(modem dial-up sounds)
(funky music)
(television static noise)
- Well thank you guys for coming,
welcome to CypherCon, my name is Joe Grand.
This talk is pretty interesting to me
because I normally give technical talks
and we'll go a little bit into my background
but when Michael invited me and the theme was
the '80s retro telephreaking historical sort of nostalgia,
I was like okay well let's think of something
a little bit differently than I've spoken about in the past
'cause I'm normally a computer engineer,
I'm a hardware hacker, I've been doing this
for my entire life as you'll see.
I'm a runner, I'm a daddy.
But I was like what if I put together
a presentation that talks about the time where nobody
knows about except for maybe a few stories
that my wife knows, but most people don't.
So this presentation is something
that's not really meant to be a bio,
but it talks about some tales of the olden days,
of the '80s and the '90s of hacking and phreaking
and juvenile delinquency and sort of
messing around and exploring in a time
where there weren't a lot of rules,
or I guess there were, but I just didn't listen to them.
So it's really goes along with the theme
as you'll see with the hacking and the phreaking
and like Michael says in the conference program
about nostalgia, like it's great to hear
all these old stories, but then it's important
to take those old stories and say okay
well what can you apply to newer stuff
so my goal is not to just stand up here
and tell you how bad I was as a kid,
which is pretty embarrassing, but to get you
to be inspired of like okay well maybe I can still do this
even though things are different now
and there's new laws and new things,
there's also new technology and there's new villages
and there's new opportunities to do this stuff
where I didn't have the same opportunities early on.
So it's still using that hacker mindset
just in a way that isn't gonna get you thrown in jail.
So my story really I don't think is that much different
from people that grew up in the early '80s and,
or mid '80s and early '90s who were involved in computers.
I got my first computer when I was seven years old
in 1982 and was just infatuated with it.
And I think it's important that people share these stories
and that's, again, why I'm doing this
because that's sort of this lost era of the hacker world
before it became what it is now.
And a lot of, everyone has a past, right?
Everybody has stories but not a lot of people
actually want to admit what they've done in the past
and I think that's an important thing to,
first of all because it's fun,
second of all because I finally wanted to say this stuff
but just so everybody can have a say
in what that history was really like.
So pretty much everything you're gonna see has never
been shown before and some of it's very embarrassing.
But I just found this stuff and I was like this is cool.
So like I said, I got my first computer in 1982,
I have an older brother who's six years older than me
and he was involved in computers, so he was 13
and he had an Atari 400 and we basically would play games
and collect games and use bulletin board systems
to talk to other people, but he decided to become a musician
and gave all of his computer stuff to me which is awesome.
Around that same time, he was also involved in electronics
and, for me, I would like do a chore for him,
I would clean his room or bring his laundry upstairs
or whatever it was and he would let me pick
a piece of electronics from his junk box,
so it was like this amazing thing and really without him
I would never have been exposed to this world at all.
So yeah, this is me in let's see I was eight
so I guess second grade or something like that
and already, that's an Atari 400 for those who don't know,
the retro gaming village in that room,
I don't know if it has an Atari but it has this era of stuff
so imagine a bunch of kids using that stuff in that room.
I was a latchkey kid, I had a normal middle class upbringing
so a lot of you might wonder as we start going through this
like how did he get over there?
He had normal parents, normal school and everything
but something just clicked with the hacker world
and as you'll see with some other stuff.
So I spent a lot of time with my computer,
it was a way for me to just discover lots of things
on my own and it was really fun, and back then
if you had a computer it was something where you
were either really lucky like I was or your parents
maybe were involved in some academia or research
or something that required a computer,
it wasn't like it was today.
And it was really something where if you had a computer
like you were sort of a weirdo already.
This one was age 10 so around 1985,
I still have that computer and yeah so television,
I have a terminal program running on here, XE Term,
which was the terminal program, my modem you can't see
but I'm guessing by '85 I had a 1200 baud modem maybe.
Most of my early days were using a 300 baud
acoustic coupler modem, which there's an acoustic coupler
in the other room also which is awesome.
And this was an age where I was doing a lot of
game collecting and playing games
and that's really why I used the computer.
What ended up happening is when you're collecting games,
and I've heard this story from other people too,
is you're collecting games, you want to then find
other games that are outside of your region.
So I could call local calls within the Boston area
where I'm from, but I wanted to connect
to other bulletin board systems, 'cause places in California
or New York like they had cooler games,
or at least that was sort of the thought process.
So we had to call those numbers.
I originally was just dialing long distance
and had to pay for it, but being a 10 year old
like that wasn't a very useful thing to do
because I wasn't making that much money,
I think I just was getting allowance.
But I found a code written on one of my brother's
floppy disks that was one of the codes
that you could use from various services
that actually would let you use to place calls.
So sort of like a corporate code, you have an 800 number
that you would dial, you'd enter some six digit pin
and then you could get access and call
long distance wherever you wanted in the country,
which it turns out is illegal.
(crowd laughing)
What did I know?
Actually I probably already knew, but I didn't care.
The quest was to get the games
and connect to other bulletin board systems.
So it just happened, just like I never would have been
introduced to electronics and computers if it wasn't
for my brother, I wouldn't have gotten into the phreaking
side of things either so it's really all his fault.
So I found one on his, on the floppy disk
and that sort of set the stage of things to come.
Once I realized that I could go to other
bulletin board systems and start communicating
with other people, the hacker world at that time
was still very localized, so you had groups of people
in Boston, in New York, in California, in the Midwest,
in Texas, but there wasn't this real connection
but then with bulletin board systems everybody was
using codes to get access for free long distance,
it's just what it was and I think some of the older guys
at the time were like we're gonna fight the man,
the telephone shouldn't be so expensive,
we're gonna do it for free, but I think most of us
were just doing it 'cause it was convenient.
So I got a little bit into software
for a very brief second, I'll tell you one story
that sort of pushed me back into hardware.
Back into hardware for good, did we just lose this?
Oh, okay.
So this is a program that I wrote when I was seven or eight
and some of you might recognize what it is,
it's called electric dog, I found this program,
it's in BASIC and so here it is, little loading screen.
(electronic beeping)
Can anyone guess what that is?
It was on the label, which you might not be able to see,
that was K9 from Doctor Who, and it looks just like him
for a eight year old or whatever.
So I did a little bit of programming
and actually taught myself hexidecimal by hacking
or modifying the binary of somebody else's cracked game,
because you know they have the crack screens on there
that says cracked by whatever, I would change that
and make it say Joey Grand or Black Ninja
which is what I was at the time.
