Is your son a computer hacker? (2001)

In the early 00s my hyper conservative helicopter parents found my Livejournal where they discovered I was into &quot;hacking&quot; and social activities they didn&#x27;t approve of.<p>They eventually confronted me and said I must have all internet postings passed through them in the future, or shut it all down.<p>What they didn&#x27;t realize is the modem PCI card in their desktop was a LAN-over-RJ12 card hooked through the walls directly to my machine where I maintained the always on dialup connection and served it to them.<p>I had a complete MITM on all their internet traffic.<p>After their demands were made, I simply served them fake copies of all my online web presences that revealed final messages that I was closing them down to respect the wishes of my parents.<p>The rest of the world saw the continually updated versions, and I was never caught.<p>Now I work in infosec.

&gt;If your son has requested a new &quot;processor&quot; from a company called &quot;AMD&quot;, this is genuine cause for alarm. AMD is a third-world based company who make inferior, &quot;knock-off&quot; copies of American processor chips. They use child labor extensively in their third world sweatshops, and they deliberately disable the security features that American processor makers, such as Intel, use to prevent hacking. AMD chips are never sold in stores, and you will most likely be told that you have to order them from internet sites. Do not buy this chip! This is one request that you must refuse your son, if you are to have any hope of raising him well.<p>Hahaha. 2001 was pretty good.

Ahahahaha.<p>I remember (vaguely) pinging AOL&#x27;s irc servers with hays cmdset commands and as a result my parents getting a letter to the effect that I was a computer criminal and we were on some &#x27;blacklist&#x27; forever, fortunately this apparently blacklist didn&#x27;t seem to be shared between ISPs so I was back causing chaos within days &gt;_&lt;<p>And now here I am, mid thirties, children, and I wonder if I would let my kid play DOOM when he is 8 or 9.. I think I&#x27;ll let him play the original ones, but the newer games seem to be much more intense (maybe that&#x27;s just down to the graphics&#x2F;music?)..<p>Or I just let him play everything.. I dunno, grand theft auto (granted, the top down one) did me no harm when I was around puberty heh...

<i>8. Is your son obsessed with &quot;Lunix&quot;?</i><p><i>BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War.</i><p>...<p><i>Lunix is extremely dangerous software, and cannot be removed without destroying part of your hard disk surface.</i>

Ah, a classic! I remember reading this as a kid thinking it was sincere and just getting madder and madder as I read

My only lament with this is that the link prominently has ‘humor’ in it, so I can&#x27;t subject unsuspecting friends to the text. Guess I&#x27;m off to one of the ‘archive’ sites, with more cryptic urls.<p>Edit: here it is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;e0diF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;e0diF</a><p>Or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20040612092245&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adequacy.org&#x2F;public&#x2F;stories&#x2F;2001.12.2.42056.2147.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20040612092245&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adequa...</a>

One of the finest trolls Adequacy.org produced, and that&#x27;s not a small pool nor an easy race to call.

&quot;If your son is using Quake, you should make hime understand that this is not acceptable to you. You should ensure all the firearms in your house are carefully locked away, and have trigger locks installed. You should also bring your concerns to the attention of his school.&quot;<p>Holy moly!

<i>&gt;DOSing involves gaining access to the &quot;command prompt&quot; on other people&#x27;s machines, and using it to tie up vital internet services.</i><p>I didn&#x27;t like most of it, but that bit cracked me right up.

Is your son or daughter safe from the Russian menace &quot;Tetris&quot;? Some common symptoms include them attempting to organize their room into well fitting shapes such as neatly fitting boxes.<p>True Hackers use Compuserve or Prodigy.

Amazing! &quot;If your son has requested a new &quot;processor&quot; from a company called &quot;AMD&quot;, this is genuine cause for alarm. AMD is a third-world based company who make inferior, &quot;knock-off&quot; copies of American processor chips. They use child labor extensively in their third world sweatshops, and they deliberately disable the security features that American processor makers, such as Intel, use to prevent hacking. AMD chips are never sold in stores, and you will most likely be told that you have to order them from internet sites. Do not buy this chip! This is one request that you must refuse your son, if you are to have any hope of raising him well. &quot;

I did some phone phreaking when I was a kid. Wrote a Basic program to control the modem to randomly try out local numbers that can call long distance because most of the cool BBS with lots of warez were long distance at that time.<p>It went well for a while. But then one of my parents’ friends called my home and couldn’t get through because my program ran for hours tying up the line. He called the phone company to complain. The phone company investigated and my parents got mad at me, and that’s the end of my phreaking career. I was mad at that friend for snitching.

