computer hackers - book - 2008 - Mafiaboy: A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man

Mafiaboy: A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man 
Michael Calce and Craig Silverman
Penguin
2008
277 pages


Mafiaboy: A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man, details the life of a Canadian teen-aged computer enthusiast, Michael Calce, who entered the underground world of hackers under the alias Mafiaboy.  In February 2000, when Calce was 15 years old, he was arrested by the RCMP after a series of brazen attacks on high-profile websites such as cnn.com.  Mafiaboy is a memoir which recalls the thrill of hacking computers, the feeling of power that can be acquired by a knowledge-hungry youth who understands computer systems, and the fear experienced once their activities have been halted by force.  Furthermore, the book contains warnings about the current state of “cybercrime” that extend beyond boundaries of a subculture of occasionally malicious computer nerds, into the realm of organized crime.


Like most contemporary memoirs, Michael Calce worked with a journalist, Craig Silverman, to produce this textual account of the Mafiaboy exploits.  Silverman is a Montreal based journalist who manages the www.regrettheerror.com website, which details journalistic errors in print and broadcast news.  Otherwise, according to his website profile, Silverman has organized ‘Hacks/Hackers Toronto and Montreal’, which are meetings between ‘hacks’ or journalists, and ‘hackers’ or subversive computer geeks.  Calce and Silverman, together create the story of the hacker as an exciting yet cautionary tale of teen-aged technology-driven hubris.  Finally, the book won the 2009 Aurthur Ellis award for best non-fiction crime writing, an award given by the Crime Writers of Canada


The text begins with an account of the hours surrounding the moment of Calce’s arrest, for his Internet activities, by the RCMP in an affluent Montreal suburb .  The narrative then jumps back to the hacker’s early family history as he discussed his successful parents and their eventual divorce.  Calce constructs himself as the paradigm of a hacker profile that has existed since the term ‘hacker’ was first applied to the malicious computer-loving youth in the early 1980s.  Adolescent, male, middle-class suburban, from a broken home, prone to insolent behavior, these attributes have been the stereotypical hacker since the early BBS days, when graduate students started studying the, “computer underground”.   Mafiaboy reads as though Calce may be, in part, telling us about his parent’s divorce and his change in attitude following the death of his best friend, to almost demonstrate that he was fated to go down the hacker path.  

    
Calce and Silverman also include a brief history of hacking as part of their text.   Much of their history chapter is derived from Stephen Levy’s book, Hackers and some other books that detail the lineage of the cultural practice.  Perhaps this history aspect is included so that Calce can position himself as a point of convergence between the hacker subculture dating back to the 1960s, and his own family history of success in business but failure in family.  

Elsewhere in the text, Calce rues his personal inability to keep his mouth shut about his own exploits. Like most transgressive subcultures, respect is given to individual hackers who break laws.  The level of respect given to the transgressor is based on the scale and scope of their crimes.  Hackers are notorious for bragging about their exploits and once Calce began to successfully disrupt the services on major websites, he felt compelled to tell others.  This behaviour, of course, got him into trouble with (international) law enforcement.  Hackers have been noted for having a need to have their accomplishments, and their knowledge, acknowledged and respected by others.  There are unofficial hierarchies that form within the hacker subculture based on an individual's knowledge and level of skill with regards to using computer technologies.  The interesting thing about this aspect of the text is that this book, at its core, can be read as an expression of a continuous need for such recognition in Calce.  Mafiaboy was characterized by other hackers, and by the prosecuting attorney at his trial, as a relatively unskilled “script kiddie”.  “Scipt Kiddie” is a term used by the hacker subculture that referrs to individuals who call themselves hackers but use pre-made hacking tools to wreak their havoc, rather than relying upon their own abilities.  