So just sort of experimenting, I was like
oh if I just change these values in this hex editor program,
it changes the thing so it was pretty cool.
I never got into software cracking because
most of my kinda passion was in hardware.
I found this just the other day looking for pictures
and stuff, my first handle was Black Ninja when I was seven,
which is hilarious because when my son turned seven,
the first name he gave himself
was Black Ninja and I realized huh,
I think every seven year old likes ninjas,
and if they're black ninjas it's even cooler
'cause they're more mysterious or something.
So it sounded cool, but this was my list
of all the games that I'd collected over time
and they were all numbered and very anally organized.
I had other names too, Astro Zombie, Auto Von,
FBI Agent, and ultimately settled on Kingpin.
So at the time, besides being involved with computers
which was a bad thing to be at the time,
I got involved in punk rock and hardcore,
woo hoo, so this was 1989, I was 13 years old
and so I would basically spend either all of my time
using the computer and the rest of the time
just being a complete mischievous whatever
you wanna call it outside of that.
And this is what's sort of interesting,
I still haven't been able to figure this out.
I'm 42 now and this was a long time ago
and I'm still drawn to that sort of subculture of music
and the counterculture of everything,
and I still haven't figured out like
I had a normal upbringing, we didn't have the struggles
that a lot of people that get into punk rock do,
but I'm still attracted to that world so I don't know.
This combination was dangerous.
And this is when I sort of knew, I'm normal,
everyone else is not normal, that's how I sort of took it.
Also at the time, which I think is important
to sort of see this progression kind of happen
is after discovering punk rock which was
all about fuck everything up, I started in high school
there's a lot of peer pressure to drink, right?
And do drugs and go to parties and all of this stuff
and I was like this is stupid, I just wanna use my computer.
I don't wanna do that stuff, so I rebelled against that
as well and discovered straight edge which really
was my kind of direction for a long time,
which was involved in the kind of punk and hardcore
music scene of like I'm not gonna drink,
I'm not gonna smoke, I'm not gonna do drugs,
I'm gonna be a vegetarian, I'm gonna have
this clean, positive kind of mindset and clean mind.
So while I was like this very almost, people would
make fun of me for being like a goody two shoes,
they had no idea what I was doing with my sober clean mind
when I wasn't around other people.
And I'll show you some examples.
And then skateboarding also, so this was like the trifecta
of things you didn't want to be in the '80s
because you would get your ass kicked.
And this was something where I was tormented emotionally
so people would make fun of me all the time,
whatever it was, I had friends that I would skateboard with
and stuff who were not technical people
so we'd go into Boston and we'd get made fun of
and we'd get into fights and we'd get beat up.
It was just like this really weird thing
and then having a computer was the same thing,
like people in school would be like oh you nerd,
fat whatever, like all of these things that really hurt
and my sort of response to that was like okay
well that gave me this thick skin of like well I'm gonna do
whatever I want to do and I don't care what anyone says
and that has sort of followed on for a long time,
so that's a theme actually of this whole thing is like
do what you wanna do no matter what other people say.
And I think that ended up being both good
and bad for me, as you'll probably see.
So some of these stories I talk about phreaking,
I talk about kind of credit card fraud
and stuff that seemed normal to me at the time,
actually it still seems normal to me, as bad as that is.
But I have to sort of preface it with I was sort of
just one generation of hacker, so before me,
of course, people have been exploring technology way before.
I was just one piece of that lineage.
So I thought this one was cool, this was a
picture of Marconi in his lab in 1903 and he had given
a demonstration to show off the first
Morse code transmission, so wireless, I don't know
if it was a spark gap transmitter or whatever it was,
but he was saying to the press and tell me how,
this is so relevant to today in infosec even,
he said I have this new system, I'm gonna show you
that we can wirelessly communicate data,
totally insecure, nobody can hack it.
And there was a guy, Italian guy, I don't know how
to say his name, Meville Maskelyne,
who was a magician and he was like that's bullshit,
I know how this system works, I'm gonna hack it.
So he ended up, when Marconi was giving his demonstration,
he sent his own messages over Morse code
to the receiver saying like he was saying rats, R-A-T-S,
rats rats and then he said some poem
making fun of Marconi, which was like so awesome.
Just that hacker ethic from 1903, right?
So it's like anything we do that we think is interesting,
we're just standing on the shoulders of other people,
so that was really pretty cool.
Oh yeah, so actually the story that he started with
it says there was a young fellow of Italy
who diddled the public quite prettily.
(crowd laughing)
So there have been trolls for a long time also.
Other stuff, too, so Esquire Magazine October 1971
was an article that inspired a whole generation of people
and before this, people had been exploring
telephone networks through MIT, through other universities,
y'know making free phone calls and phone phreaks,
or phone pranks, calling people using the blue box
to gain access to the phone network and travel around
using multifrequency tones and stuff like that,
so there was already this culture of telephone exploration
by the time I got involved and sort of
just took advantage of all of it.
There was actually a letter to the editor
that I found from this article
and this guy says it says so much about our relationship
to our technology, the union of isolated spirits
through electronics, the computerized craziness of our times
and that was 1971, so just you can already see
that similarity even to this day where everyone's like
there's too much technology but technology
brings us together still, but that paranoia
was there earlier so I just think that's really interesting.
But I think also that Marconi example
is like what we do at hacker conferences,
we'll find vulnerabilities and talk about them
and it's what, 115 years later
and we're still doing the same thing.
And then I would be remiss to not mention
the 414s being in Milwaukee.
Are there any 414s here?
'Cause I heard there were last year, right?
Okay, I was hoping there would be.
So yeah, this was a group, and there's actually
some Wisconsin history section over there
at the conference, they were a group that actually met
through IBM's Explorer Club which was hosted
by the Boy Scouts to let people explore computers.
And they ended up breaking into all sorts
of computer systems that were connected over the modem
and really were the first, I would say the first
publicly known hacker group and it was just
a group of 16 to 22 year old kids.
But that was like a really interesting time
and then Wargames came out and that inspired more people.
We had like the Legion of Doom, LoD,
Masters of Deception, MoD, hacker groups sometimes warring
with each other trying to one up each other of like
can we listen on people's cell phone, normal phone,
landline calls, can we hack the whatever ESS,
I don't remember what version, can we hack the ESS switch
to listen in on phone calls and do all of this stuff.
Kevin Mitnick, of course, Kevin Poulsen who had hacked
various radio stations, hacked phone lines
so he could be the only person to dial in
to win the Porsche, so people were doing this stuff.
