Needing Information.

[Starshine]

I am working on a research paper regarding the creation and rise of computers and the rise of computer hackers.

The information I am having trouble researching and finding ( charts, graphics, spreadsheets ) are on personal computer usage per capita in, say 1985 compared to today.

Can anyone out there possibly help find some information that would shed some light on this for me?

Also, any information or close information ( can not be from Wiki - my professor made that bright and clear ) on the first ( or close to ) computer hacker or group? ( Year, person or group, what they did )

Thanks a bunch.

[sunils]

here are some of the links that i can find

http://www.frbsf.org/publications/ec.../wp06-18bk.pdf
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0880489.html
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0931441.html
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0873822.html
http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbook...e/uu19ie0e.htm


about hacking

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/994700.stm
http://pcworld.about.com/news/Apr102001id45764.htm
http://www.sptimes.com/Hackers/history.hacking.html
http://www.linuxhaxor.net/2007/08/14...ing-and-geeks/


these are the links that i could find now. Please send me a copy of that paper after it is finished. I am eager to read this.

[Sohail]

I found this on a website that maybe interesting to you... :-

"Hacking has been around for more than a century. In the 1870s, several teenagers were flung off the country's brand new phone system by enraged authorities. Here's a peek at how busy hackers have been in the past 35 years.

Early 1960s

University facilities with huge mainframe computers, like MIT's artificial intelligence lab, become staging grounds for hackers. At first, "hacker" was a positive term for a person with a mastery of computers who could push programs beyond what they were designed to do.

Early 1970s

John Draper
John Draper makes a long-distance call for free by blowing a precise tone into a telephone that tells the phone system to open a line. Draper discovered the whistle as a give-away in a box of children's cereal. Draper, who later earns the handle "Captain Crunch," is arrested repeatedly for phone tampering throughout the 1970s.

Yippie social movement starts YIPL/TAP (Youth International Party Line/Technical Assistance Program) magazine to help phone hackers (called "phreaks") make free long-distance calls.

Two members of California's Homebrew Computer Club begin making "blue boxes," devices used to hack into the phone system. The members, who adopt handles "Berkeley Blue" (Steve Jobs) and "Oak Toebark" (Steve Wozniak), later go on to found Apple Computer.

Early 1980s

Author William Gibson coins the term "cyberspace" in a science fiction novel called Neuromancer.

In one of the first arrests of hackers, the FBI busts the Milwaukee-based 414s (named after the local area code) after members are accused of 60 computer break-ins ranging from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The Hacker Quarterly cover Comprehensive Crime Control Act gives Secret Service jurisdiction over credit card and computer fraud.

Two hacker groups form, the Legion of Doom in the United States and the Chaos Computer Club in Germany.

2600: The Hacker Quarterly is founded to share tips on phone and computer hacking.

Late 1980s

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act gives more clout to federal authorities.

Computer Emergency Response Team is formed by U.S. defense agencies. Based at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, its mission is to investigate the growing volume of attacks on computer networks.

At 25, veteran hacker Kevin Mitnick secretly monitors the e-mail of MCI and Digital Equipment security officials. He is convicted of damaging computers and stealing software and is sentenced to one year in prison.

First National Bank of Chicago is the victim of a $70-million computer heist.

An Indiana hacker known as "Fry Guy" -- so named for hacking McDonald's -- is raided by law enforcement. A similar sweep occurs in Atlanta for Legion of Doom hackers known by the handles "Prophet," "Leftist" and "Urvile."

Early 1990s

After AT&T long-distance service crashes on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, law enforcement starts a national crackdown on hackers. The feds nab St. Louis' "Knight Lightning" and in New York grab Masters of Deception trio "Phiber Optik," " Acid Phreak" and "Scorpion." Fellow hacker "Eric Bloodaxe" is picked up in Austin, Texas.

Operation Sundevil, a special team of Secret Service agents and members of Arizona's organized crime unit, conducts raids in 12 major cities, including Miami.

