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[John] Maxfield always tried to stay off the radar, but after he was exposed as an FBI informant in late 1983, he became the most loathed man on the internet.
by elahieh 7y ago
[John] Maxfield always tried to stay off the radar, but after he was exposed as an FBI informant in late 1983, he became the most loathed man on the internet.
Well ... the ARPAnet? Until RTM came along?
The word Internet was first used in RFC 675, in December 1974. But I think the author actually means "the Inner Circle and their friends and supporters". The man had his day as a vigilante until about 1990, then faded into obscurity.
- CWuestefeld 7y agoI met Maxfield briefly, at a talk he was doing at my college, probably sometime around '87 or '88. He certainly wasn't trying to stay off the radar then, he was inflating his role in all of this quite a lot. As it happens, I was attending that talk along with one member of the Inner Circle (not named in this article), as well as one other even more respected hacker, BIOC Agent 003. Not that I'm an uber-hacker myself - my association with them was mostly a matter of coincidence. Maxfield told a number of anecdotes about famous hacks and takedowns, like the famous Fargo 4A phone switch thing. Having some knowledge of these events from my friends, it was clear that he was stretching the truth to inflate his own importance. My friends called him out on this, and I remember much of the rest of the talk being Q&A with the audience directing questions mostly at my friends rather than to Maxfield.