<nettime> [rop@xs4all.nl: ScRiPt KiDdY MaNuAl To HaL2001]

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

To nettime by permission from the author...


----- Forwarded message from Rop Gonggrijp <rop@xs4all.nl> -----

Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 11:31:41 +0200
To: discussion@hippiesfromhell.org
Subject: ScRiPt KiDdY MaNuAl To HaL2001



I wrote a small text for HAL. It will show up in the programme booklet
and on the site. I though some of you might enjoy it.

Grtz,

Rop


----------------------------------------------------------------------



COPS, CRIMES and HAL2001

  or

ScRiPt KiDdY MaNuAl To HaL2001



When you arrive at HAL2001 and look around you, you may feel this is
an ideal place to do script-kiddie things. I mean: with 1 GB of
bandwidth coming almost all the way to your tent, a simple ping-flood
is a mighty weapon. And with all these people around, there's bound to
be someone within 10 meters that knows how to get root on that
webhosting farm you found this morning.

You may have also noticed all these other people around you. Most of
them seem to be in some kind of different world. Most noticably,
they're not constantly bragging about how many machines they have
installed Stacheldraht on. When they talk about computer security you
often don't understand, and they keep talking about vague political
things a lot of the time. That's us. We are the rest of the hacker
community. Weve been here for a while now, so you would probably just
refer to most of us as "these old people". That's OK.

We feel there are important things going on in the world today. Things
worth fighting against. Governments and large corporations are
basically taking over and are in the process of building mechanisms of
control. That may sound difficult or weird, but think of new laws that
allow instantaneous monitoring of anyone. Think of computer databases
that know where everyone is in realtime. Think of cameras everywhere.
Think of making you pay every time, for everything you watch or listen
to. Think of your MP3 collection. Think of prison


- Making us all look bad

Hey, let's not kid eachother: we weren't all that good when we were
kids. But right now, powerful people all over the world would like to
paint a picture of HAL2001 as a gathering of dangerous individuals out
to destroy. While it may seem cool to have powerful people think of
you as dangerous, you're only serving their purpose if you deface
websites from here, or perform the mother of all dDOS attacks. You're
helping the hardliners that say we are no good. They don't care about
the websites you deface. They don't care about the dDOS attacks. Heck,
their leadership doesn't even know how to hold a mouse. They care
about making us all look like a threat, so they can get the public
support needed to lock us all up.


- Landing you in trouble

But if you don't care about any of the above, here's another reason
not to do bad things at HAL: there is almost no place on earth where
the odds of getting arrested are stacked against you as bad as at
HAL2001. Members of the dutch law enforcement community (yes: cops)
are attending in large numbers. And public perception is that they
haven't arrested enough people for computer crimes recently. So they
are under a lot of pressure to arrest someone. Anyone....

Because few people have been convicted here, there is a notion that
the cops in The Netherlands do not take this seriously. But defacing a
site or doing Denial of Service are serious crimes here, and you may
not be going home for quite a while if you're arrested here. Being
arrested at HAL makes your case a "big deal", no matter how little may
have actually happened. This means they are less likely to let you off
with a slap on the wrist.

And if HAL is anything like its predecessors, intelligence people from
internal security agencies of most industrialised nations are walking
around, and will see if anyone from their country is sticking their
head out doing naughty things. HAL is an excellent place to become
visible, in many different and often interesting ways.


- Getting us all disconnected

Just like at HIP97, the authorities have pre-signed orders ready and
waiting to cut our link to the world if the HAL network becomes a
source of too many problems. Yes, you read it right: cut the link.
100% packet loss.

HAL2001 has some of the worlds best system administrators monitoring
our link to see if everything runs smooth. Some of these people
already had a deep understanding of computer security issues before
you were even born. And *ofcourse* they are monitoring to see if
anyone is causing problems, either to our own network operations, or
to the outside world.

So do us all and yourself a favour, and please don't be stupid. And if
you still insist on causing trouble, think of this: if you do manage
to get us all diconnected, maybe you should hope the cops get to you
first.


- Growing up

If you have it in you, now would be an excellent time to grow up. Live
a life in the hacker community that goes beyond defacing websites and
performing dDoS attacks. The post script-kiddie existence offers many
rewards: you might have feeling you've done something useful more
often, people won't look at you funny, and you might even get to meet
girls.

Perhaps even more importantly: we as a community _need_ you to grow
up. As we said: Governments and large corporations are taking control
of our world at alarming speed. Hackers are more likely to understand
what's going on, and to do something about it. Which is one reason why
they are being demonized by parties seeking to monitor the whole
population's every move. Many privacy enhancing technologies still
need to be built, and a whole new generation needs to be made aware
that their freedoms are being dismantled. Your help would be greatly
appreciated.

----- End forwarded message -----

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