So I definitely wasn't that first generation of hackers
but I will say I think that I was part
of the last generation that got to do what we did
before the mainstream got involved in it
and a lot of the laws changed, it was a little bit
like yes it was illegal at the time but it wasn't
totally enforced and I knew people that got in trouble,
myself included, but it wasn't
like it is today, the world is much different.
Okay, so let's see some stories.
So one of the, besides collecting games,
what ended up happening is after collecting games
that sort of evolved into, as I got older I was like
okay well playing games is alright, I realized
I'm not a good game player, but I still loved technology
and I loved communicating with other people
and I loved the bulletin board systems.
What I ended up doing is a lot more of like war dialing,
so saying okay I know these phone numbers
are known BBS's, what if I use a war dialer program
to try every single number of this prefix
and so I would dial 10,000 different numbers,
usually you'd let the program run overnight,
you needed a direct dial modem, you couldn't do it
with an acoustic coupler, and you wake up in the morning
and you have a list of phones that phone numbers
that were modems, so then you could go through and connect
to things and it was really such an easy process.
It's sort of like if you have your badge now,
there's actually a war dialer program in your badge
so you can connect up to this USB port,
hook it up to the phone line and war dial
the telephone network that's up in the other room too
and sort of get that feeling of what it's like.
And you can do it manually as well,
'cause you could just sit there and dial, y'know 555-0000,
555-0001, over and over again and see what you get.
You'd hang up on a lot of people,
but then if you connected to a modem
then it would keep track of that
so that's how you would discover systems
and even if they were passworded,
that's just the next step right?
Just finding the computers, it's like a scan now
on the internet, see what ports are open
of different things using Shodan to see
what IOT devices are connected.
This was just slower.
So it sort of evolved into not the trading games
but trading codes and trading phone numbers
of things that I had war dialed with somebody else
that would war dial something else
and it just became this gathering of information,
I was like a hoarder of information.
Not necessarily to use it all, but just to have it.
And I thought that was really neat.
Some bulletin board systems, too, also had secret sections
so you had like the game trading sections,
if you could get to those, but there was also
other sections sometimes that would be like the hacker side,
and then you could trade codes
and do all of this other stuff.
Inside of the book, this was the first page of my first book
which was the red one, there's three of them.
They get more and more nefarious as the years go on,
but this I was not even 15 when I started this,
so I was just fascinated with what phone numbers
could you call and what could they do
and log in usernames and passwords for various systems.
I didn't even know what the systems were
but just to be able to go and explore and connect to them,
it's sort of like with lockpicking now, right?
Lockpicking village is huge because having that power
to unlock something, even if you never use it
to break into something, it's just like really cool.
Except I did end up using that stuff to break into things.
So let's see, some of the early stuff,
y'know bulletin board systems, trading information,
I did a lot of telephone kind of centric goofing around
so I did connect to various computer systems
that I shouldn't have, I'll talk about one of them later.
But I just loved using the phone
and you could really fuck with people on the phone.
So I actually found a recording of my first,
not my first but one of my earliest recorded prank calls,
I had just turned 14, some of you guys might get insulted,
so sorry (laughing), so it was christmas time
and being who I am, said well christmas is what?
It's like Jesus' birthday right?
So I'm gonna look up people named Jesus in the white pages
and then call them up and wish them happy birthday.
(crowd laughing)
So let's see, I'll try to play it, see if you can hear it.
(phone ringing)
Is Jesus there?
- [Jesus] Yeah?
- [Joe] Is this Jesus?
- [Jesus] Yeah.
- [Joe] Happy birthday.
- [Jesus] Good.
(crowd laughing)
So my voice hadn't changed yet,
did you hear it in the back?
Yeah okay, so just stuff like that, that was fun.
What we would also trade are voicemail systems,
so one way that hackers would exchange information
back in the day before the internet,
besides bulletin board systems and besides meeting in person
which once in a while happened, mostly around
trading games and stuff, is through hacked voicemails.
And you would find the voicemail box somewhere,
call an 800 number or somebody might say
hey this is a voicemail for my dad's work,
so you'd call that and you'd hack somebody's voicemail
password, which normally is gonna be like 0000 or 1234,
actually not that much different than today,
except this was 30 years ago.
So you would hack their voicemail system,
you would use that as a way to share information
with other people, you'd say okay here's my list of stuff
that I know, leave a message with stuff you know,
I'll go share that, that gets relayed over here,
and you have this network of people communicating
over other people's voicemail and then you get
the legitimate user after the weekend or something
comes back and says wait a second someone's hacked my thing
so they change the password and they leave a voicemail
like this number, you can't use this anymore,
it's my voicemail, and then
you'd just go find another voicemail.
So this recording, I ended up finding a whole bunch of tapes
that Whisker from the toy makers digitized for me,
all of them are now up on archive.org,
if you search for Kingpin voicemail collection,
there's a whole list of voicemail systems,
I'll just play one that's one of my favorite
that's sort of a short one and you can just
sorta get a feeling of like what types of stuff
were out there and you can tell by his voice
that he was just another kid doing this stuff,
so really cool so here we go.
- [Operator] Please enter your
three digit extension number now.
(numbers dialing)
- [Mike] Hello Mike Hunt here with a 1-800-458-5035,
also a 193187, next 206085, next 209649 I think that is,
maybe a seven, so 3215, next 205309,
net two fucking place here's more codes.
Same number 715132, next 715248,
next 715632, next 715964.
All those would have to be freshly hacked
by a crow fly, okay here goes the Mastercard
at 5329 0217 8301 3120 expiration date is 8/90.
Okay to the guy who gave that to me,
you said you want Mastercards with names and shit,
I can get a lot of those but give me
a number where I can reach you or a BnB okay?
See what else I got, here's on if this still works,
474-2010, um okay guys, leave what you want.
Message, fuckin messages on here are pretty long
we got actually three minutes so just slow the fuck down
when you say your shit, okay?
That's all I can say right now, this is Mike
oh wait here's one 1-800-234-5095,
codes are 590447 and 8148870.
Okay and this is Mike Hunt, later on.
Oh shit, keep on having more shit.
Okay here's a calling card, 8919 938 7824 2403,
next 919 938, oh shit fuck that one.
Sorry about that, leave what you want,
call my other box if you wanna leave shit too,
it's 1-800-284-2337 box number is 2125, okay?
This is Mike Hunt, later.
- So you can see he started off with a bunch of codes
for doing free long distance and then threw a credit card
in there, which of course if a bunch of hackers get that,
that's gonna be used very quickly,
I'll talk a little bit about credit card stuff.
