Hacking Away : Computer Fiends Wring Magic From Keyboards

SUBJECT FILE: Hackers. Computer hackers.

DEFINE: Misperceived as an electronic subculture of humans who noodle at computers 40 hours a day--subsist on Cokes and Chinese takeout food--typically young, smart males who rarely become nose guards--often found at schools whose initials end in T for Tech--nerds with acne who devise fiendish booby traps to blow the fuses of the republic’s vital computer systems.

ENTER: Caution. Don’t believe everything you read. Hackers are more likely a national treasure.

Seated at a terminal in the computer lab at UC Berkeley, Jef (one “f” has been sacrificed for aesthetic purity) Poskanzer, a longhair of 30 years, is poised like Vladimir Horowitz about to wring magic from a keyboard.

Plockety-plock-plock. Suddenly on the screen appears a detailed portrait of the moon. Every 20 minutes throughout the 28-day lunar cycle the portrait changes to update the sunlight’s progression from fingernail sliver to complete illumination at full moon. Poskanzer programmed the computer to do this during several nights when the machines usually doze.

Neat.

But why did Poskanzer do this? For about the same reasons that Michelangelo painted ceilings, Columbus went sailing or Hillary-Tenzing worried up the ice of Mt. Everest.

“What use is a newborn baby?” replied Ben Franklin when a rain-soaked fellow onlooker asked him in Paris in 1783 what possible purpose Jacques-Alexandre-Cesar Charles could have had in mind in launching a huge balloon up into the clouds.

Poskanzer’s moon is an intellectual descendant of that balloon and is, in the purest sense of the term, a hack.

Hacking can be called an attitude toward problem solving, a human urge to outwit conventional wisdom, an exploration of limits.

When Caltech students at the 1961 Rose Bowl rearranged the code of the cheering section’s half-time show so their synchronized cards spelled “CALTECH” instead of “HUSKIES” for the University of Washington, then spelled Huskies backward, this was a hack.

Since Robert Morris, a 23-year-old Cornell grad student, was strongly suspected of planting a “virus” last fall--actually a “worm,” but don’t bother your head about the distinction--that gave 6,000 interconnected computers electronic hits, hacking has become a nasty word. Should it be?

According to Steven Levy, the Herodotus of hacking in his estimable history, “Hackers,” the word stems from MIT at the dawn of the computer age in the late ‘50s. The incubator was the Tech Model Railroad Club.

In The Real World, defined by “The Hacker’s Dictionary” as a place whose inhabitants wear ties and are thought of as “not unlike deceased persons,” hacking was how Henry VIII solved his marital dissonances or what inept golfers or unfelicitous writers do.

At MIT, where ingenious students had long since advanced from reassembling Model A Fords in a professor’s room, hacking at the Railroad Club meant creating something of great panache and ingenuity without necessarily an ultimate utility. Circuits could be rewired not to make the tiny trains run on time but to make them do it more elegantly.

When computers began showing up on campus, some railroaders were immediately drawn to them like moths to a diode. They set behavior patterns that abide. They lived by night when computers were idle, neglected families, food, studies, sunlight, soap. The last may account for the scarcity of female hackers.

Early on, hackers, marked more by preoccupation than misogyny, ignored girls because they considered them unprogrammable. Poskanzer, however, backpacks, plays soccer and admits he has a girl.

Gifted children have long been prodigies in music and math. Add, now, computers.

“The young don’t know there are walls,” says Glenn Tenney, who is 39, still hacks but knows he must buy foodstuffs in The Real World. “It’s easier to spend 40 hours a day hacking when you’re a kid than when you’re middle-aged.”

A hacking prodigy can be called, often unjustly, a nerd.

The source of the term nerd is obscure. In a very informal poll, the only characteristic a majority agreed on was that nerds usually wear plastic pencil holders in their shirt pockets.

In a lacrosse game, this writer once faced off against an MIT defenseman whose stick was twice the length of mine. Rather than snarl that he’d split my skull the next time the ref wasn’t looking, this student engineer observed:

“Quite a disparity in leverage, isn’t it?”

The remark was probably nerdistic.

The hacking instinct in the years BC--before computers--might have expressed itself in the souping up of hot rods. But this is dirty work. Computing is clean. There’s a whole world at your fingertips. You don’t have to risk rejection when the neighborhood gang chooses up sides for one o’ cat.

“Years ago these kids would have been tipping over decrepit barns or the like,” said Don Parker, an authority on computer crime at SRI International in Menlo Park and once an expert in barn demolition. His childhood mates would almost saw through the supports of an abandoned barn, tie on ropes, then collapse the structure before the startled eyes of the owner roused from his bed by the adolescent clamor. Delinquency, perhaps, but with a flair toward a hack.

