hacking

	==Phrack Inc.==

	Volume Three, Issue Thirty-Three, File 2 of 13

	-[ P H R A C K XXXIII P R O P H I L E ]-

	-=>[ by Crimson Death ]<=-

	This issue Phrack Profile features a hacker familiar to most of you.
	His informative files in Phrack and the Legion of Doom Technical Journals
	created a stampede of wanna-be Unix hackers. Your friend and mine...

	Shooting Shark
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

	Personal
	~~~~~~~~
	Handle: Shooting Shark
	Call him: 'Shark'
	Past handles: None
	Handle origin: It's the title of the 3rd song on "Revolution By Night,"
	which many consider to be Blue Oyster Cult's last good
	album.
	Date of Birth: 11/25/66
	Age at current date: 24
	Approximate Location: San Francisco Bay Area.
	Height: 5'10"
	Weight: 150 lbs.
	Eye color: Hazel
	Hair Color: Dark Brown
	Computers: First: Apple //e. Presently: ALR Business V EISA
	386/33.
	------------------------------------------------------------------------------

	The Story of my Hacking Career
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
	In 1984 I was lucky enough to be a Senior at a high school that had one of
	the pilot "Advanced Placement Computer Science" classes. I didn't know much
	about computers at the time, but I had a strong interest, so I signed up.
	"Advanced Placement Computer Science" meant programming in Pascal using the
	UCSD P-System on the newly-released Apple //e. I wasn't too crazy about
	programming in Pascal -- does ANYBODY really like Pascal? -- but I did enjoy
	the software piracy sessions that the class had after school and, much of the
	time, during class when the Instructor was lecturing about DO WHILE loops or
	something equally fascinating. Some of our favorite games at the time were
	ZORK II and what I still consider to be the best Apple II game ever, RESCUE
	RAIDERS. A few months into the school year, I somehow convinced my mother to
	buy me my very own Apple //e, with an entire 64K of RAM, a monochrome monitor,
	and a floppy drive. The first low-cost hard drive for the Apple II, the Sider,
	was $700 for 10Mb at the time, so it was out of the question.

	Now at about this time, Coleco was touting their Adam add-on to the
	ColecoVision game unit, and they had these great guilt-inducing advertisements
	that had copy something like this:

	TEACHER: "I want to talk to you about Billy. He's not doing very
	well in school. He just doesn't seem to understand new
	concepts as well as the other kids. All he does is sit
	there and pick his nose."

	CONCERNED "Well, golly, I just don't know what to do. It's probably
	FATHER: probably because his mother drank so much when she was
	pregnant."

	TEACHER: "Have you considered getting Billy a computer?"

	And of course the next scene showed little Billy inserting a tape
	cartridge into his new Adam and pecking his way to higher grades.

	Such was not the case with me when I got MY computer. All I did was go
	home after school and play "Wizardry." I stopped doing homework and
	I failed 3 out of 6 classes my last semester of my Senior year of high school.
	Luckily enough, I had already been accepted to the local state University, so
	it didn't really matter. Shortly before graduating, I took the AP Computer
	Science test and got the minimum passing score. (I didn't feel so bad when Sir
	Francis Drake later told me that he failed it. Then again, he completed all
	the questions in BASIC.)

	Worse yet, "Wargames" came out around this time. I'll admit it, my
	interest in hacking was largely influenced by that film.

	Shortly after I (barely) graduated from high school, I saved up my money
	and bought a (get this) Hayes MicroModem //e. It was only something like $250
	and I was in 300 baud heaven. I started calling the local "use your real name"
	BBSs and shortly graduated to the various small-time hacker BBSs. Note that
	90% of the BBSs at this time were running on Apples using Networks, GBBS or
	some other variant. Few were faster than 300 baud. It was on one of these
	Apple Networks BBSs that I noticed some users talking about these mysterious
	numbers called "800 extenders." I innocently inquired as to what these were,
	and got a reply from Elric of Imrryr. He explained that all I needed to do was
	dial an 800 number, enter a six-digit code, and then I could call anywhere I
	wanted for FREE! It was the most amazing thing. So, I picked a handle, and
	began calling systems like Sherwood Forest II and Sherwood Forest III, OSUNY,
	and PloverNet. At their height, you could call any of these systems and read
	dozens of new messages containing lots of new Sprint and extender codes EVERY
	DAY. It was great! I kept pestering my mentor, Elric, and despite his
	undoubted annoyance with my stupid questions, we remained friends. By this
	time, I realized that my Hayes MicroModem //e was just not where it was at, and
	saved up the $400 to buy a Novation Apple Cat 300, the most awesomest modem of
	its day. This baby had a sound generation chip which could be used to generate
	speech, and more importantly, DTMF and 2600Hz tones. Stupidly enough, I began
	blue boxing. Ironically, at this time I was living in the very town that Steve
	Wozniak and Steve Jobs had gotten busted in for boxing ten years previously.

	And THEN I started college. I probably would have remained a two-bit
	Apple hacker (instead of what I am today, a two-bit IBM hacker) to this day if
	a friend hadn't told me that it was easy to hack into the school's new Pyramid
	90x, a "super mini" that ran a BSD 4.2 variant. "The professor for the C class
	has created a bunch of accounts, sequentially numbered, all with the same
	default password," he told me. "Just keep trying them until you get an account
	that hasn't been used by a student yet!" I snagged an account which I still
	use to this day, seven years later.

	At about this time, I called The Matrix, run by Dr. Strangelove. This was
	my first experience with Ken's FORUM-PC BBS software. Dr. Strangelove was a
	great guy, even though he looks somewhat like a wood mouse (and I mean that in
	the nicest possible way). DSL helped me build my first XT clone for a total