A 17-month search ends in the capture of hacker Kevin Lee Poulsen ("Dark Dante"), who is indicted for stealing military documents.

Hackers break into Griffith Air Force Base, then pewwwte computers at NASA and the Korean Atomic Research Institute. Scotland Yard nabs "Data Stream," a 16-year-old British teenager who curls up in the fetal position when seized.

A Texas A&M professor receives death threats after a hacker logs on to his computer from off-campus and sends 20,000 racist e-mail messages using his Internet address.

Kevin Mitnick
In a highly publicized case, Kevin Mitnick is arrested (again), this time in Raleigh, N.C., after he is tracked down via computer by Tsutomu Shimomura at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Late 1990s

Hackers break into and deface federal Web sites, including the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Air Force, CIA, NASA and others.

Report by the General Accounting Office finds Defense Department computers sustained 250,000 attacks by hackers in 1995 alone.

A Canadian hacker group called the Brotherhood, angry at hackers being falsely accused of electronically stalking a Canadian family, break into the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Web site and leave message: "The media are liars." Family's own 15-year-old son eventually is identified as stalking culprit.

Hackers pierce security in Microsoft's NT operating system to illustrate its weaknesses.

Popular Internet search engine Yahoo! is hit by hackers claiming a "logic bomb" will go off in the PCs of Yahoo!'s users on Christmas Day 1997 unless Kevin Mitnick is released from prison. "There is no virus," Yahoo! spokeswoman Diane Hunt said.

1998

Anti-hacker ad runs during Super Bowl XXXII. The Network Associates ad, costing $1.3-million for 30 seconds, shows two Russian missile silo crewmen worrying that a computer order to launch missiles may have come from a hacker. They decide to blow up the world anyway.

In January, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics is inundated for days with hundreds of thousands of fake information requests, a hacker attack called "spamming."

Hackers break into United Nation's Children Fund Web site, threatening a "holocaust" if Kevin Mitnick is not freed.

Hackers claim to have broken into a Pentagon network and stolen software for a military satellite system. They threaten to sell the software to terrorists.

The U.S. Justice Department unveils National Infrastructure Protection Center, which is given a mission to protect the nation's telecommunications, technology and transportation systems from hackers.

Hacker group L0pht, in testimony before Congress, warns it could shut down nationwide access to the Internet in less than 30 minutes. The group urges stronger security measures. "

[sunils]

This was another article which i have kept in my system.

Prologue: The Real Programmers



In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.
That's not what they called themselves. They didn't call themselves `hackers', either, or anything in particular; the sobriquet `Real Programmer' wasn't coined until after 1980, retrospectively by one of their own. But from 1945 onward, the technology of computing attracted many of the world's brightest and most creative minds. From Eckert and Mauchly's first ENIAC computer onward there was a more or less continuous and self-conscious technical culture of enthusiast programmers, people who built and played with software for fun.
The Real Programmers typically came out of engineering or physics backgrounds. They were often amateur-radio hobbyists. They wore white socks and polyester shirts and ties and thick glasses and coded in machine language and assembler and FORTRAN and half a dozen ancient languages now forgotten.
From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, in the great days of batch processing and the ``big iron'' mainframes, the Real Programmers were the dominant technical culture in computing. A few pieces of revered hacker folklore date from this era, including various lists of Murphy's Laws and the mock-German ``Blinkenlights'' poster that still graces many computer rooms.
Some people who grew up in the `Real Programmer' culture remained active into the 1990s and even past the turn of the 21st century. Seymour Cray, designer of the Cray line of supercomputers, was among the greatest. He is said once to have toggled an entire operating system of his own design into a computer of his own design through its front-panel switches. In octal. Without an error. And it worked. Real Programmer macho supremo.
The `Real Programmer' culture, though, was heavily associated with batch (and especially batch scientific) computing. It was eventually eclipsed by the rise of interactive computing, the universities, and the networks. These gave birth to another engineering tradition that, eventually, would evolve into today's open-source hacker culture.