The current wikipedia article for ‘Mafiaboy’ continues to refer to him as a ‘script kiddie’.  Mafiaboy: A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man, seems to repeat a need felt by Calce to have his skills recognized.  The former hacker seems at pains to explain that he did know computers, he did have prodigious computer skills, and he did have an intense need to understand them which drove his development.  The implicit expression of this need for approval and understanding is probably the most interesting aspect of the text.  This entire confessional is a grand return to the boastful hacker spirit, Calce needs us to know, as a young adult in 2008, how good he was with computers - and the extent of his will to do wrong with them - back in 2000, when he was in his early teens.


The Mafiaboy story moves through his trial, his detainment, and ends with him being reuinited with his friends after a (relatively) brief period of incarceration in a youth detention facility.  The book ends with warnings about a new frontier in computer crime emerging from Russia that comes from the Russian mafia providing salaries to unemployed Russian computer programmers who can use their skills to extort money from North American Internet users.  Calce and Silverman are suggesting what is on the horizon for cybercrime, and also perhaps suggesting that what Calce did back in the year 2000 was nothing compared to what may happen today to the average internet user.

4chan - article - 2011 - 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community

4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community
Michael S. Bernstein, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Drew Harry, Paul Andre, Katrina Panovich and Greg Vargas
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

    Bernstein et. al, have produced a brief report on the issue of anonymity and ephemerality with regards to the /b/ forum on the lulzy website, 4chan.org.  This research team has investigated such aspects of the well known (for its offensive content and as the source of a number of highly regarded internet memes and hilarious media pranks) online community.  Their report is interesting because it stresses that /b/ appears to thrive despite an absence of the things many other online communities consider requirements for responsible membership - that is, markers of user-identity and an archive of past community activity.  The authorship of almost %100 of messages posted on /b/ is noted as 'anonymous', and the average forum thread dies within seven minutes.  /B/ is a hugely popular message forum, despite the fact that most other forums require its contributors to build a reputation associated with a particular online identity, and expect users to observe modes of communication by researching the forum's previously archived activity.

    The article includes a brief history of the forum which details the reasons for its notoriety.  Their history includes describing /b/'s perpetually offensive content (including racist rants, misogynist and homophobic imagery, etc) and the forum's base for the mysteriously amorphous group, Anonymous.  The focus of the article were two studies based on data accumulated over a two week period.  These studies determined that /b/ did, indeed, foster anonymity among its users, and that a typical thread would exist for a very short amount of time before disappearing forever. 

    The author's of these studies note how /b/ works with these aspects, claiming that anonymity deinhibits users and may drive innovation in meme-making.  Furthermore, anonymity and ephemerality may help users evade histories of poor posting, and develop alternative forms of status signaling.  My own experience with /b/ is limited, however from conducting a few unstructured surveys of the content of /b/ it strikes me that a repetition of the content of posts from thread to thread is a fairly prominent aspect of the communication that appears on the forum.  I'd be curious to know if this repetition is considered necessary, and therefore ephemerality of /b/ creates a need for communication that has anything in common with oral traditions systems for preserving cultural memories. 

Anyways, the article may be read at: http://projects.csail.mit.edu/chanthropology/4chan.pdf

computer hackers - film - 1982 - Tron

Tron
Disney 
1982
Director: Steven Lisburger
Writer: Steven Lisburger
96 minutes

Hello everybody in cyberland!  Here’s my first “blog” post on the compu-net.  I hope the good netizens of the world approve!

I borrowed Tron from the Toronto Public Library.  In 1982 there was a popular sense that the personal computer had opened a new frontier for outlaw activity.  But because computers are essentially office equipment, there was little about hacking to make it into an exciting source of cinematic action.  Wargames, released in 1983, portrayed computer hacking as a pursuit for disaffected, underachieving teenagers.  Matthew Broaderick played high-school hacker David Lightman whose exploits plunged him into a cross-country fugitive adventure with cold war era Nuclear-apocalyptic overtones.  The post-cold war film, Hackers, released in 1995, maintained the teen-aged outlaw portrayal of hackers although the film bestowed upon them roller-blades and mid-90’s club kid style and attitude.  Both Wargames and Hackers represent computer hackers as mildly malevolent kids who possess a knowledge of the weaknesses of contemporary technologies and infrastructure that gets them into, and out of, tense situations.  Tron predates these films and charts a unique path among hacker movies, where the hacker enters the computer and conquers its internal landscape.
  
