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It was a different age, with different social norms. Hacking didn't have anything close to the stigma that it rightfully has now, and most incidents weren't mal
by trotsky 15y ago
It was a different age, with different social norms. Hacking didn't have anything close to the stigma that it rightfully has now, and most incidents weren't malicious. If you had an account broken into back then there wasn't the same sense of invasion of privacy, most things were work related and run of the mill.
- StavrosK 15y agoI'm not saying he was going to steal people's credit card numbers or whatever (you'd need to call the president of the bank to make a credit card transaction at the time, anyway), what I'm saying is that, on the scale of hacking (actual hacking for excitement), replacing /bin/login with a trojan is pretty low, because there's no skill required to do it. I wouldn't even call it hacking, really. It's like installing a keylogger, it's not a hack.
- trotsky 15y agoI'm not lying, at the time a trojan /bin/login was state of the art. Run of the mill hacking was calling up a strange system and using the login: guest to get access, or trying women's names as passwords over and over until you got lucky. Actually knowing how to modify a C program was something of a skill, though your peers wouldn't be too impressed. Think more along the lines of office prank to misuse of company resources.
- StavrosK 15y agoOh. Hmm, that makes sense, I guess it would be considered something one might try for fun...