The Early Hackers



The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1. The Signals and Power Committee of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club adopted the machine as their favorite tech-toy and invented programming tools, slang, and an entire surrounding culture that is still recognizably with us today. These early years have been examined in the first part of Steven Levy's book Hackers [Levy].
MIT's computer culture seems to have been the first to adopt the term `hacker'. The Tech Model Railroad Club's hackers became the nucleus of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the world's leading center of AI research into the early 1980s. Their influence was spread far wider after 1969, the first year of the ARPAnet.
The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network. It was built by the Defense Department as an experiment in digital communications, but grew to link together hundreds of universities and defense contractors and research laboratories. It enabled researchers everywhere to exchange information with unprecedented speed and flexibility, giving a huge boost to collaborative work and tremendously increasing both the pace and intensity of technological advance.
But the ARPAnet did something else as well. Its electronic highways brought together hackers all over the U.S. in a critical mass; instead of remaining in isolated small groups each developing their own ephemeral local cultures, they discovered (or re-invented) themselves as a networked tribe.
The first intentional artifacts of the hacker culture—the first slang lists, the first satires, the first self-conscious discussions of the hacker ethic—all propagated on the ARPAnet in its early years. In particular, the first version of the Jargon File developed as a cross-net collaboration during 1973–1975. This slang dictionary became one of the culture's defining documents. It was eventually published as "The Hacker's Dictionary" in 1983; that first version is out of print, but a revised and expanded version is New Hacker's Dictionary [Raymond].
Hackerdom flowered at the universities connected to the net, especially (though not exclusively) in their computer science departments. MIT's AI and LCS labs made it first among equals from the late 1960s. But Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) and Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) became nearly as important. All were thriving centers of computer science and AI research. All attracted bright people who contributed great things to the hacker culture, on both the technical and folkloric levels.
To understand what came later, though, we need to take another look at the computers themselves; because the AI Lab's rise and its eventual fall were both driven by waves of change in computing technology.
Since the days of the PDP-1, hackerdom's fortunes had been woven together with Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series of minicomputers. DEC pioneered commercial interactive computing and time-sharing operating systems. Because their machines were flexible, powerful, and relatively cheap for the era, lots of universities bought them.
Cheap time-sharing was the medium the hacker culture grew in, and for most of its lifespan the ARPAnet was primarily a network of DEC machines. The most important of these was the PDP-10, first released in 1967. The 10 remained hackerdom's favorite machine for almost fifteen years; TOPS-10 (DEC's operating system for the machine) and MACRO-10 (its assembler) are still remembered with nostalgic fondness in a great deal of slang and folklore.
MIT, though it used the same PDP-10s as everyone else, took a slightly different path; they rejected DEC's software for the PDP-10 entirely and built their own operating system, the fabled ITS.
ITS stood for `Incompatible Time-sharing System' which gives one a pretty good fix on the MIT hackers' attitude (technically, the name was a play on its predecessor, the Compatible Time-Sharing System CTSS). They wanted it their way. Fortunately for all, MIT's people had the intelligence to match their arrogance. ITS, quirky and eccentric and occasionally buggy though it always was, hosted a brilliant series of technical innovations and still arguably holds the record as the single time-sharing system in longest continuous use.
ITS itself was written in assembler, but many ITS projects were written in the AI language LISP. LISP was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day; in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. LISP freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.
Many of the ITS culture's technical creations are still alive today; the EMACS program editor is perhaps the best-known. And much of ITS's folklore is still `live' to hackers, as one can see in the Jargon File.
SAIL and CMU weren't asleep, either. Many of the cadre of hackers that grew up around SAIL's PDP-10 later became key figures in the development of the personal computer and today's window/icon/mouse software interfaces. Meanwhile hackers at CMU were doing the work that would lead to the first practical large-scale applications of expert systems and industrial robotics.
Another important node of the culture was XEROX PARC, the famed Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of groundbreaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice, windows, and icons style of software interface was invented there. So was the laser printer, and the local-area network; and PARC's series of D machines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the 1980s by a decade. Sadly, these prophets were without honor in their own company; so much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place characterized by developing brilliant ideas for everyone else. Their influence on hackerdom was pervasive.
The ARPAnet and the PDP-10 cultures grew in strength and variety throughout the 1970s. The facilities for electronic mailing lists that had been used to foster cooperation among continent-wide special-interest groups were increasingly also used for more social and recreational purposes. DARPA deliberately turned a blind eye to all the technically `unauthorized' activity; it understood that the extra overhead was a small price to pay for attracting an entire generation of bright young people into the computing field.
Perhaps the best-known of the `social' ARPAnet mailing lists was the SF-LOVERS list for science-fiction fans; it is still very much alive today, in fact, on the larger `Internet' that ARPAnet evolved into. But there were many others, pioneering a style of communication that would later be commercialized by for-profit time-sharing services like CompuServe, GEnie and Prodigy (and later still dominated by AOL).
Your historian first became involved with the hacker culture in 1977 through the early ARPAnet and science-fiction fandom. From then onward, I personally witnessed and participated in many of the changes described here.