And then another voicemail box to call to
so it was like this web and I don't know who that guy is,
I would love to meet him 'cause that was like
when I recorded that I was like this guy is so cool
'cause I was even younger than that
and I was like this guy is awesome, I wonder where he lives.
But I had no idea.
Because of using the codes that I was using
which were 1-800 numbers and I don't exactly know
how traceable those were at the time and all of that,
doing prank calls and voicemail hacking and everything,
I was really paranoid about who was calling my house.
And so I created a board which I'll show you later on
that was called ring busy device, and it was a resistor,
just a single resistor that would go in line
between the ring and the tip of the telephone line
and that would still let you dial out
so my parents could use the phone,
but if somebody tried to call the house,
they would get a busy signal,
actually it would ring once and then be a busy signal.
So that would prevent these companies
from calling and complaining and having my teachers
call and complain about whatever I did that day.
And it actually worked, I used it for a long time,
I don't actually know if my parents know that,
so now you do 'cause they wanna watch this.
I warned them they probably shouldn't
watch this presentation but I think they will.
So I got a phone call one day and I always
recorded every phone call which is also illegal by the way.
But I recorded this one,
so see if you can notice what's going on.
(phone ringing)
- [Joe] Hello.
- [Man] Hey you're busted, man.
You ain't got long distance service.
- [Joe] Excuse me?
- [Man] Yeah.
- [Joe] Excuse me?
Who's this, who's calling please?
- [Man] Huh?
- [Joe] Who's calling please?
- [Man] Secret Service, federal department.
- [Joe] Uh can I please have your name?
I think you might have the wrong number.
- [Man] No we show this number 617 (beep)
- [Joe] That's my phone number.
Yes that is the number.
- [Man] Okay, thank you, we're just confirming that.
- So that was sort of hard to hear
but this guy called me out of the blue
and he's like you're busted, but he was obviously
also pretending to be somebody else
because Secret Service doesn't have a federal department,
they are a federal department.
But it still freaked me out, and you can hear like,
what I did a lot of times too is people called me
Mickey Mouse growing up because my voice was so high
like you heard in that other video, so I would try to be
like hello this is, I'm sorry you have the wrong number,
but I still had a high voice so that was me trying
to sound older, which you'll hear on the next one too
which I don't understand how people even believed
this stuff, especially when I started actually
ordering things with credit cards and I'm like
hello I would like to order this video camera to my house.
Yeah so having a high voice didn't work out too well.
So one of the things also that a lot of hackers did
was do what are called alliance teleconferences,
and these were teleconference systems that were run
by AT&T and businesses would use them,
sort of like a conference call now or whatever people use,
Skype or I don't even know what people use
for conference calls, Slack, no you can't do voice
with Slack, I don't know, whatever it is,
three-way calling for lots of people.
So it was a conference call system I think it was
$5 per minute per line that was on the conference call.
A lot of these, actually a lot of alliance teleconference
recordings, I had some but they were inappropriate
to post to archive.org and inappropriate to play here
but some of them are on archive.org from other people
that you hear all these hackers, like legendary hackers
on the phone messing with people 'cause you basically have
a giant group conference, it's like IRC for voice.
And the way you would start these systems
is whoever calls in to start the teleconference pays the fee
pays the money so you werent' gonna do that from your house,
you might be able to do it through other ways
of getting access to some, like through PBX
to get access to an outdial that would call out.
But what I would do since I lived in Boston,
I would hop on my bike, ride down into the city
into like an alleyway, I had my lineman handset,
take off the cover of one of the phone junction boxes
that covered like all the apartments in the back,
clip on to one of those, hope no one was on the phone
at the time, I'd get a dialtone, start the conference,
and then transfer control of the conference to a friend
of mine and then unclip, ride my bike home,
and the conference would be running for 12 hours at a time.
And we'd call everybody, people from around the,
usually local but also other places too
because like I had my friends and then they
might know somebody in New York, let's call him.
This guy likes a girl in California
that they met at camp, let's call her
and it was like this totally ridiculous thing
that would go on for hours and hours and hours
and for those of you who remember having phones,
like I'm sure everybody in here who's my age
or maybe slightly younger and definitely older
like spent time on the phone with like somebody you liked
and you'd lie in bed and you'd talk on the phone for awhile
and you would do that for hours and hours
and like my ear would turn red and it was just so fun.
So we would call party lines like at the time
there were actually legitimate party lines going,
1-900 whatever and you would call those
and it would be like a, I don't even know what
a good example is, a forum for whatever sex
or I don't know whatever stuff.
So we would call those and then like just screw
with whatever, we'd pretend to be that type of person
or whatever which was just totally horrible.
We would also call girls that we liked
and sometimes prank call girls that we liked
because we didn't know how to actually communicate
with people that we liked at the time.
So we would call them or we would have somebody call up
and be like hey is this Samantha?
And they'd be like yeah Samantha,
uh Joe says hi click, just stuff like that,
and then sometimes we'd just bring on, we'd call people
and the thing is like there was no caller ID,
your house phone would just ring and so someone's
parent would answer, hello, it's like is Bill there,
and we'd talk to Bill for four hours, it was just chaos.
One time I remember I was in New York working
and got a phone call from one of my friends
who was on a conference, we decided to connect
directory assistance operators from all over the country
together, 'cause you know you would call 411
to get directory assistance but you could also call
a local number for each of those areas to connect
to directory assistance, so we brought them all
into the conference and then we all stopped talking.
(crowd laughing)
And they at first they were like hello Kentucky
directory assistance, how can I help you?
And someone else was like California directory assistance,
and they're like what's going on, this is really weird
and then they just all start talking.
So it's like we're bringing people together
by screwing with them and I don't remember how long
they were on the phone for but it was hilarious.
So imagine 20 people on the phone for eight hours,
12 hours at a time, $5 a minute, it was not cheap
and companies did not like that.
Also AT&T did not like that so they started
doing their own investigations into misuse of stuff,
so I got a phone call one day,
okay and another reason why the ring busy device was good,
my parents weren't home during the day
so I could turn it off and see who was gonna call me.
I got a phone call and the person on the other end
started naming every single name and phone number,
or every single name of people that were
on the conference call, and there were names of people
I didn't even know because we were all using handles,
but it was every name and I was like oh my god,
we're so screwed, so you can hear me
trying to act very like oh very innocent.
- [Woman] June 18th at 9:56 in the evening.
- [Joe] June 18th, um, yeah I don't have any idea.
- [Woman] It was a conference call.
- [Joe] Conference call.