“Most kid hackers are not socially skilled,” Dave Flory said. “They socialize through the computer.”

“It’s a way to nudge the system, impress your friends, say, ‘Here I am,’ ” said Tom Mandel, a hacker who also wears a tie in The Real World as a futurist at a Silicon Valley think tank.

Dave Flory tracks down computer malfeasance as head of the fraud squad for the San Jose police. Although 50, he hacks in his spare time but was not amused when someone, possibly a nerd, filched his password and ran up an $80 bill on his telephone playing computer games long distance.

“I was never popular, just a loner,” Mark Duchaineau, a former high school hacker, told “Hackers” author Levy. “You feel a oneness with the computer. (Without it) there would have been this great void . . . like you didn’t have your sight or hearing.”

“There are a lot of bright kids, not socially well-developed who are miserable in junior high,” said Mark Crispin, an author of “The Hacker’s Dictionary.” “They are naturally drawn to computer hacking, something where they have complete control over the results. Humans have basic needs and, if they don’t get them out of society, they’ll get them elsewhere, and computers seem a better answer than drugs.”

Tenney is hacking in his basement in San Mateo. It looks like the command module of a space capsule the morning after a Saturday night linkup with some vodka-toasting Russkies:

“Computers are my hobby and my living. Hackers do it because they enjoy it. That doesn’t mean you can’t think about money.”

He speaks from experience with a wife and kids upstairs and a diesel Cadillac with a blown head in the driveway. He programs professionally to keep them respectively fueled.

“Hacking is the key to Silicon Valley. Woz (Steve Wozniak, the legendary hacker who created the first Apple computer in a garage) did it because he was interested in the challenge. Steve Jobs (Woz’s partner who turned the Apple into a multibillion-dollar orchard) saw where it could go from the garage. That happens all the time out here.” A sum greater than its arts: synergy.

“If any company tells you they don’t have any hackers on their staff in the Valley, they’re lying,” said Leo Schwab, a young hacker-programmer near San Rafael, a reputed wizard at computer graphics.

In hackerese, a wizard is a person permitted by the gods to do things denied ordinary mortals.

“Hacking is a proud culture and rightly so,” said Don Ingraham, somewhat surprisingly since his job as assistant district attorney for Alameda County is to track down computer bad guys. “These hackers working all night in their garages in Silicon Valley and basements at MIT have pulled off miracles. They may well be the salvation of our technology.”

Japanese trains run on time but not because they’ve been hacked. Nippon, collectively, makes great robots. America produces great tinkerers, although a Japanese did ski down Everest, a most celestial hack.

Tenney is an anomaly, like a banana tree in Labrador. He emerged not from the Valley or MIT but Chicago, where hackers were “computer bums.” By the time he was a high school senior, he had his own office at the Illinois Institute of Technology. That was to make it easier for him to tutor math teachers in computer familiarization seminars, a child lecturing the Pharisees at the temple.

Even then something had evolved that Levy calls the Hacker Ethic. This posited that access to computers and the data that fed them should be free (keep in mind these were the ‘60s) and that hacking, in and of itself and for the pure freedom of it, should be unimpeded by the high priests of The Real World. Big Business. Big Brother. Big Anybody. Computers promised a brave new world and all should romp unhindered in Elysium.

This has inevitably produced a gray, indeed very, very gray area as to where hacking leaves off and the increasingly essential networks of the nation’s computers begin.

He is called Captain Crunch, after the breakfast cereal. His real name is John Draper.

About 1970, while a soldier overseas, Draper found that the toy whistle that came with each cereal box blew at 2,600 cycles, exactly the pitch the phone company sang to. He began calling home--free.

Hacking Ma Bell became a challenge with electronic “blue boxes.” Woz used to sell them dormitory to dormitory at Stanford. (He could also arrange things so friends’ computers would suddenly light up with off-color Polish jokes.) You could ring up Sydney, Australia, for nothing to get the Top 10 Tunes, try and give Brezhnev a wake-up call.

(Crunch, to whom Ingraham is a personal nemesis, finally went to jail where he gave seminars to inmates on blue boxes. His back was broken, Ingraham said, because his fellow cons felt he was withholding technology. Draper, subsequently in the toils of the law again, rigged Ingraham’s computer to receive his legal bills.)

Crunching--and Morrising, if you will--are deeds that have put hacking in disrepute in The Real World. Stuart Brand, the Californian who brought us “The Whole Earth Catalog” and now provides a computer bulletin board in the Bay Area, is among many of the old school who think everything, including copyrighted software, should be free. But what of those, including numerous hackers, who have devised brilliant software and then copyrighted it if only to buy their groceries?

