Black Hat

I've read several posts recently about what to do about the RIAA and other enemies of P2P. The term Black Hat seems to come up often as a last line of defense. I guess in the cyberworld these Delta Force among hackers are thought of along the same lines as nuclear deterrence. My question is, if these individuals exist, where did they learn their extraordinary skills? Also, have they ever before worked together to do something good for the online community? Do we have reason to believe that they can be counted on as allies? I hope the answers are positive, but as I heve never met an uber-hacker, I do not know. Do you?

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Originally posted by quasiantidisestablishmentarian@3 July 2003 - 03:29
I've read several posts recently about what to do about the RIAA and other enemies of P2P. The term Black Hat seems to come up often as a last line of defense. I guess in the cyberworld these Delta Force among hackers are thought of along the same lines as nuclear deterrence. My question is, if these individuals exist, where did they learn their extraordinary skills? Also, have they ever before worked together to do something good for the online community? Do we have reason to believe that they can be counted on as allies? I hope the answers are positive, but as I heve never met an uber-hacker, I do not know. Do you?

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can you get a smaller name?
it's mucking up the board as it is

p.s hopefully these guys will be able to save the world, who knows
i don't want to say anything bad about them in case they blow up my pc :P

I like my name. It is appropriately complicated and meaningless. When they asked for a username up to 32 characters long I thought I'd give it a shot. Although mine is only 30. Back to super-hacking, I guess I am just trying to seperate real from myth. I went to school with a lot of computer scientists and computer engineers and they would often romanticize about Gibsonesque cyber-cowboys, but none of them actually did any of that. Reading the headlines of any newspaper will tell you that the occasional super-hacker exists, because they were caught doing something really nasty. Yet, I assume these more self-interested individuals are not the heroes we are counting on. Are there really good (as in skilled) and really good (as in altruistic) hackers out there. Or is this a popular myth that we tell eachother to sleep better at night, when we know there are entities like the RIAA out to get us? I'm not asking for anyone to come out and say "Hey, I am a good-natured super-hacker, look at me!" just has anyone ever even heard reliable information about such people actually existing?

These people do actually exisit, no you will probably never meet them due to lack of intellegence asking who/where hackers are/is. Huge companies like Microsoft higher "ex-hackers"(you never get out of the profession) to protect their systems and servers from other hackers trying to gain knowledge from them. And yes hackers won't come out and say they are cause FBI/CIA/NSA/etc. have computers that can easily record stuff that peopl do, they're probably monitering this post and tracking it right now. Oh and ya they won't help the P2P people cause its really not in their benifit for one (unless you got money). :D

I would have to agree with ph33rm3 in the previous post. If there supposedly is a hacker that would help out people who operate and use these p2p networks.....they wouldnt really do much out of their way to create a program or do something to prevent any one of these organizations to getting in and lurking and probing.......simply because there is nobody to pay for the services. And, as we all know, if you want something done in this life....it usually takes some cash to get someone motivated.

Thank you both. I think that answers my question.

If you hear of "hackers" (a better word is cracker) on the news that did something big and were caught, you can hardly call them super-hackers as if they were super-hackers the wouldint have been caught, would they? The people you hear about on the news are script kiddies who probably just used some program to do their attacks and got lucky cause they worked.
Black hats are crackers, ie. they hack to destroy stuff, their nothing special, a person with minimum knowledge of network security/hacking could become one, there are many programs avaikable. You also get white hat hacker who are hackers who hack, destroy nothing, and inform the system admin of the vulnerability in their software, etc.
Yes there are "super-hackers" but you wont hear about these on the news, and as allready mentioned, they are usually employed by large companies like Microsoft.

Very simply, hacking isn't the answer, for us or for them. The RIAA claimed they would hack people's machine, which is highly illegal. The answer is to move to a filesharing program with encryption. :)

Ah why not hack into all these anti-piracy sites? They claim that they are going to hack into our computers. Eye for an eye sounds good.

And to any hackers that are reading this, the RIAAs site is up right now. Better take it down. :P

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Originally posted by nick_k@6 July 2003 - 10:37
If you hear of "hackers" (a better word is cracker) on the news that did something big and were caught, you can hardly call them super-hackers as if they were super-hackers the wouldint have been caught, would they? The people you hear about on the news are script kiddies who probably just used some program to do their attacks and got lucky cause they worked.
Black hats are crackers, ie. they hack to destroy stuff, their nothing special, a person with minimum knowledge of network security/hacking could become one, there are many programs avaikable. You also get white hat hacker who are hackers who hack, destroy nothing, and inform the system admin of the vulnerability in their software, etc.
Yes there are "super-hackers" but you wont hear about these on the news, and as allready mentioned, they are usually employed by large companies like Microsoft.

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Dont act like you know what your talking about. Your probably just some lame ass Sub7 script kiddie yourself. Not that I blame you, ya gotta start somewhere.

Like Jibbler said, the answer to our riaa problem isnt hacking. That just strengthens their point that we are thieves. In fact, hacking isnt the soultion for anything...

I know a super hacker. He would crack his own programs and write his own programs. He loved Kazaa and the P2P network. He was in my calculus class and would regularly bring in list of addresses and credit card numbers from Yahoo Shopping. He always told me to never buy anything from Yahoo shopping because it was very insecure. He F***ed up our schools network on several occasions, had keyloggers running on all of the school computers, and had access to all final exams and grade books.

He told me that he got his start here and moved up to bigger things.

who cares, the riaa is just something that is make believe like the boogy-man or michael jackon