- [Woman] Involving a bunch of different numbers
so that not a lot of people would be on the same call.
- [Joe] Um no I have no idea, I don't have triple on though.
- [Woman] No something originated from your phone number,
it was originated from a number in Clarksville, Tennessee
and they, y'know, included all the other numbers.
So that the charges weren't on your bill at all.
- [Joe] Um, hmm, I don't know anyone from Tennessee.
Is this, do you know if this is some kind of mistake, or?
- [Woman] Well the calls weren't billed to your phone
and they won't be because you're not responsible
in any way, I'm just trying to find out
who initiated the call, if I give you names,
can you tell me if you recognize them?
- [Joe] Um okay yeah, I'll try.
I'll see what I can do.
(beep)
Uh nope.
- [Woman] (beep) In California
- [Joe] Uh no.
- [Woman] (beep) In Tennessee.
- [Joe] Uh no.
- [Woman] (beep) in Boston, Massachusetts.
- [Joe] Nope.
- [Woman] (beep) one of the parties
call from Sterling Heights, Michigan.
- [Joe] Hm, yeah none of these sound familiar.
(beep)
Uh, nope.
- [Woman] (beep) Sterling Heights.
- [Joe] Uh nope.
- [Woman] And the last one, (beep).
- [Joe] Uh no.
(beep)
Nope, nope.
- [Woman] (beep) Memphis.
- [Joe] Nope.
- [Woman] (beep) Cordova, Tennessee.
- [Joe] Nope.
- [Woman] (beep) Oldford, Massachusetts.
- [Joe] Uh no I don't know any of them.
- [Woman] Alright, are you the only one
that would answer the phone there?
- [Joe] Um yeah.
- [Woman] Okay thank you very much.
- [Joe] Okay, bye.
So you can imagine my fear after that lady
just naming every single person that was on
the conference call, asking if I was the only person
to answer that phone, so I went ahead and then
started calling people and were like
I just got a call from the alliance operator.
But that was sort of the kind of
stress you lived under doing this stuff.
And ultimately, I never got in trouble
for alliance stuff which was good.
So here's one that was a friend of mine
was war dialing and apparently somebody answered the phone
and war dialing you normally do at night,
while you're sleeping, so somebody answered the phone
and she got pretty angry and left a message for him.
So here, this one might be a little loud,
so just I tried to turn it down, she was really angry.
(crowd laughing)
But so you'll see this.
- [Angry Lady] For some reason you're calling my number,
I don't know who own that, we might need a new number.
Please don't call that number again
because I will have the police calling you.
Don't you dare call my telephone number tonight
and call on nine or whatever, wherever you are.
I don't care who you are,
that's no reason to call me in the middle of the night
and I'm gonna have the curb or something
and I will have them come on you.
If you a killer, or whatever, I don't know
who the hell you are but you don't call me tonight
and wake me up in the middle of the night, you hear me?
- So I can imagine that happening all over the country
all the time because the war dialers
were going and people would answer.
Makes me nervous just hearing it.
So yeah were indirectly effecting people,
not that I feel bad about it but it was sort of funny.
So this one's a little bit of RF radio hacking,
so this is something, we have software-defined radios now,
we have lots of methods of manipulating wireless systems,
what we used to do back in the day,
this was November, around November 1992,
is we had HAM radios, and HAM radios will transmit
in a defined range, so I had a two meter HAM radio,
I think it was 144 to 146 or something,
HAM people will know, but I had modified my radio,
it was in Icom 2SRA to transmit at a wider band
so I could transmit from 138 to 174 megahertz or something
which violates the FCC rules and I'll probably
get my HAM radio license taken away now
'cause I'm admitting to doing it.
But we would modify the transmit frequency outside
of that range and it just so happens
that maybe even still to this day I'm not sure,
that the fast food drive through windows,
the speakers were all wireless,
which meant you could transmit to the people
inside wearing the headsets that are taking your order
or you could transmit out the speaker
and really screw with people.
So this is one where I was in the car with a friend of mine,
this one's really hard to hear so I'll sort of explain
at the end but we're sitting in the parking lot
a little further away, we see a guy come up and he
starts his order, and then we jump in and sort of harass.
So here we go.
- [Man] Yeah can I have two quarter pounders with cheese?
- [Joe] He'll eat 20 Big Macs please.
That was us.
- [Drive Thru] Can you hold on for one second?
Alright, can I take your order?
- [Man] Medium cheeseburger
- [Joe] I'd just like 10 in a bag please,
just 10 in the bag, we're next.
- [Man] I'd still like a quarter pounder with cheese,
three cheeseburgers and two large Cokes.
- [Drive Thru] Can you pull around
to the second window for me please?
- [Joe] And also in a brown paper bag,
I want 10 bags I'm really hungry, I'm really hungry.
- [Woman] Please pull around.
- [Joe] I can't, my tires are slashed.
Wait a second, wait okay.
Can I have hot dogs delivered?
I guess I can't, I'll just park my car.
- [Woman] Hey, is anyone at the speaker?
- [Joe] Yeah just hand me that.
- [Woman] Who's ordering 10 Big Macs?
Who's ordering 10 Big Macs?
Mike, are you hearing anything?
- [Mike] He's gone.
- [Woman] Just me?
Mike are you hearing anything but me?
Okay if you hear it again, I want you to
let me know 'cause I'm gonna call the police.
- So the loud voice obviously was us
transmitting over the radio and at the beginning
there's a guy that's like I want three quarter pounders
with cheese and we're like we want 20 Big Macs
and you can hear him go no not that many.
(crowd laughing)
And then he drives away and we're still harassing them
and we're not even there, and we got the point
where we would do it and it's like
can you come to the window, who's at the window?
And it's like I don't have any arms or legs,
I can't get it was just horrible.
So anyway, that was just some of the mischief
that we did, and like I said like this stuff
just felt normal, it was playing around with stuff
and just being a punk juvenile delinquent kid.
What I also got into was cloning cellphones,
and this was later on but because of my fascination
with technology and with electronics,
cellphones at the time that were on the Amp'd network
would use ESN and MIN pairs, electronic serial number
and a mobile identification number.
If you had that pair, you could program that
into other phones and then use that
and then those phone calls would get billed
to the ESN MIN account, so it was actually
really easy with certain types of phones
to load your own ESN and MIN pairs in
and then you could use that for a day or two,
call 900 porn numbers and call your friends
and everything and not get billed
and then change to another one.
I ended up selling those in high school,
which was a good way to make money
but I found myself in like really sketchy areas of town,
in like projects and I'm like this sorta chubby white kid
and selling phones to people that were friends of friends
of other people, but it was actually sorta fun
and a good way to get money that I could then
go buy electronics and other stuff with.
