did ski down Everest, a most celestial
hack.
    ---
    Tenney is an anomaly, like a banana tree in Labrador. He emerged not
from the Valley or MIT but Chicago where hackers were ''computer
bums.'' By the time he was a high school senior, he had his own
office at the Illinois Institute of Technology. That was to make it
easier for him to tutor math teachers in computer familiarization
seminars, a child lecturing the pharisees at the temple. 
    Even then something had evolved that Levy calls the Hacker Ethic.
This posited that access to computers and the data that fed them
should be free (keep in mind these were the '60s) and that hacking,
in and of itself and for the pure freedom of it, should be unimpeded
by the high priests of The Real World. Big Business. Big Brother. Big
Anybody. Computers promised a brave new world and all should romp
unhindered in Elysium.
    This has inevitably produced a gray, indeed very, very gray area as
to where hacking leaves off and the increasingly essential networks
of the nation's computers begin.
    ---
    He is called Captain Crunch, after the breakfast cereal. His real
name is John Draper.
    About 1970, while a soldier overseas, Draper found that the toy
whistle that came with each cereal box blew at 2,600 cycles, exactly
the pitch the phone company sang to. He began calling home - free.
    Hacking Ma Bell became a challenge with electronic ''blue boxes.''
Woz used to sell them dormitory-to-dormitory at Stanford. (He could
also arrange things so friends' computers would suddenly light up
with off-color Polish jokes.) You could ring up Sydney, Australia,
for nothing to get the Top Ten Tunes, try and give Brezhnev a wakeup
call. 
    (Crunch, to whom Ingraham is a personal nemesis, finally went to
jail where he gave seminars to inmates on blue boxes. His back was
broken, Ingraham says, because his fellow cons felt he was
withholding technology. Draper, subsequently in the toils of the law
again, rigged Ingraham's computer to receive his legal bills.) 
    Crunching - and Morrising, if you will - are deeds that have put
hacking in disrepute in The Real World. Stuart Brand, the Californian
who brought you ''The Whole Earth Catalog'' and now provides a
computer bulletin board in the Bay Area, is among many of the old
school who think everything, including copyrighted software, should
be free. But what of those, including numerous hackers, who have
devised brilliant software and then copyrighted it if only to buy
their groceries?
    ''When an artist produces art, he doesn't hang it in the closet,''
Tenney reasons. ''He wants it to be seen.'' For nothing?
    ''A radical leftist hacker would say it's bad to let establishment
NCRs and IBMs use your stuff,'' says Poskanzer. ''A radical leftist
hacker would say you should not have sold it to IBM. I say if they
want to use it, fine. So I guess I'm a middle-of-the-road hacker.''
    The Valley's annual Hacker Conference, which Tenney organizes and
Mandel attends as one of the 5 percent of ''necktie'' members allowed
to join, argues about free access at every meeting.
    Hackers agree the word ''hacking'' badly needs a euphemism. Their
fertile minds have added to the mother tongue such coinages as gronk,
to clear up, sort of; frobnicate, to adjust, as ''please frobnicate
the TV;'' dwim, forget it, move on to...; foo or bletch, disgusting;
moby foo, very disgusting; kluge, something that shouldn't work but
does; snarf, to snatch. But hackers have not come up with a kinder,
gentler term for what they do.
    There is, however, a term for hacking gone criminal: cracking.
Crunch, who made $1 million in The Real World as a hacker-programmer,
did hard time when he cracked.
    ---
    A world that found out about gravity when Newton hacked a falling
apple has to be tentative about curbing the curiosity of genius, two
sides of the same coin. There is a certain voyeurism to hacking.
(Ingraham thinks Crunch would have been a peeping Tom B.C.) 
    Malcolm McNally, a retired nuclear engineer who has raised three
sons who have hacked, ceases pedaling his bike along Monterey Bay
long enough to consider why they did and why he approved.
    ''Say you're backpacking in the Sierras and see a 'No Trespassing'
sign. You don't climb over the fence to start a forest fire, but
because you're curious about what's on the other side.''
    ''I like to crawl around inside things and see how they work and on
the way out make them work better,'' Mandel explained his
frobnication. ''Morris cracked. He did damage.''
    In the days of youth, hacking can become a compulsion, its
practitionersan obsessive brotherhood. The hacker's world shrinks
into the machine and blooms inside like a Chinese chrysanthemum
dropped into a water glass.
    Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at MIT, writes in
his book, ''Computer Power and Human Reason'': 
    ''...compulsive programming (hacking) represents a psychopathology
that is far less ambiguous than, say, milder forms of schizophrenia
or paranoia.''
    About 1980, a hacker at Stanford posted an anguished letter on the
bulletin board of the university's computer center. (The dispensing
machine had been computerized so you could charge food, Cokes and
beer. It was also programmed to refuse suds to minors.) In the
letter, 'G. Gandalf' called computing ''highly addictive'' to the
point that ''very, very few hackers remain close to their families.
Very, very few associate with anyone who is not at least partially a
member of the hacking group...The most brilliant minds at our top
universities are learning how to play with multimillion-dollar toys
first and how to utilize them constructively second...The hackers'
motivation to challenge themselves in any field not directly linked
to computers gradually disintegrates...This is what takes some of the
brightest and most capable minds in college today and turns them into
narrowness.''
    'A. Anonymous' replied to Gandalf: ''A person who chooses to be a
musician must devote hours and hours to gain adequate expertise. But
would you consider the computer hacker any less creative than such a
person?''
    W.A. Mozart lived B.C. and couldn't answer.
    Crispin, a Stanford hacker in the time of Gandalf, used to talk
nationwide via electronic mail. (Hackers call the U.S. Postal Service
''snail mail.'' Dave Flory thinks computer talk is antiseptic,
dehumanized. No inflection, no body language.) Lynn Gold, a student
at Columbia University in New York, thought ''there was something
about Crispin's messages. They were funny.''
    Eventually they arranged to meet in The Real World and got married
in it.
    ''Some hackers never grow up,'' says Mandel. ''Computers remain
their entire life. They don't pay any attention to The Real World.''
    ''You can burn out at 30 by losing your inspiration,'' says Jef.
''But you can also have substitute skills to allow you to do better
work. A lot of kid hackers don't realize that. They feel they've lost
it.''
    Mozart had been dead four years when he was Tenney's age. Tenney,
nonetheless, doesn't think he has composed his last concerto for
computer.
    ''An employer will say 'Wow! How did you do this?' I tell him I did
it hacking 15 years ago. It was in my mental library.''
    ---
    Craig Leres, Poskanzer's sidekick who spent hours trying to unearth
Morris' worm from Berkeley computers and is angry about it, muses:
    ''What happens to old hackers? You start your own company and make
millions, and then you can spend all your time hacking.''
    ''You just call it research instead of hacking,'' says Jef.
    ---
    Poskanzer's moon is about two hours farther along now. He and Leres
are discussing Morris' worm. They say they could have done it much
faster. Theirs would have elegantly closed the ''trapdoors'' by which
it entered, wouldn't have had ''hooks'' that could have caused even
more damage than it did, wouldn't have had a mistake on it as the
actual worm did.
    Did they know that when Morris was in elementary school in New
Jersey, he was so precocious the school let him use its computer to
assign students to lunchroom tables? That he let it be known that for
a dollar he'd work it out so you sat with your buddies and not your
enemies and definitely not with your unfavorite teacher?
    ''Maybe he was rebelling against the authoritarianism of assigning
kids to tables,'' says Jef, the middle-of-the-road hacker.
    ''He's a cracker,'' says Leres. ''I hope he does time. It would be a
precedent for others who might try the same thing.''
    Poskanzer turns off his moon. ''I got 39 requests for it when I
offered it on bulletin boards. I've copyrighted it, but I give it
away. I don't care. But I copyrighted it so no one else could put his
name on it. That I do care about.''
    Then, Hacker Ethic modified by Poskanzer's Amendment, he drives
home. A real, uncopyrighted new moon, just like his on the machine,
shines in the night sky across the Bay.
    Neat.
a265  1843  21 Jan 89
BC-APN--Hackers-II, ADV 05-3 Takes,0940
$Adv05
AGENCIES AND RADIO OUT
For Release Sunday, Feb. 5
From AP Newsfeatures
(APN SUNDAY ILLUSTRATIONS: Mailed print subscribers get 1 graphic.)
    
    EDITOR'S NOTE - The infection proved curable, at a hefty cost. No
sensitive secrets were penetrated. But the anguish a now-famous
computer virus produced last November has led to soul-searching about
computer security. The fact is that the machines are vulnerable to
all sorts of interference, from playful hackers to sophisticated
criminals. Second of three articles.