Oh man, I&#x27;m lucky my father never would have believed this stuff. In 2001, I was putting together tens of 486 and 386 based PCs out of a heap of old parts donated by a family friend and the neighbors thought I was some kind of hacker.<p>I fondly remember dad spending his tax refund to buy me a brand new Dell the next year, and coming home from work to find me at the kitchen table with it in parts. He said nothing at first, but from the look in his eyes, it took him about 30-40 seconds to remember that I knew what I was doing already.

Adequacy.org is just... it&#x27;s from a different generation of the Internet. As someone who read this close to publication, and was fifteen at the time... what a read, haha.

Nah. My son just listens to a lot of Manson, plays a lot of Quake, and has penchant for stylish trenchcoats. He&#x27;s a good kid.<p>He would never become a dirty hacker.

This constant linking to other things is a bit annoying. I found most of them are older books. I clicked the spanking link to maybe find a book on why you should&#x2F;shouldn&#x27;t spank your children and instead got a porn site.<p>Who is this guy?

What scares me is that I can picture some parents having read this and thinking it was good, serious advice.

15 year old me read this headline as - how to be a hacker - do everything they&#x27;re warning you about in here

&gt;Popular hacker software includes &quot;Comet Cursor&quot;, &quot;Bonzi Buddy&quot; and &quot;Flash&quot;<p>OK i have to admit. This made me laugh.

Can we get away from the politics and get back to the topic at hand? The dangers of Quake as a hacker training ground for young impressionable minds?<p>Don’t get me started on the potential pitfalls of AMD processors.<p>Related story: I one time almost got our internet shutoff by trying to telnet into various ISP (EarthLink) IPs when I was like 13.

In an age of &quot;post-truth&quot;, out of control &quot;political correctness&quot; and all the other daemons, it&#x27;s hard to read this and even realise it is supposed to be satire.

Ha, I was one of the editors of Adequacy.org back in the day, my &quot;Not Just Harmless Fun&quot; story was the second most commented on the site after this one. My name is even there on the Wikipedia article thanks to the &quot;naked and petrified&quot; guy getting annoyed with us at one point IIRC.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;gWskS" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;gWskS</a><p>This story got so much traffic it broke the site numerous times and in the end we had to disable commenting entirely, so it&#x27;s entirely possible it would have had more responses if our server had been able to handle it.

Covered by Martin Sargent of TechTV here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=nkLtXfsPqVQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=nkLtXfsPqVQ</a>

A visual 1993 guide: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;KhUINw1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;KhUINw1</a>

Now this brings back some memories. I remember finding this when I was still a teenager and found it funny. I cannot really remember if I thought that this was legit, even it looks like a joke now. It could have been written by an adult, when looking from teenagers point of view. After all, adults had some stupid rules.

I&#x27;ve looked for this off and on for a long time. What a relic. It belongs in a museum.<p>Thank you so much for finding it.

A true classic, thanks for reminding me of this article.<p>If I remember correctly, the &quot;hacking manuals&quot; section is what inspired my reading for much of middle school. I wonder how many other 12-year-olds turned in a book report on <i>Neuromancer</i> to a horrified teacher because of this post?

The line about &quot;The Cathedral and the Bazaar&quot; slayed me.

Wow, amazing satire. Can someone provide some context - what is this website? I tried to go to Front Page but I think we&#x27;re hugging the site to death.

Playing Quake doesn&#x27;t make you a hacker, it makes you rad as fuck. But if they play Rocket Arena, your child is a G.G. Allin-level lunatic.