So that's sort of a side thing,
but just another example of this sort of
craziness that came out of this hacker world.
I do have one request that a friend of mine requested
I tell this story that isn't exactly technical related,
but a little bit of physical security.
So I grew up in Boston, the public transit system there
is called the MBTA, so the train system there
where besides just hanging on the back of the train
to get free train rides, which was fun,
it wasn't very safe so one of the other things
that we would do, especially if the train was full,
the train is like, I don't know how to explain it,
it's like a bi-directional train
so you have the conductor's booth at both ends
so when the train turns around, the conductor goes
to the other side and gets to the other track
and keeps going so the conductor's in the front
of the train driving the train,
that means the back conductor booth is open and empty.
And when the train is full and you're surrounded
by Bostonians who are just naturally mean anyway,
myself included, I wanted a nice plush,
comfortable seat to sit in.
It turns out that the locks on those doors
were one type of skeleton key, I don't remember what type
but I grew up in an old house that had lots
of skeleton keys so I just took a bunch
and tried each one until it worked.
If you didn't have a skeleton key, you could just
use a credit card as a shim to push
the latch out of the way to get in.
So then you'd go and sit, you'd push everyone
out of the way you'd go sit in the back
of the train and get your ride in comfort.
But then that was sort of boring
'cause now you're sitting there
just looking out the back of the train
so what we decided to do was oh, we can control everything
from the back of the train also.
We didn't try to drive it or anything,
which now that I'm thinking about it
would have been actually really funny,
but you could do like the bell, like the warning
as they cross over the tracks, ding ding ding.
So we would do that, we'd sometimes honk the horn
and then we'd see the button for PA, it's like oh yeah.
So what we would do is like we'd use the PA
and you'd be like next stop is the last stop
on this train, sorry everybody has to get out
and then you'd hear everyone go ugh,
and then the train would go err, the driver would stop,
and like we're in the middle of the train tracks,
and then run down the thing to try to get in.
Sometimes we had friends on the inside
and friends on the outside to see what the conductors
would do trying to get to the back of the train,
so we knew that they were gonna come after us
but it was just so funny and we would say
all sorts of different stuff, as kids do.
So what we'd end up doing is we'd do that,
we'd honk the horn, we'd use the PA,
the train would stop, the conductor would come down
and we would open a window and just jump out
the window of the train and run off down the tracks.
So that was a story by request.
Sorry mom and dad.
(group laughing)
So I mentioned earlier that I don't normally deal
with software, and I do low level programming and stuff
but that doesn't really count, I was experimenting
at one time with keyloggers on UNIX systems
which are still very common, right?
People hack UNIX systems all the time.
I had a keylogger and I think I had written something,
I had some piece of code and I modified it
to try to log people's keystrokes.
I went to a very prestigious technical university,
I didn't go there, I mean I went there, I didn't attend.
Went to this place and one of their laboratories
had computers for the students to use and computer labs.
This particular institution had a known root password,
like it was a public thing, so this was still a time
where like sharing root access on systems was okay
because it's all about trust and somebody not
shitting in their own backyard.
But being me, I said oh I have root access,
I'm gonna install keyloggers on all these machines
then I can get legitimate credentials
from all of the students there.
So I rode my bike down to this institution,
ran these keyloggers on all these computers,
and said okay I'll come back tomorrow and grab the log files
'cause I didn't really have a lot of skill
in like network side of things so I'm like alright
I'll come back and physically get them off the computers.
Come back the next day, the entire lab room
where I had installed the keyloggers,
all the computers were down, like I had crashed them all.
And I'm like okay maybe I should just stick to hardware.
And I never got any of the accounts.
So I was involved in a hacker group called Renegade Legion
in my teenage years and this was a group,
we released a bunch of text files, so we were a group
but it was like let's try to share information.
The information we were sharing, though,
wasn't like it is today where like trying to fix things,
it was mostly like here's how you steal credit cards,
here's how you break into credit bureau systems,
here's how you there's actually one on creating
a master key for master lock, here's how different types
of systems worked so it was all hacker related info files.
We did some pretty crazy stuff
and I'll mention one thing later.
There was also another group that I was involved in
called Lost which was really just making fun
of one of our friends, that was Renegade Legion guys
but we already had handles, we had fake names
of doing our hacker normal hacker stuff and then this
was like we would just fuck with anybody, it was really bad.
New hacker kids that would come in and everything.
We were just a mess.
You can probably guess which one was me based on the names
here but I'll give you a hint, it says Skateboard Joe.
Okay so this, like I mentioned, the mischief didn't just
take place on phone lines or around the city,
I got involved in credit card fraud as well.
And just like phones and free phone calls,
like it didn't seem weird because it was this faceless,
the way I justified it was like a faceless crime,
like these big banks, the credit card owners
didn't get in trouble so I mean they didn't have to pay,
they weren't responsible, just a big evil companies
would front the cost so it seemed to make sense.
And this was before like now identity theft and fraud
like it's a much bigger deal now
because of organized crime involved
and people that are have their whole goal is to screw you
and get as much information, this was still
even though a lot of people were doing it,
it was still very localized and sorta small.
But I had access to credit card numbers
like through the voicemail systems and one other way
that we would do it is through our modems
since we had access to credit bureaus,
dial up the credit bureau and in those little books
I had passwords of the credit bureaus as they changed
and you would hack the passwords and guess them.
There was a certain string you had to enter
to query records, so we would look through the white pages
and say okay who would have a large credit rating?
Or a large credit on their cards?
Doctors, lawyers, dentists, so we would look
through the white pages, that book with names in it,
which I don't even know does that exist anymore?
I don't know.
We would look through those, find the names
of those people, pull their credit record,
get all the information about them, get their name whatever
their maiden name, whatever stuff was in there
and then we would call the credit card company
and say uh my name is Dr. whatever Smith,
I'm going on vacation and I seem to have misplaced
my credit card, can you mail it to this address?
So they would mail a new credit card to my dropsite,
my abandoned house or a neighbor who I knew was away.
I'd get the credit card and then we'd go on a shopping spree
or we'd use it online, or not online
but use it over the phone, get stuff delivered
to the same dropsite so the billing address matched,
or at least they knew that we were at this location
for some amount of time on vacation
and then we would get rid of the card.
And it's something where people can still do that,
and like it shouldn't happen still anymore
because I feel like the banks maybe should have learned
30 years ago or 20 years ago when mischievous kids
were doing it, maybe we should make it harder.