    
By SID MOODY
AP Newsfeatures Writer
    MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) - The bad news is that computers get
diseases.
    The worse news is that when they do, the illness can spread at the
speed of light, leaving everything from household accounts to
business data to power plants to defense systems fatally stricken.
    Apocalypse now? It's not just a movie.
    ''There's a potential risk that matches the destructiveness of a
nuclear attack,'' warns Donn Parker, an authority on computer crime
at SRI International here.
    In only a few short years, computers have become the bedrock of how
the United States and, increasingly, the developed world operate.
Computers handle half a trillion dollars in U.S. bank transfers a
day. They guide planes through the air and back to land. They monitor
hospital patients, predict weather, run phone systems, plant crops
and check the results out of supermarkets, store any data imaginable.
Your bank balance. The national debt. When a computer gets sniffles,
a whole system can catch pneumonia.
    Computer technology advances almost daily. So do the techniques of
computer security. So do the threats of someone, witting or
unwitting, monkey-wrenching whole systems.
    Computers get sick for the same reasons humans catch flu or VD. They
interconnect. The illnesses bear the same familiar names that attack
people: worms, bugs, viruses. They work the same way, invading a
system and replicating or infiltrating until the body is overwhelmed.
    A worm broadly believed to have been planted last November by
Cornell grad student Robert Morris within hours fouled up some 6,000
interconnected computers in a defense-university network. Estimates
of the damage done and the man-hours spent to repair it run from $20
to $95 million.
    The origins of computer disease vary. Begin with the hacker, the
computer junkie who spends every waking minute bopping around in
computerland exploring its fascinations. Then come the mischievous,
then the malicious and then the outright criminal: the embezzler, the
corporate spy. What Donn Parker fears is the arrival, eventually, of
the terrorist.
    Some case histories of computer illness, benign and less so:
    In 1986 then Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir was about to
give a speech which said:
    ''Let us say yes to a great, massive, successful and victorious
Herut movement.''
    Just before delivery it was discovered an otherwise-minded employee
had wormed his way into Shamir's computer and changed the text to
read:
    ''Let us say yes to a tiny, worrying and incompetent Herut
movement.''
    In Fort Worth, Texas, an uneasy employee planted a ''time bomb'' in
his company computer. Any time his name did not appear, indicating
he'd been fired, the hidden instruction would activate, destroying
the firm's files.
    About five years ago in New York, students at the exclusive Dalton
School found their way into the computers at the Sloan-Kettering
Institute for Cancer Research. They were discovered before they could
do any damage, intended or inadvertent, to medical files.
    In Hayward, Calif., a rapist used a computer to get the addresses of
women he attacked by tracing their license plates through state files
to which he had access. In the Equity Funding scandal of the '70s, a
ring used computers to steal some $70 million.
    Besides the federal government, 48 states have laws against computer
crime. The remaining two, Vermont and West Virginia, are considering
introducing legislation this year.
    ''In effect, the laws say thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not do
damage and thou shalt not trespass,'' said Jay BloomBecker, who runs
the National Institute for Computer Crime Data in Los Angeles. He
estimates computer crime may have reached the billions-a-year level
in the United States. ''The problem is getting society to treat
computer crime as it does other crimes.''
    Computers are a natural for disease and crime because they are
vulnerable. They are vulnerable because their usefulness is magnified
many times over when they talk to each other to exchange news or data
or memory. Unfortunately, that means they can share infection.
    ''A network is for exchange of information,'' says Richard Koenig,
associate director of the Computer Security Institute in
Northborough, Mass. ''If it needs a lot of security, you defeat its
purpose.''
    ''Any communication designed for easy access is subject to
tampering,'' says Bill Cunningham, head of management information
systems for The Associated Press. 
    To stop tampering or worse, Koenig foresees the day when access to
computer networks will be encoded like a scrambler phone. But that
only makes computers even more intimidating to the unpracticed layman
than they already are. It's a dilemma.
    To the hacker, it's more likely a challenge. ''The more complex a
system gets, the more nooks and crannies for hackers to try and get
into,'' says Tom Mandel, a computer futurist at SRI. This is not to
point a finger at hackers. Quite the contrary. Their contribution to
technology is inestimable. They push machines beyond their designed
limits to new horizons. Their genius with software is one reason the
United States leads the world in that technology.
    MORE
 
 
AP-NY-01-21-89 2121EST
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