[sgc.web.dev]

Sunils, that is some interesting stuff. You have been keeping all of that around?

I suppose you did some research for school, too?

[sunils]

To correct you, currently i have finished my graduation last year and now a software engineer in a MNC company. I have presented papers in college level in this particular area and hence did a good research.

[kkenny]

pretty interesting info for this report.

Starshine, would you be willing to release a public copy of your report when you're done? I'd also be eager to read it x]

[frankfriend]

On the question of numnbers - try a query on dogpile.com .I ran one on Google and got the data pasted below.
It is on www.c-i-a.com/pr1296.htm [OK its Computer Industry Almanac, not the other CIA!]


December 16, 1996 - The increase in computer usage has been phenomenal in the last 20 years. The computers per capita table shows the explosion in computer usage. In 1965 there was only one computer for each 10,000 people in the United States. In the next ten years, computers per capita increased nine-fold. Then came the PC. In the following ten years, from 1975 to 1985, the computer density grew 100-fold as the computers per capita zoomed to 9 per 100 people! In the next ten years, the computers per capita grew four-fold to 36.5 computers per 100 people. At year-end 1996, there are 40 computers per 100 people in the U.S. with PCs accounting for 38 of these or over 95% of the total computers in use.
Year-End 1975 1980 1985 1989 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1997 2000
Computers in Use: US (#M) 0.2 3.3 21.5 48 62 68 77 86 96 117 160
US Computers per 1,000 People 0.9 14 90 192 245 267 297 329 365 433 580
Computers in Use: Worldwide (#M) 0.3 5.2 38 97 137 159 187 219 257 338 557
Computers per 1,000 People: WW 0.07 1.2 7.8 18.5 25.3 29.1 33.7 38.8 44.9 57.0 90.3

The computer density will continue to grow strongly in the 1990s. Currently the computer density per 100 people increases by about 3.5 units per year in the U.S. This trend will put the computers per capita at 55 to 60 per 100 people by year-end 2000. If the emerging application-specific computers such as NCs, WebTVs and information appliances are moderately successful, the computers per capita will hit the 55 range by the 21st century. If these inexpensive and easy-to-use computers really take off and speech recognition and virtual reality live up to expectations, the computer density could even approach 60 to 70 per 100 people when the 21st century begins.

Best regards

[Sohail]

I have another one :-

Living the High-Tech Life

So, why do they do it? What motivates a suburban teen to hack into a university computer to chat with 40-something garbage collectors, or to compromise bank systems and steal credit card numbers? It’s hard to know for sure. But one thing’s certain: Not all hackers [wiki] are created equal. As technology has evolved, its human predators have evolved, multiplied, and diversified with it. Today, there are "phreakers [wiki]," who break into major telephone systems to make free phone calls, as well as "crackers [wiki]," who decode encrypted computer systems (often those belonging to major corporations) with alarming ease. Then there are your "spammers [wiki] " - the ones who remotely tap into "zombie" computers to send marketing emails to millions of unsuspecting dupes - and "phishers [wiki]," who con you with look-alike Web sites to steal your account information. Some of them are simply pranksters, out to do nothing more than upload a few erotic http://www.neatorama.com/images onto a government Web site just to prove they can. Others use their powers for good instead of evil, actually working for security agencies and helping define hacking as a worthwhile, productive endeavor. Yet, every hacker seems to have one underlying urge: to exist on the fringes of society and reveal vulnerabilities to all those coloring inside the lines. And it’s been that way wince the dawn of the computer age.
Super Phreaking