Maybe a maiden name shouldn't be an identifier,
maybe we shouldn't use a social security number
for everything, maybe we shouldn't
just send out credit cards, but really the banks
don't actually give a shit because they want you
to spend money and they want you to be in debt
so they're gonna happily issue you cards and then if,
for some reason, somebody notices new credit card charges
and they complain, they just eat those costs.
It's still a winning battle, it's like a casino
where sometimes they have to pay out
but they're gonna make money in the end.
So it was just too easy to have that happen.
This was, took place in one area I was 15 or 16
or something, I can't believe how young I actually look
there where this was an area that I hang out a lot
and we started recording our exploits and instead of
having phones we had to have a video camera,
how do you get the video camera?
You use a credit card and you order one.
I remember being on the phone with some video audio
video place and I had really loved this Sony camera,
it was like this beautiful, box looking Sony camera
from the '90s I don't remember the name of it
so I went to order one over the phone and the guy said
you know we have this new one, it's a whatever
this company is, this one's way better so he
upsold me to a more expensive one
and I'm like sure I'll take that one.
So I ended up with this video camera
so I think it's sort of funny where I was obviously
defrauding him but then he was sort of trying to defraud me
by upseling me and I guess he got screwed,
no actually he didn't get screwed anyway,
it was the credit card company.
Anyway so I got this video camera,
we started filming stuff, this guy,
I'm gonna call him Robert because he looks like Robert Plant
that wasn't his name, wasn't his handle,
we would spend a lot of time together.
Usually credit card types of stuff.
We would hang out in this one location in Boston
where we would hang out in this store as you can see
and really annoy the people that work there,
we'd just talk with them all the time, hours at a time.
Across from this location was a bank of payphones
which was great for us to do all of our
various types of calling people and harassing people.
There was a little store that sold like Moroccan trinkets
from Morocco that this Moroccan guy owned
and he saw us messing around with the phone
and one day he came up to us and like what are you doing?
I'm like oh making some phone calls
so we ended up working out a deal
where I would trade him free international phone calls
to Morocco to get like Moroccan stuff.
So my room had like all this Moroccan incense holders
and the bells and the hands and all this stuff,
it was super cool but that's sort of where I learned
early on that's like oh I can barter with people,
I can trade my skills for other people's skills
which actually still happens today.
Let's see, one other story, oh yeah.
So I ordered a laptop once from a well-known
computer company and shipped it to a friend of mine
in a different state because he had good access
to like a dropsite, so he, we had it delivered there,
he was gonna test it before he sent it to me
and I talked to him on the phone he was like
I couldn't believe how long it took to test
all the RAM when I powered it up, it had eight megs of RAM.
Eight megabytes of RAM, that was a huge thing.
He ended up actually getting arrested
for credit card stuff, too bad.
And then speaking of being awkward with girls,
so Robert here had a crush on somebody who worked
at a record store across the hall from here.
So instead of just like going and being yourself
and communicating, he said let's order 12 dozen roses
to her at work, so we used a credit card
and ordered 144 roses and the delivery guy
was walking with one dozen at a time up the ramp
to put them all on the counter of the checkout counter
and it was like, it was awesome.
I wish I had pictures of it.
So anyway, this is all ridiculous stuff.
So being into hardware, this thing up here,
this is the that's the ring busy device.
When I was messing around with cellphones,
I needed a way to extract the memory contents from the phone
where the ESN and MIN were stored so I could figure out
how I could change those, so I didn't have access
to a device programmer which is like a general type of tool
you can get now to do it so I built my own
and I would just manually cycle through
every single address of the contents of the memory.
Down here was sort of some experimenting
with creating a multi-frequency generator
because with a lot of the phone phreaking stuff,
you need to generate certain tones, you your DTMF tones
but then you had your multi-frequency just MF tones
that were the ones that you would use
for the in-band signaling to control where you're going
in the system so blue box type of stuff here.
Here's one of my little beige boxes I would use
as my lineman handset, so instead of having
a legitimate orange lineman handset,
I could just plug a normal phone into this,
connect these to two phone lines in this case,
this was a little conference call system
so I could have little conference call on my own
just clipping onto phone lines.
This one down here, who had a pager back in the day?
Yeah, few people.
This was a red box in a pager, and a red box
is a device that would generate the tones
that a coin would generate when you put it into a payphone.
So I don't know if you remember, like you put a dime
in a payphone it would go beep beep
or you put a quarter in and it would go beep beep beep
and do five beeps so this just created those tones
and because all that signaling was called in-band,
all you had to do was have your red box,
hold it up to the phone when it said
please enter, please deposit 75 cents, you would hold
this thing up, you'd push the buttons corresponding
to 75 cents and then you would get your phone call.
I sold those a lot, too, that was also very profitable.
Oh I should mention, I've always been into buying
and selling stuff at my parents just reminded me of this.
So when I was a little bit older I discovered
that AT&T dumpster, a junkyard that was all
discarded AT&T equipment and I pulled out all the EPROMs
from the different types of telephone equipment,
and EPROMs at the time, they're programmable memory devices
and they're used in all sorts of arcade games
and stuff like that, not anymore 'cause it's
an older technology but I had dozens and dozens
of those that I would sell on usenet,
so selling stuff has always been kinda popular.
When I was younger, when I was about 10
I discovered like an adult bulletin board system
and that was a local number so of course I signed up
with a friend of mine, we pretended to be older
and we said our birth dates at something that seemed
really old and you could download ASCII art of naked women.
There were probably naked men too, but I didn't see that.
So I'd have these printouts and it was dot matrix printout,
ASCII dot matrix on a piece of paper with the paper
on the sides, whatever it's called, tracker feed.
So I had these printouts of naked ladies,
I'd hide 'em under my bed,
but I ended up selling those at school
which was one of my first endeavors of selling things.
Which was awesome, yeah.
What else?
This one here is a universal garage door opener
so this system is just based on it has 10 DIP switches
that you would set for your transmit password
that would match the receiver and I said well wait
what if I just replaced that with a circuit
that would cycle through all of them automatically,
so you just hold the button down
and it will open any garage door that uses that system.
Which is like a precursor to doing it with wireless
exploits through software-defined radio
which Samm Kamkar did something recently
that basically emulated this attack plus a whole bunch
of other ones of other systems to have
this universal garage door opener system,
so just because you could do it doesn't mean it's legal.
I didn't actually take advantage of that,
I ended up showing it to my parents
and they said okay good job, then they moved their bikes
out of the garage, so at least that was a good thing.
