Posts Tagged ‘hackers’

Late 90’s – The one interesting thing about looking at tech history is you can see trends. One trend I’ve been seeing in the last few days around the late 90’s was the amount of websites getting hacked. Groups like Legions of Underground, cArPaRtS nInJa TaSk FOrc3? and L|Z gained names for themselves over busting into other websites.

Then, in 1999, chairman of the President’s Council on Year 2000 Conversion: John Koskinen publicly pleads mercy with hackers to create a moratorium during the Y2K time.

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Other Day in Tech History items:

• Atari releases the 1200XL
• Charles Dickens publishes “A Christmas Carol”
• Cyrix files lawsuits over others who were using their patented technologies

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What, you can’t read that? Oh. O.K.

On this day, the word “hacking” was used in an issue of “the tech”, which is a massachusetts institute of technology newspaper.

Here is a snippet of the article:

Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Prof. Carlton Tucker, administrator of the Institute phone system…

Basically, hackers were tying up phone lines between Harvard and MIT.

1985 – Also on this day, Microsoft releases Windows 1.0, the 16 bit graphical system in 4 versions. 1.01, 1.02, 1.03 and 1.04. 1.02 and 1.03 were language versions, while 1.04 let people use new technologies like VGA monitors and a cool feature of “Multitasking” in MS-DOS. The OS only cost $99.99

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Other Technology History Facts:

• AT&T launches the Teletype
• Intel launches the Pentium 4

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2005 – In an effort to curb piracy, record companies began putting copy protection on the CD’s themselves.  The electronic marking would cause CD’s to error out if they tried to copy. Unfortunately this idea was riddled with problems. Some players couldn’t read the disks, other people would find ways around the copy protection, such as different brand drives. However, it was found that the XCP copy protection standard became a backdoor for hackers as viruses could be introduced through the software.

The announcement came ten days after Sony had secretly put this system on the shelves.

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Other Day in Tech History items:

• Remembrance of Veterans on Vetrans Day / WWI Memorial Day
• IBM 2980 Financial terminal
• The first OLPC order is placed
• Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Icahn debauchery cost $73 million.

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Not that that is anything new.

Reuters reports that Microsoft has announced that baddies are using vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office for Windows to recruit computers into botnets. The full story is here. An excerpt, including a link for help:

Hackers take advantage of the Office vulnerability by booby-trapping websites with malicious code that loads onto computers running Office software. Infected PCs are commandeered into a botnet, a network of hijacked computers. They are used for identity theft, spamming and other cybercrimes.

Microsoft did not say how many machines were attacked.

Users can prevent attacks by disabling functions within the Office software that allow it to work over the Web. Microsoft has posted a tool for doing that on its website — here.

Me, I use OpenOffice.

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May 29th 2008 – Comcast had a different type of attack. This one opened the eyes to how our records in ICANN were being handled. The infamous “Comcast Hack” was where hackers did not attack the servers themselves, but they found a way into Network Solutions and changed the DNS of the webpage. Once the DNS is changed, the homepage would then redirect to servers of their choosing.

Other historical notes – The Woodstock of the web. We also heard about the first computer patent and the Dell computer fraud. This is all on the Podcast

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Jury Duty – FAWM – Recording Machine & slight Buzz

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Of course, with the Holiday season, Technology news slows down a little. We still have a great list of history though. Including this article – On December 26th 1982, TIME Magazine does the unthinkable. They award the “Man of the Year” award for the first time to a non-human being. The PC received the honor this year. It was called the “greatest influence for good or evil.”

Other items in History – Hackers, Hackers, Hackers. The Transistor is demonstrated for the first time. Charles Darwin embarks on his famous voyage aboard the HMS Beagle and SELinux is released to the Open Source Community.

I also realized after the podcast that this marks the 100th Geekazine Quickcast.

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