<story><title>‘We Got to Be Cool About This‘: An Oral History of the LØpht, Part 1</title><url>https://duo.com/decipher/an-oral-history-of-the-l0pht</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>madmax108</author><text>Man, this whole series is so well written. I remember back in the day, when lophtcrack, Medusa, Cain and Abel, and JackTheRipper along with massive  (for the time) rainbow tables were the tools of the trade (This was a little before internet exploits and Metasploit gained popularity). As a little script-kiddie, finding and running exploits on unsecured servers and machines, doing silly things like ARP poisoning in my high school lab network and bruteforcing zip files with passwords, oh such glorious times. I truly went from being a user of tech to a person with a hacker mindset, which has proved to be tremendously useful in my professional career.&lt;p&gt;I honestly feel that in the current day and age, if anyone tried the same stuff many of us got away with in the early 2000s (or 90s), then the punishment would be much much stricter. Not sure how that gets in the way of people learning by &amp;quot;banging things together till they work&amp;quot;, which was a major source of learning for me.&lt;p&gt;Damn, I feel old now!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fragmede</author><text>Those rose colored glasses seem to have forgotten Kevin Mitnick, and the accounting practices used to inflate the impression of the amount of damage he did. He was confined to solitary for eight months (out of five years served) due to fears that he could &amp;quot;start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The 90&amp;#x27;s in the school&amp;#x27;s computer lab may have felt differently if you escaped any sort of punishment for exploration, but the CFAA was first enacted in 1986 and the punishment for computer crimes have been disproportional since before then, owing to societal lack of understanding of how computers actually work.</text></comment>
<story><title>‘We Got to Be Cool About This‘: An Oral History of the LØpht, Part 1</title><url>https://duo.com/decipher/an-oral-history-of-the-l0pht</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>madmax108</author><text>Man, this whole series is so well written. I remember back in the day, when lophtcrack, Medusa, Cain and Abel, and JackTheRipper along with massive  (for the time) rainbow tables were the tools of the trade (This was a little before internet exploits and Metasploit gained popularity). As a little script-kiddie, finding and running exploits on unsecured servers and machines, doing silly things like ARP poisoning in my high school lab network and bruteforcing zip files with passwords, oh such glorious times. I truly went from being a user of tech to a person with a hacker mindset, which has proved to be tremendously useful in my professional career.&lt;p&gt;I honestly feel that in the current day and age, if anyone tried the same stuff many of us got away with in the early 2000s (or 90s), then the punishment would be much much stricter. Not sure how that gets in the way of people learning by &amp;quot;banging things together till they work&amp;quot;, which was a major source of learning for me.&lt;p&gt;Damn, I feel old now!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fpgaminer</author><text>I just finished playing the game Hacknet which simulates that nostalgic experience, to some extent.  Obviously it&amp;#x27;s oversimplified and gamified, but it&amp;#x27;s a fun little game; worth playing.  Its DLC, Labyrinths, even adds an IRC channel where you interact with your fellow hackers.</text></comment>