The Happy Hacker offers you the secrets and tools to become an Überhacker and Cyberwarrior, and even how to build a railgun. But who is this Happy Hacker? Though other folks are now involved with the website, Carolyn P. Meinel is the primary face of The Happy Hacker. She is a long-time computer hacker, going back to getting unapproved access to the PLATO system (previously). She started Happy Hacker because "all sorts of guys were begging me, 'teach me how to hack'." Her webpage gained attention, getting mentioned in The Happy Mutant Handbook, and being invited to speak at Defcon. But there are people who doubt her credentials, and others who are a lot more harsh. Regardless of the backlash, and the appearance that the peak of The Happy Hacker has passed, her articles are still being published.
posted by filthy light thief on Apr 29, 2009 - 23 comments

overclockblocked , by Sumit Dan. short story told in speculative chippy dialect. Fucken AIbrid think he so fucking cool with he retrofleshy stylen. Like you don’t already know he dealin double-helix, not just some two-bit qubit.
posted by mwhybark on Feb 6, 2009 - 61 comments

Hacking Al-Qaeda's websites: Hacker wars are the latest front in the fight against Al Qaeda. CNN says here that AQ may be unable to post propaganda videos as a result. But who is attacking? As far back as 2002, people speculated that Western intelligence agencies had compromised them, and a pornographer claimed he did. More recently, there are Shiite vs. Sunni battles, as when Ayatollah Sistani's website was cracked. In 2004, Zarqawi's site was breached.
posted by msalt on Oct 23, 2008 - 11 comments

Microsoft is taking unprecedented measures to combat China's piracy. The people aren't happy. Is the company shooting itself in the foot?
posted by strangeguitars on Oct 22, 2008 - 66 comments

Hackers attack Large Hadron Collider Hackers have mounted an attack on the Large Hadron Collider, raising concerns about the security of the biggest experiment in the world as it passes an important new milestone.
posted by fixedgear on Sep 13, 2008 - 41 comments

Your Gmail account isn't secure. Announced at Defcon 16, Jay Beale's tool, The Middler (man-in-the-middle) to steal session ID from not only Gmail users, but LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Facebook, and presumably any site that uses a session-based cookie. Enable https permanently. (previously)
posted by sluglicker on Aug 28, 2008 - 53 comments

Serious as a heart attack: A collaboration of various medical researchers in the academic field has led to proof that pacemakers can be remotely hacked with simple and accessible equipment. This is a proof of concept, but the real question is: How many other pacemakers and medical devices are similarly vulnerable? (Writers may note a new twist available for the assassination of characters in their novels and screenplays.)
posted by spock on Aug 13, 2008 - 41 comments

YouTube on YouTube . . .
posted by huckhound on May 20, 2008 - 11 comments

I was a Teenage Wares Freak? San Diego Republican Party chairman Tony Krvaric may have been Strider, co-founder of Fairlight. via Slashdot
posted by Artw on May 6, 2008 - 57 comments

How the underground hacker economy works. Black hat hackers and other scammers make money through methods ranging from pumping penny stocks to re-shipping rings. Meet the four most wanted cybercriminals.
posted by blahblahblah on Feb 12, 2007 - 13 comments

A hacker breaks into the forums of the guild Band of Brothers on the MMORPG Eve, where he discovers an Eve devolper, called t20, is not only a high-ranking member of the alliance, but has been feeding BoB expensive and rare in-game items. CCP, the company who runs EVE, denies any wrong doing, before it is revealed that CCP knew about t20's abuses for over six months. Players are not happy.
posted by Snyder on Feb 12, 2007 - 49 comments

Idiot Tries to Hire Hacker to Change his GPA
Why study when you can just hire a hacker to adjust your GPA to something more to your liking? Or not.
And now an amazing (and scary) amount of his personal information is pwned!
posted by fenriq on Dec 21, 2006 - 70 comments

Pope Benedict XVI makes his usual Sunday address during Italy's National August Holiday and about two-thirds in points out that "excessive activity" can lead to "hardness of heart", specifically recommending taking time out for prayer. It becomes the highlight of the speech, gets picked up all over, by Reuters and AP, and suddenly he's the Patron Saint of Slackers. Huh? Maybe that's why it's called The Protestant Work Ethic. Meanwhile, Americans are 'giving up' on vacations (voluntarily?) and in parts of Turkey a Muslim Protestant Work Ethic is emerging. And whatever happened to the Hacker Ethic?
posted by wendell on Aug 20, 2006 - 22 comments

Wikipedia wrangling once more: the entire German edition was shut down this week over the contents of a single entry. The parents of the article's subject, a German hacker who died in 1998 under mysterious circumstances, are displeased with his real name being disclosed in the encyclopedia. It is now back online; however, the future of the family's efforts is currently unclear, not only due to the German order's debatable validity in the US - but also because the order was, initially at least, mistakenly addressed to St. Petersburg, Russia, instead of St. Petersburg, Florida.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Jan 20, 2006 - 18 comments

"Hacker" discovers backdoor to Harvard Business School admissions decisions.
Harvard rejects all applicants who used the "hack."
posted by trharlan on Mar 8, 2005 - 68 comments

Boing Boing says he's a Lynx user , but British Telecom declared him a hacker and that's what the BBC is carrying. There's no way to tell who's right yet, but I'd say the Bloggers are betting on Lynx user. Anyone got an update?
posted by krisjohn on Jan 27, 2005 - 30 comments