And then other mischievous stuff like this
generated a really high frequency sound
which high frequency bounces all over the place
so I would bring this in to school in high school,
turn it on, close it, it was a Sucrets box
so like an Altoid sort of thing, leave it on the desk
and have some tissues to pretend I was sick
and the teacher'd be like what is that sound?
And look all over the place and
I'd just sit there, it was awesome.
This is a laser listener that I thought
would be cool to spy on people
and so I created this to try and spy on people,
this was a credit card copier and of course
with all of this stuff something was bound to happen.
So eventually the hammer came down on me
and I ended up getting arrested,
this picture by the way like I normally smile a lot
if you haven't noticed, the police told me
not to smile because it wasn't funny when I got arrested.
So this was not the first picture that they took.
So it was actually I got very lucky,
this was a turning point for me
and I ended up flying to Michigan to hang out
with some of the guys from Renegade Legion
so hacker group that normally we'd
mess around on the phones, now we're in person.
Being a parent now, I have no idea why my parents
let me do that, they were very open with what I was doing,
and so I ended up going to Michigan, we thought it
would be fun to break into a Michigan Bell
telephone facility to steal information and it was all,
again, about that information of having like
how can we do things on the phone networks,
how can we have hardware that we're not supposed to have?
We ultimately were charged with six felonies each,
they dropped the charges on me because I was
the only juvenile, so this was the point
where I was like shit I should probably stop doing this.
The other guys, not so lucky.
I ended up going back about a year ago I was doing
some work out there and stopped by the telephone company,
took a picture and it was really eerie to be back there
25 years later and then it was so cold in Detroit
that my cellphone died, so I was like shit,
so I just followed the signs to the police station
and I was like this is where I got arrested,
went into the police station, my palms got sweaty,
I'm like oh my god they're gonna recognize me
'cause I had to ask for directions
to get back to the airport, and they didn't.
So anyway, I only have a few minutes
and this is really like all that bad stuff
were experiences that kind of paved where I ended up
and I had to do a sport or get a job according to my parents
and so I ended up running which became
a saving grace for me because now I would
I could kind of that was my balance of using computers
and then running so that was really good.
I ended up joining The Lopht which is a hacker group
in Boston with a bunch of older guys that were
really focused on sharing information in a good way
and using the hacker name to spread the good side
of what we could do, the positivity of it
without breaking the law, so I had
known them beforehand, there's a lot of history
about The Lopht that's already online.
I had known them before that, but they're like
we don't want him to join until he's done
doing his dumb shit and they were right so I got in trouble,
joined The Lopht, I won't play the video,
you can see it online 'cause we don't have time
but it was a hacker hangout to mess around
with stuff not unlike maker's spaces today.
So we got a lot of media coverage about trying to
share what hackers can do for the good side,
which you should all understand
being at a hacker conference.
We ended up testifying in front of Senate in 1998
about the state of computer security in government,
that is of course not real.
That was in the White House press room though.
I do want to play this as sort of the final thing
because it's pretty funny, this was Conan O'Brien
the day after our Senate testimony
and he had heard about it and said okay let's make fun
of hackers 'cause who doesn't make fun of hackers?
- I found this, talk about something that's
a little frightening I read this in the news yesterday.
A group of computer hackers told Congress
that hackers are now capable of shutting down the internet,
redirecting commercial flights, and transferring
millions of Wall Street dollars around the world.
It's weird, yeah, which means the only thing hackers
still aren't capable of doing is losing their virginity.
(audience laughing)
There's a guy with thick black glasses
crying right now in the third row.
- And moving all the money out of
your account. - Yeah right.
I'm completely screwed.
I'll show that red-haired freak.
I don't fear nerds.
(audience laughing)
That's the bravest stand I ever took.
I'm sorry, I might be going out
on a limb here but I don't fear the nerds.
- Yeah okay so that I should mention that this
was 1998 so this is just when the internet
was becoming common, people were starting
to discover technology, and we were really at that point
trying to show how bad computer security was at the time
and has it changed since then?
No, I'm gonna skip through this,
I also ended up doing a TV show called Prototype This
which was an opportunity now to share my love
of electronics without fucking with people but teaching them
how to do it and how to build crazy projects
so it really is something that ended up being positive.
Of course, designing the Defcon badges,
the first electronic badges at conferences,
other sorts of stuff, Chumby was like the first
open source hackable hardware thing, so it's again
just turning that energy into something positive
ended up being my career, like this is what I do.
I live it, I've lived it my whole life.
The technology has changed but like I still am always
thinking about things and always questioning
and always trying to find a way to push somebody's buttons
and how can I teach people things and like it really
is just something that I've done.
So yeah, even though technology has changed,
now there is this technical criminal more
organized criminal element to it,
but there's still plenty of stuff to hack, right?
Like we're doing retro stuff here
but even with the newer things, there's stuff
you can do and just not hopefully get arrested for it.
I would say like the hacker mindset is still here
where the most important thing that we can do
is kind of use our passion so do what we love to do
but I think teach critical thinking skills
and teach the facts of questioning our world to kids,
to this next generation because we sort of already have
our minds kind of made up but a lot of kids these days,
I have two of them, and they're in the school system
and I can see that they need to learn
to not trust everything that they read,
they need to learn to not trust everything they see,
they need to question on their own and then experiment
so I feel like that's our main responsibility
as hackers is to learn stuff on our own
but then teach other people to question stuff.
Because that's gonna be the most important thing.
'Cause I know that I want my kids to be able
to critically think about stuff and not go down
the path I did but learn that okay I don't really
trust what this guy's saying, I want to learn
on my own or I want to figure it out and like
I think that's really important and that's what
the hacker community is, to me, all about.
The history, I feel like everybody has a story.
I just saw Hamilton recently and there was like
one song at the end, everyone's bawling at the end
'cause it was so sad but it's the song
is called Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story
and Hamilton had this amazing story
and his wife spent like 50 years after his death
documenting everything and sharing
and if we don't document our history
of these early days it's gonna be lost
because it was before our data was harvested by everybody.
It was like this time where it almost doesn't exist
unless people talk about it, so please tell your stories
in other conferences and sort of share this stuff.
And of course this is all my these are mistakes
from my past, I maybe some of them were mistakes,
the carelessness of youth I guess
but I wouldn't have changed anything
because it sort of got me where I am,
I just have to apologize to my parents
for dragging them through this.
So yes thank you again, sorry I'm a little over
so we'll take questions elsewhere but thank you
for coming and enjoy the rest of the conference.
(group applauding)
(dial up modem sounds)
(television static)