Tron is unique because its basic narrative revolves around anthropomorphized computer programs. The programs are represented as men who fight with each other for survival.  Much of the movie takes place inside of a computer system that is being hacked by former programmer and current arcade owner, Kevin Flynn.  Flynn seeks the evidence that his video game designs have been stolen from him by Ed Dillinger, the film’s villain who is currently an executive of the company Flynn used to work for, a software development firm called ENCOM.  While Tron’s hackers are grown-up software industry professionals, Flynn exists in a state of perpetual adolescence.  He is first alluded to by Alan Bradley, a former colleague, in conversation with Lora Baines, also a former ENCOM colleague as well as an ex-girlfriend, as a programmer who wastefully used his considerable talent to program games.  He first appears in the film as the centre of attention, surrounded by enraptured kids, achieving a high score on a game machine in his arcade.  That scene recalls a time when the video arcade was a space where heroes were made.  I suspect that this brief scene, displaying the handsome and fun loving Flynn, surrounded by girls that are amazed by his gaming abilities, provides the model for the nighttime fantasies of the sad subterraneans who populate the King of Kong and Chasing Ghosts documentaries.   

Flynn at the arcade.

Video game great, Robert Mruczek, is featured in the 2007 documentaries The King of Kong, and Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade.

This film quickly progresses from displaying Flynn’s hacking efforts, where he types at a keyboard, to zapping him into inner-space of the computer via some kind of transmogrifier.  While the computer interior should probably be a domain under the MCP’s  complete control, it is actually a chaotic realm subject to the same unpredictable shifts in power as any other landscape populated by people of divergent interests and motivations.  Dellinger’s avatar within the computer, Sark, is Tron’s Darth Vader.  He is a military leader who orders his red guard around.  The Red’s are Fascistic foot soldiers that seem to take computer programs hostage and force them into armed combat with one another.  The film’s title refers to a network security program, designed by Alan Bradley, that is essentially a powerful hacking tool.  In the computer realm, Tron is a figure who is preternaturally skilled at overcoming any of the challenges Sark throws at him, and is such a powerful new program that he is essentially destined to succeed in destroying the MPC, which, of course, happens in the end.  Similarly, Flynn is not an avatar but is rather a user materially transported into the machine.  Computer users are regarded as godlike entities by the anthropomorphic programs in Tron, and therefore Flynn is considered a power previously unseen in the space.  Within the computer realm, hacking is game-playing, and Flynn’s honed game skills put him on par with Tron in terms of breaking through Sark and MPC’s security systems.  

Tron has succeeded in finding a way of representing hacking as adventurous in a way that is interesting to cinema.  In most hacker films, the scenes in which the hacking being done are the least interesting, generally, and the inevitable post-hacking run from the police or whoever is where the action is.  Of course, Tron succeeds at this by removing anything that resembles actual hacker activity and turning the whole enterprise into an adventure quest, but so what?  Tron’s aesthetic is also really great, as the whole computer world is a light-blue monochrome against a black sky, and every character glows red or blue.  The evil Master Control Program is represented as a spinning glowing monolith that speaks, and for a film villain, is genuinely intimidating (although by 1982 Disney has long mastered the hero vs villain quest formula).

  

Tron is probably one of the first cinematic representations of the computer as a space to be explored, rather than a tool to be utilized.  Furthermore, the film presents the hacker as an outlaw hero whose knowledge of technology allows him to undo the wrongs of the powerful.  This mode of thought about hackers continues today where hackers such as Julian Assange of Wikileaks, to name a single example, claim to use their technological acumen in ways which appear morally questionable, but are vindicated when they achieve a moral good.  Flynn’s infiltration of ENCOM computers and the ultimate destruction of their property is vindicated by his discovery of proof that Dillinger stole his game code.  In the film, Flynn is detached from any hacker subculture, but the model he provides is identifiably present throughout the actual hacker world.