	cost of about $400. He even GAVE me a lot of the components I needed, like a
	CGA card and a keyboard.

	Shortly after that, The Matrix went down and was quickly replaced by IDI,
	run by Aiken Drum. It is here that I met Sir Francis Drake. Shortly after
	THAT, IDI went down and was quickly replaced by Lunatic Labs Unltd, run by my
	old friend The Mad Alchemist. TMA lived within walking distance of my house,
	so I called LunaLabs quite a bit. LunaLabs later became the home base of
	Phrack for a few issues when Knight Lightning and Taran King gave it upon
	entering their freshman year of college.

	So during this time I just got really into Unix and started writing files
	for Phrack. I wrote about six articles for Phrack and then one for the 2nd LOD
	Technical Journal, which featured a brute-force password hacker. I know, that
	sounds archaic, but this was back in 1984, and I was actually one of the few
	people in the hacker community that knew quite a bit about Unix. I've been
	told by several people that it was my LOD TJ article that got them into Unix
	hacking (shucks). I also wrote the original Unix Nasties article for Phrack,
	and on two occasions, when I was later heavily into massive Internet node
	hopping, I would get into a virgin system at some backwoods college like MIT
	and find my file in somebody's directory.

	During 1987, I got a letter from the local FBI office. It was addressed
	to my real name and asked for any information I might wish to provide on a
	break-in in San Diego. Of course I declined, but they kept sending me more
	letters. Now that I was 18 years old I decided to stop doing illegal things.
	I know..."what a weenie." So Lunatic Labs, now being run by The Mad Alchemist,
	became my exclusive haunt because it was a local board. When Elric and Sir
	Francis Drake took over the editorship of Phrack for a few issues, I wrote all
	their intro files.

	When my computer broke I let those days just fade away behind me.
	Occasionally, old associates would manage to find me and call me voice, much to
	my surprise. Somebody called me once and told me an account had been created
	for me on a BBS called "Catch 22," a system that must have been too good to
	last. I think I called it twice before it went down. Most recently, Crimson
	Death called me, asked me to write a Profile, and here we are.

	What I'm Doing Now
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
	After two years in the Computer Science program in college, I switched my
	major to Theater Arts for three reasons:

	1) Theater Arts people were generally nicer people;
	2) Most CS students were just too geeky for me (note I said "most"); and,
	3) I just couldn't manage to pass Calculus III!

	I graduated last year with a BA in Theater Arts, and like all newly graduated
	Theater majors, started practicing my lines, such as "Do you want fries with
	that?" and "Can I tell you about today's special?" However, I managed to have
	the amazing luck of getting a job in upper management at one of the west
	coast's most famous IBM video graphics card manufacturers. My position lets me
	play with a lot of different toys like AutoDesk 3D Studio and 24-bit frame
	buffers. A 24-bit image I created was featured on the cover of the November
	1990 issue of Presentation Products magazine. For a while I was the system
	administrator of the company's Unix system, with an IP address and netnews and
	the whole works. Now I'm running the company's two-line BBS -- if you can
	figure out what company I work for, give it a call and leave me some mail
	sometime. I'm also into MIDI, and I've set my mother up with a nice little
	studio including a Tascam Porta One and a Roland MT-32. I was an extra in the
	films "Patty Hearst" (with The $muggler) and "The Doors" (for which I put in a
	22-hour day at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco for a concert scene that
	WAS CUT FROM THE #*%& FILM) and I look forward to working on more films in a
	capacity that does not require me to wear bell-bottoms. I've also acted in
	local college theater and I'll be directing a full-length production at a local
	community theater next year. I like to consider myself a well-rounded person.

	Oh yeah. I also got married last October.

	People I Have Known
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
	Elric of Imrryr -- My true mentor. He got me into the business. Too bad he
	moved to Los Angeles.

	Shadow 2600 -- Known to some as David Flory, may he rest in peace. Early
	in my career he mentioned me and listed me as a collaborator for
	a 2600 article. That was the first time I saw my name in print.

	Oryan QUEST -- After I had my first Phrack article published, he started
	calling me (he lived about 20 miles away at the time). He would
	just call me and give me c0deZ like he was trying to impress me
	or something. I don't know why he needed me for his own
	personal validation. I was one of the first people to see
	through him and I realized early on that he was a pathological
	liar. Later on he lied about me on a BBS and got me kicked off,
	because the Sysop though he was this great guy. Sheesh.

	Sir Francis Drake -- Certainly one of the more unique people I've met. He
	printed a really crappy two-part fiction story I wrote in
	his WORM magazine. Shortly after that the magazine
	folded; I think there's a connection.

	David Lightman -- Never met him, but he used to share my Unix account at
	school.

	The Disk Jockey -- He pulled a TRW report on the woman that I later ended
	up marrying. Incidentally, he can be seen playing
	basketball in the background in one scene of the film
	"Hoosiers."

	Lex Luthor -- I have to respect somebody who would first publish my article in
	LOD TJ and then call me up for no reason a year later and give me
	his private Tymnet outdial code.

	Dr. Strangelove -- He runs a really cool BBS called JUST SAY YES. Call it at
	(415) 922-2008. DSL is probably singularly responsible for
	getting me into IBM clones, which in turn got me my job (how
	many Apple // programmers are they hiring nowadays?).

	BBSs
	~~~
	Sherwood Forest II and III, OSUNY -- I just thought they were the greatest
	systems ever.

