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Techno Page - By Harendra Alwis E-mail: technopage_lk@yahoo.com The history
of hacking * During the
early 1960s, university facilities with huge mainframe computers,
like MIT's artificial intelligence lab, become staging grounds as
well as targets for hackers. In those early days, 'hacker' was a
positive term for a person with a mastery of computers who could
push programmes beyond what they were designed to do. * But in the
1970s John Draper made a name for himself by making a long-distance
call for free by blowing a precise tone into a telephone that tells
the phone system to open a line. Draper had discovered the whistle
as a give-away in a box of children's cereal. Draper, who later
earned the handle 'Captain Crunch,' was arrested repeatedly for
phone tampering through the 1970s and early '80s. The '70s also
saw Yippie - a social movement start the YIPL/TAP (Youth International
Party Line/Technical Assistance Programme) magazine to help phone
hackers (who were better known as phreaks) make free long-distance
calls. Two members of California's Home-brew Computer Club began
making 'blue boxes', devices used to hack into the phone system
during the mid '70s. The two who were nicknamed Berkeley Blue and
Oak Toebark, later went on to establish Apple Computers as Steve
Jobs and Steve Wozniak respectively. * In one of
the first arrests of hackers in the 1980s, the FBI caught the Milwaukee-based
414s (named after the local area code) after members were accused
of 60 computer break-ins ranging from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Centre to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Just months later, two
hacker groups were formed called the Legion of Doom in the United
States and the Chaos Computer Club in Germany. * During the
late 1980s, the United States adopted the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act to give more power to federal authorities. A computer Emergency
Response Team was also formed by U.S. defense agencies. Based at
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, its mission was to investigate
the growing volume of attacks on computer networks. * Still in
the '80s, Kevin Mitnick, one of the most (in)famous hackers of all
time, secretly monitored the e-mail of MCI and Digital Equipment
security officials. He was later convicted of damaging computers
and stealing software and was sentenced to one year in prison. * Law enforcement
authorities caught a hacker in Indiana known as Fry Guy - so named
for hacking McDonald's, in 1988 while a similar sweep occurred in
Atlanta for Legion of Doom hackers known by the handles Prophet,
Leftist and Urvile. * The 1990s
saw hacking reach new levels with the advancement of Internet. After
AT&T long-distance service crashed as a result of hacker attacks,
U.S. law enforcement officials launched a nation-wide crackdown
on hackers. A number of powerful hackers and hacker groups were
caught and prosecuted as a result of this raid. Operation Sundevil,
a special team of Secret Service agents was responsible for most
of these arrests and for exposing key security lapses on strategically
important networks. After a 17-month search, they captured hacker
Kevin Lee Poulsen ("Dark Dante"), who was indicted for
stealing military documents. * In the mid-1990s,
hackers were able to break into Griffith Air Force Base, then NASA
and the Korean Atomic Research Institute. Later Scotland Yard raided
Data Stream, a 16-year-old British teenager who had been responsible
for many breaches of military networks. In a highly publicised case
during the mid '90s, Kevin Mitnick was arrested again, after Tsutomu
Shimomura at the San Diego Super computer Center tracked him down. * Hackers broke
into federal Web sites, including the U.S. Department of Justice,
U.S. Air Force, CIA and NASA among others. A US government report
found Defense Department computers sustained 250,000 attacks by
hackers in 1995 alone. In 1997, a Canadian hacker group called the
Brotherhood, angry at hackers being falsely accused of electronically
stalking a Canadian family, broke into the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation Web site and left message: "The media are liars".
The family's own 15-year-old son eventually was identified as the
stalking culprit. Later in 1997, Hackers pierced security in Microsoft's
NT operating system to illustrate its weaknesses. * Popular Internet
search engine Yahoo! was hit by hackers claiming a 'logic bomb'
would go off in the PCs of Yahoo!'s users on Christmas Day 1997
unless Kevin Mitnick was released from prison. This was later found
to be a hoax. Later in 1998 they broke into the United Nation's
Children Fund Web site, threatening a "holocaust" if Kevin
Mitnick was not freed. * In June 1998, Hacker group L0pht, in testimony before the US Congress, warned it could shut down nationwide access to the Internet in less than 30 minutes. The group urged stronger security measures. Websites
of the week Before we proceed
any further, take a look at the following sites as a reference.
This may give you an idea about how far current technologies have
stretched the boundaries of web design and the quality of presentation
that we have to compete with.
IEEE 1394 Products supporting
the 1394 standard go under different names, depending on the company.
Apple, which
originally developed the technology, uses the trademarked name FireWire.
Other companies use other names, such as i.link and Lynx, to describe
their 1394 products. A single 1394
port can be used to connect up 63 external devices. In addition
to its high speed, 1394 also supports isochronous data - delivering
data at a guaranteed rate. This makes it ideal for devices that
need to transfer high levels of data in real-time, such as video
devices. Although extremely
fast and flexible, 1394 is also expensive. Like USB, 1394 supports
both Plug-and-Play and hot plugging, and also provides power to
peripheral devices. |
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