Hacker Pleads Guilty. The Minnesota man who spread a modified version of the MSBlast worm over the Internet last summer pleaded guilty on Wednesday and faces 18 to 37 months in prison.
posted by semmi on Aug 12, 2004 - 7 comments

Christopher Andrew Phillips , the University of Texas at Austin student accused of "hacking" the school's computer system, has turned himself in. But reading about his method makes me wonder if this really is hacking and/or illegal...
posted by Big_B on Mar 14, 2003 - 13 comments

kevin mitnick, the famed hacker who was released recently from jail has granted Slashdot an interview in which he debunks many of the myths about him. He provides some insights into the ethics of the journalists that profitted from his case.
posted by Raichle on Feb 5, 2003 - 2 comments

Mitnick and Me. Kevin Mitnick's girlfriend, TechTV producer Darci Wood, blogs their lives and defends his activities in anticipation of Kevin's return to the Internet later this month. Mitnick anticipates the end of his probation in today's NY Times.
posted by PrinceValium on Jan 12, 2003 - 9 comments

"Microsoft's Xbox console may not be overpopular with computer game players but it is rapidly winning fans in the hardware hacking world." Get your Xbox mod chips here.
posted by aLienated on Jun 26, 2002 - 12 comments

Who says DeCSS litigation is dead? Norwegian court indicts the fellow who cracked DVD protection.
posted by donkeysuck on Jan 11, 2002 - 2 comments

Is your son a computer hacker? Has your son loaded strange programs like "Flash" on the family computer? Is your son reading dangerous books like "Programming with Perl?" Is your son obsessed with "Lunix?" [sic] Hey, I read it on the web, so it must be true.
posted by chipr on Dec 4, 2001 - 26 comments

(In)famous anti-gay site hacked (copy) - The defacement says, in part, "nothin against 'First Amendment hosting' we support u just not some of ur sites". So if I understand correctly, they support the first amendment as long as they agree with what is being said? Doesn't this seem a poor form of protest?
posted by revbrian on Jul 24, 2001 - 24 comments

John Draper says he's going straight for good and looking to "pay back society for [his] deeds in the past," by working with a software security outfit.
posted by idiolect on Jan 29, 2001 - 2 comments

How to care for you brand new hacker. [via memepool. Quicktime movie, 3.1M. Astoundingly accurate.
posted by plinth on Sep 29, 2000 - 12 comments

Mitnick is free to use computers for work
"[The] federal judge has ruled that such blanket restrictions are unacceptable and job offers should be considered on a case-by-case basis."
posted by rschram on Jul 18, 2000 - 5 comments

Not only can Kevin Mitnick not touch a computer, cell phone, or the Internet for three years, but a judge is trying to bar him from the lecture circut because he's talking about hacking and technology. I wonder, if they get him to stop talking about technology, are they going to bust him for thinking about it too?
posted by mathowie on Apr 28, 2000 - 4 comments

Feds seize Cuban Hacker in a raid early morning this weekend. 6 year old Elian Gonzalez was arrested for hacking Microsoft. c4str0 oWnz j00 d4d! Check out this hilarious spoof.
posted by da5id on Apr 24, 2000 - 0 comments

Canada arrests hacker' father. Strange, I don't recall anything like this ever happening. Your thoughts?
posted by tiaka on Apr 21, 2000 - 7 comments

They bagged the kid who was responsible for all those Denial-of-Service attacks a couple of months ago. He's Canadian.

Here's an interesting legal question: could the US extradite him? The crimes were committed in the US, but he was in Canada at the time he did it, since he worked through the Internet. Whose laws apply?

(By the way, I've seen no indication that the US is considering extradition; I was just curious whether they could extradite him.)
posted by Steven Den Beste on Apr 19, 2000 - 18 comments

Last night Kevin Mitnick was on 60 minutes (the gist of the interview is quoted here), and I have to say he came off as an utterly harmless geek. He was an information junkie that enjoyed the challenge of cracking firewalls. He never profited from his activities and the affected companies made up their monetary losses. It's a shame he was forced to waste away in prison instead of offer his security expertise to the affected companies.
posted by mathowie on Jan 24, 2000 - 1 comment

Kevin Mittnick is finally being released from prison today, but I wouldn't call what he's getting as being "free". Prohibiting Kevin from touching a computer for 3 years? This isn't like giving a toddler to a ex-con child molester, it's a computer. A person can do a lot of things besides hack into company servers. How does anyone expect Kevin to make the $125 restitution he owes each month, if he can't use a computer or get a job that requires a computer? Now that I think about it, what percentage of decent jobs are completely free of computers?
posted by mathowie on Jan 21, 2000 - 5 comments

Recently, MTV had a special on 'hackers' (scroll down to last weeks show), but apparently the people they contacted for background info didn't give them an interesting enough story. So the guys made one up. The guy behind it all says he was just trying to make MTV's journalists look bad, but that's restating the obvious. Of course MTV is clueless and goes to any length to create a story. The worst part is that MTV isn't alone in this, every news outlet does this. The nightly news looks the way it does for the same reasons, it's all about entertainment.
posted by mathowie on Oct 18, 1999 - 0 comments

Today, I was searching for some stock art photos at photodisc. I needed an image of someone programming a computer, and in that search I found this picture. The words associated with it were all variations of 'hacker' but I was surprised that I didn't see 'leather and flashlight fetish' in the keywords. And by the way, don't you think a hacker would know how to type correctly?
posted by mathowie on Oct 1, 1999 - 0 comments