Hack Me Once, Phreak Me Twice :: Computers Technology Hacking Hackers Papers

Hack Me Once, Phreak Me Twice There are a few elite in our technology-driven world that possess the unnatural ability to understand and wield the power of computers. To the media they are known as hackers, threats to computer security everywhere. To the underground they are known as "console cowboys", samurais, and the last defenders of free information. To the common man they are young teenage boys that break your computer and ruin your e-mail. Hackers are not criminals or mischievous kids with no purpose. They play an important role in our culture and are the fuel behind our technological revolution. Before we can fully understand the mind of a hacker, we need to look at the history of hacking. Hacking is usually broken up into three time periods: The Elder Days, The Golden Age, and Zero Tolerance. The Elder Days were the years from 1965-1979 when the "hackers" emerged from the computer labs of MIT, Cornell, and Harvard. These computer geeks of the 60's had an incurable thirst to know how machines worked, specifically computers. While professors were trying to teach structured, mathematical programming, students were staying up late nights "hacking" away at their programs until they found shorter and more elegant solutions to the problems. This process of "bumming code" contradicted the professors' methods, and so began the defiant and rebellious origins of hackers. This time period produced one of the best hacks of all time, when Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thomson of Bell Labs created the operating system UNIX in 1969. This primitive operating system was written by hackers, for hackers. There was now a standard to run programs on, although it required an enormous amount of knowledge of computers for even the simplest tasks. As a consequence of UNIX, the 1970's became all about exp loring and figuring out how the computer world worked. In 1971, a hacker found out how to get free calls from AT&T by emitting a 2600 MHz tone into the receiver. He called himself "Cap'n Crunch" because he used the free whistle that came in the cereal box to give off the 2600 MHz tone. From this, a new type of hacking gained popularity, one that did not deal specifically with computers but rather with telephones. Hackers like Cap'n Crunch were called "phreaks", for "phone freaks." So, fittingly, hacking phones is known as "phreaking." As more phreakers and hackers emerged, they needed a way to communicate with each other.