In the 1960s, computers were Pontiac-size behemoths encased in glass or housed in wax-floor laboratories accessible only to keycard-wielding geeks. The term "computer scientist" implied a Princeton degree and a government pedigree. Only accredited professionals were allowed the privilege of programming these powerful computers to track university enrollments, analyze medical anomalies, or monitor traffic conditions. Everyone else - the ostensibly computer-illiterate general populace - could only sit back and absorb the impact from the sidelines.


Cap’n Crunch Whistle, now a collector’s item.

This kind of elitism stuck in John Draper’s craw. A Vietnam veteran who loved to tinker with electronics, Draper [wiki] happened upon an opportunity to take the tech bigwigs down a peg. In 1972, one of Draper’s friends tipped him off to a curious discovery: a toy whistle from a Cap’n Crunch cereal box could be modified to emit a 2,600-hertz tone - the precise frequency needed to authorize Bell System long distance calls, thus making them free. For Draper, this unlocked a goldmine of vulnerabilities in major phone company systems, and to exploit it, he developed what was known as a blue box [wiki]. At the push of a button, Draper’s invention could produce a number of different sound frequencies to manipulate the telephone route and switching systems. Dubbed "Cap’n Crunch," Draper soon found himself the unlikely father of phone phreaking and - arguably - the founder of the modern hack. Interestingly, he shared the news of his invention with Steve Wozniak [wiki], future cofounder of Apple Computer, at a potluck supper for the People’s Computer Club in Menlo Park, Calif., where the two enjoyed a prankster rapport. Wozniak later used the blue box with his pal and future Apple head honcho Steve Jobs [wiki] to make untraceable prank phone calls, including one to the Pope.

Back then, phone phreaking offered hackers a potent allure. It meant unraveling a mystery and sharing the results with friends. It wasn’t as much about the nefarious phone exploitation as it was about understanding the complexity. Draper, for example, would revel in routing calls through multiple countries just to talk to his neighbor. But no matter how harmless some of his work might have been, Draper did damage to the profit margins of some major companies. In 1976, he was arrested on toll fraud charges and spent four months in prison.

Today, the blue box still works on some foreign phone lines and a few toll calls, but Draper says phone companies have become increasingly adept at spotting illegal usage. The 2,600-hertz tone - now almost meaningless in an age of fiber optics - is a kind of phone phreaking mascot. It even inspired the name of the well-known hacker rag, 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Meanwhile, Draper has become a god to the hacking masses. To an extent, the concepts of beating the telephone conglomerates, scanning for security flaws, and exploiting a hack as far as possible all originate with Draper. He’s promoted the mystique with a hacker portal (www.webcrunchers.com - link not working?) that documents his early days. But now he’s working as a security software developer and running a security site (www.crunchtv.net) that seems to disavow hacker mantras.
The Birth of the Worm.

After Draper, there was a time shift in computing. While phreakers were still blowing whistles into phone receivers, a new type of delinquent emerged: the cracker. By the late 1980s, the home PC had become more prevalent but large corporations still cornered the market on the technology. In response, hackers tried even harder to get in on the fun. Hacker clubs surged in popularity - most notably, Germany’s Chaos Computer Club, a kind of think tank that fought for free access to computer infrastructure, and Masters of Deception [wiki], a New York hackers club fronted by the Radio Shack hack himself, Mark Abene. Code tinkering for sport was becoming nothing short of an epidemic, and in 1986, the U.S. government tried to thwart the problem by passing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

Ironically, computers were about to fall victims to crime and abuse never before imagined. In 1988, Robert Tappan Morris [wiki], a Cornell University grad student (and son of the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center), created the first Internet "worm [wiki]," a destructive program that replicates itself and moves through a computer network at breakneck speed. Partly to demonstrate his cracking prowess to classmates and partly to show how an MIT security system was vulnerable to attack, Morris wrote a software program that exploited a glitch in a Unix email program. Allegedly, Morris intended the worm program to infect only the MIT network. But during a 12-hour period, it spread rapidly, infecting thousands of systems and forcing some universities to shut down their computers altogether.