	Pirate's Bay -- Run by Mr. KRACK-MAN, who considered himself the greatest Apple
	pirate that ever lived. It's still up, for all I know.

	The 2600 Magazine BBS -- Run on a piece of Apple BBS software called
	TBBS. It is there that I met David Flory.

	The Police Station -- Remember THAT one?

	The Matrix, IDI, Lunatic Labs -- Three great Bay Area Forum-PC boards.

	Catch-22 -- 25 Users, No Waiting!

	And, of course, net.telecom (the original), comp.risks, rec.arts.startrek...

	Memories
	~~~~~~~~
	Remember Alliance Teleconferencing? Nothing like putting the receiver
	down to go get something to eat, forgetting about it, coming back in 24 hours,
	and finding the conference still going on.

	Playing Wizardry and Rescue Raiders on my Apple //e until I lost the
	feeling in my fingers...

	Carding 13 child-sized Garfield sleeping bags to people I didn't
	particularly care for in high school...

	Calling Canadian DA Ops and playing a 2600Hz tone for them was always fun.

	Trashing all the local COs with The Mad Alchemist...

	My brush with greatness: I was riding BART home from school one night a
	few years ago when Steve Wozniak got onto my car with two of his kids. He was
	taking them to a Warriors game. I was the only person in the car that
	recognized him. He signed a copy of BYTE that I happened to have on me and we
	talked about his new venture, CL-9, the universal remote controller. (Do you
	know anybody who ever BOUGHT one of those?)

	....And now, for the question
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
	"Of the general population of phreaks you have met, would you consider
	most phreaks, if any, to be computer geeks?"

	Back in my Apple pirating days, I met quite a few young men who were
	definitely members of the Order of the Geek. However, I can count the number
	of true phreaks/hackers I have met personally on one hand. None of them are
	people I'd consider geeks, nerds, spazzes, dorks, etc. They're all people who
	live on the fringe and do things a bit differently -- how many LEGAL people do
	you know that have a nose ring? -- but they're all people I've respected.
	Well, let me take back what I just said. Dr. Strangelove looks kinda geeky in
	my opinion (my mother thinks he's cute, but then again she said that Sir
	Francis Drake is "cute" and when I told him that it bothered him to no end),
	but I consider him a good friend and a generally k-kool d00d. (I'm sure I'll
	be getting a voice call from him on that one...) The only phreak that I've
	ever taken a genuine disliking to was Oryan QUEST, but that was only because he
	was a pathological liar and a pest. Who knows, he might be a nice person now,
	so no offense intended, especially if he knows my home address.

	So, Anyway...

	-> Thanks for your time Shooting Shark.

	Crimson Death
	_______________________________________________________________________________