And they grow up to teach computer hacking classes to sysadmins and law enforcement.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sans.org&#x2F;cyber-security-courses&#x2F;hacker-techniques-exploits-incident-handling&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sans.org&#x2F;cyber-security-courses&#x2F;hacker-technique...</a>

Did he ask for one of these for his birthday? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;surplus.gov.ab.ca&#x2F;OA&#x2F;ItemDetail.aspx?AuctionID=31633" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;surplus.gov.ab.ca&#x2F;OA&#x2F;ItemDetail.aspx?AuctionID=31633</a>

I&#x27;m assuming that this is obviously satire. Looking at some of the comments on HN tho, it makes me feel like it might not be. Please correct me if I&#x27;m wrong.

&gt;does your son use Quake<p>I lost it.

If your son can backtrace a firewall through a series of tubes, he&#x27;s definitely a hacker

I remember having read this back then. I can&#x27;t believe 20 years have passed...

It&#x27;s a bit sad how many of the links in the article don&#x27;t work anymore.

I can&#x27;t tell if this was legit fear, outright propaganda or satire. Having had a computer in my life since the age of 8, this seems like one hilarious cliche on top of another, the kind of thing you&#x27;d expect to see as an ad playing in the background of the 1995 cult classic: Hackers :D

I am not sure if it was a satire or an actual article from someone concerned.

&gt; I attend their teen parties with them to ensure no drinking or alcohol is on the premises. I keep a fatherly eye on the CDs they listen to and the shows they watch, the company they keep and the books they read. You could say I&#x27;m a model parent.<p>Um, no, not a model parent. Draconian.

I remember reading this in 2001 ... I swear I read this on theonion.ca...

This is hilarious!! I met almost all the list criteria and turned out ok.

Old Gold. This is what I grew up imagining what all hackers are like.

&quot;son&quot;<p>Because women can&#x27;t be hackers, I guess?

Wait, this is article isn&#x27;t sarcastic?

oldie but such a classic

At Mark Zuckerberg&#x27;s school I remember a story about him getting in trouble for PHP. The school had a zero tolerance drug policy and PHP was confused with PCP.

The Linux being an illegal operating system is only a slight exaggeration of the FUD being put out by Microsoft at the time.<p>Any time Microsoft publicly talks about their love and support of Linux, someone in the room should point out their multi-pronged, multi-year, highly-funded, campaign to poison the well.

&quot;invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War&quot;<p>That should be a dead giveaway.

&gt; If your son has requested a new &quot;processor&quot; from a company called &quot;AMD&quot;, this is genuine cause for alarm. AMD is a third-world based company who make inferior, &quot;knock-off&quot; copies of American processor chips. They use child labor extensively in their third world sweatshops, and they deliberately disable the security features that American processor makers, such as Intel, use to prevent hacking. AMD chips are never sold in stores, and you will most likely be told that you have to order them from internet sites. Do not buy this chip! This is one request that you must refuse your son, if you are to have any hope of raising him well.<p>I can’t tell if this post is serious or satire? Was this actually the consensus back in 2001?

Alternate questionnaire.<p>Does your child have interests outside of sports and video games? Does your child work independently on projects? Does your child look outside the box and solves difficult challenges? Does your child question the status quo and seeks to find answers outside of their domain?<p>If you answered Yes to any of these questions then you are a good parent. Just make sure they aren&#x27;t doing anything illegal and they will turn out okay.

The first few sentences were okay-ish, but the more I read,the more it sounded just plain absurd,border line controlling behaviour+ lots of silly assumptions.<p>Going back to the topic itself, the vast majority of parents wouldn&#x27;t even know where to start, not even mentioning if a kid has really became a haxor of sorts. Taking away computers, sending them out to the church,or doing others &#x27;let&#x27;s fix this quickly the adult way&#x27; things unlikely to help. I&#x27;m not a hacker but by the time I was 16 I was doing things on computer my parents won&#x27;t ever comprehend or know how to put an end to it. By the time I&#x27;m 18,nobody can say anything to me anymore.<p>The only real solution to this is to build trust in the family in a way that kids would know that no matter how bad they screwed it up, parents won&#x27;t go after them but will work with them trying to undo it or at least learn from those actions so they won&#x27;t happen again.