Shocked by how quickly the worm was spreading, Morris helped a friend send out an anonymous message with instructions for system administrators to stop the plaque. But it was too late; the worm had propagated beyond control. In the end, every university affected had to spend thousands of dollars to fix its infected computers. Morris became the first person indicted under the CFAA when the U.S. government fined him $10,000 and sentenced him to probation and community service. However, the source code for the worm remains in wide circulation today. Almost 18 years after the incident, hackers are still using Morris’ worm as a starting point for new viruses.
When Code Goes Criminal

By the 1990s, hacking had clearly transitioned from the child’s play of Cap’n Crunch toys to a brave new world of tech crime. And nothing underscored that shift more than when Kevin Mitnick [wiki] became the first hacker to earn an FBI Most Wanted distinction.

In 1976, while other Americans were celebrating the centennial, Mitnick was sweeping floors at a Radio Shack - not because he loved cleaning, but because he loved using their computers at night to hone his cracking skills. Before long, he’d developed a habit of unraveling computer code in order to see how an operating system worked or (later) how a cell phone connected to a network. Combine that kind of know-how and enthusiasm with a gregarious personality, and you’ve got a problem. Mitnick once called Motorola and charmed them into sharing their source code for free - information he promptly used to break into the computer systems at Motorola, Nokia, Sun Microsystem, and Fujitsu.


Kevin Mitnick’s Wanted Poster: First ever for computer crime.

The New York Times broke the story about Mitnick’s activities that ultimately led to his 1995 arrest and a five-and-a-half-year prison term. However, there remains widespread misunderstanding (and controversy) about the case. Mitnick denies causing any serious damage to the computer systems he hacked, though he admits sneaking into private networks was wrong. Regardless, the government - still uncertain of what hackers were capable of - treated him as a seriously dangerous man. Authorities were bombarded with claims that Mitnick had done everything from wiretapping the FBI to hacking his way ito NORAD. (He denies those allegations, as well.) They assumed he could crack anything, even fearing he could launch nuclear bombs or shut down the Internet by whistling into a phone. In fact, after he was released from prison, Mitnick was barred from owning or using any electronic communications devices. When he played the role of a computer whiz on a 2001 episode of "Alias," the producers would only allow him access to a dummy computer.

Mitnick has influenced an entire generation of hackers with his innovative and stealthy cracking tactics, such as using IRC (Internet Relay Chat) [wiki] technology, an Internet conferencing system. He’s also written treatises stating his belief that the future of hacking lies in "social engineering," in which sensitive computer and coding information is not obtained through people’s computers, but from the persons themselves, via false emails and the like. But Mitnick’s greatest legacy might be in setting a good example. Today, he’s on the straight-and-narrow. The master hacker now spends about 25 percent of his time earning primo consulting fees helping fellow specialists break into "secure" systems in order to show companies how their networks are vulnerable.

Hope this helps...

[Starshine]

Thank you everyone for the assistance.

After a few days of gathering info and a ton of reading, I did a report - but I feel it doesn't match the level of writing I could of really put in it if I tried harder. To be honest, my professor was a pain in the ass, and I stopped caring after a certain point and wanted to just turn it in.

http://www.globalplush.net/Hackers.doc
http://www.globalplush.net/mgcybercrimes.ppt

Its not my best work, but its there. One is my written paper, and the other is the powerpoint presentation I had to make to go with it. I already know its not "great", but would like your thoughts.