“When an artist produces art, he doesn’t hang it in the closet,” Tenney reasoned. “He wants it to be seen.” For nothing?

“A radical leftist hacker would say it’s bad to let Establishment NCRs and IBMs use your stuff,” Poskanzer said. “A radical leftist hacker would say you should not have sold it to IBM. I say if they want to use it, fine. So I guess I’m a middle-of-the-road hacker.”

The Valley’s annual Hacker Conference, which Tenney organizes and Mandel attends as one of the 5% of “necktie” members allowed to join, argues about free access at every meeting.

Hackers agree the word hacking badly needs a euphemism. Their fertile minds have added to the mother tongue such coinages as gronk, to clear up, sort of; frobnicate, to adjust, as “please frobnicate the TV;” dwim, forget it, move on to . . . ; foo or bletch, disgusting; moby foo, very disgusting; kluge, something that shouldn’t work but does; snarf, to snatch. But hackers have not come up with a kinder, gentler term for what they do.

There is, however, a term for hacking gone criminal: cracking. Crunch, who made $1 million in The Real World as a hacker-programmer, did hard time when he cracked.

A world that found out about gravity when Newton hacked a falling apple has to be tentative about curbing the curiosity of genius, two sides of the same coin. There is a certain voyeurism to hacking.

Malcolm McNally, a retired nuclear engineer who has raised three sons who have hacked, ceases pedaling his bike along Monterey Bay long enough to consider why they did and why he approved.

“Say you’re backpacking in the Sierras and see a ‘No Trespassing’ sign. You don’t climb over the fence to start a forest fire, but because you’re curious about what’s on the other side.”

“I like to crawl around inside things and see how they work and on the way out make them work better,” Mandel explained his frobnication. “Morris cracked. He did damage.”

In the days of youth, hacking can become a compulsion, its practitioners an obsessive brotherhood. The hacker’s world shrinks into the machine and blooms inside like a Chinese chrysanthemum dropped into a water glass.

Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at MIT, writes in his book, “Computer Power and Human Reason:”

” . . . Compulsive programming (hacking) represents a psychopathology that is far less ambiguous than, say, milder forms of schizophrenia or paranoia.”

About 1980, a hacker at Stanford posted an anguished letter on the bulletin board of the university’s computer center. (The dispensing machine had been computerized so you could charge food, Cokes and beer. It was also programmed to refuse suds to minors.) In the letter, “G. Gandalf” called computing “highly addictive” to the point that “very, very few hackers remain close to their families. Very, very few associate with anyone who is not at least partially a member of the hacking group. . . . The most brilliant minds at our top universities are learning how to play with multimillion-dollar toys first and how to utilize them constructively second. . . . The hackers’ motivation to challenge themselves in any field not directly linked to computers gradually disintegrates. . . . This is what takes some of the brightest and most capable minds in college today and turns them into narrowness.”

“A. Anonymous” replied to Gandalf: “A person who chooses to be a musician must devote hours and hours to gain adequate expertise. But would you consider the computer hacker any less creative than such a person?”

W. A. Mozart lived BC and couldn’t answer.

Crispin, a Stanford hacker in the time of Gandalf, used to talk nationwide via electronic mail. (Hackers call the U.S. Postal Service “snail mail.” Dave Flory thinks computer talk is antiseptic, dehumanized. No inflection, no body language.) Lynn Gold, a student at Columbia University in New York, thought “there was something about Crispin’s messages. They were funny.”

Eventually they arranged to meet in The Real World and got married in it.

“Some hackers never grow up,” Mandel said. “Computers remain their entire life. They don’t pay any attention to The Real World.”

“You can burn out at 30 by losing your inspiration,” Poskanzer said. “But you can also have substitute skills to allow you to do better work. A lot of kid hackers don’t realize that. They feel they’ve lost it.”

Mozart had been dead four years when he was Tenney’s age. Tenney, nonetheless, doesn’t think he has composed his last concerto for computer.

“An employer will say ‘Wow! How did you do this?’ I tell him I did it hacking 15 years ago. It was in my mental library.”

Craig Leres, Poskanzer’s sidekick who spent hours trying to unearth Morris’ worm from Berkeley computers and is angry about it, mused:

“What happens to old hackers? You start your own company and make millions, and then you can spend all your time hacking.”

“You just call it research instead of hacking,” Poskanzer said.

Poskanzer’s moon is about two hours farther along now. He and Leres are discussing Morris’ worm. They say they could have done it much faster. Theirs would have elegantly closed the “trapdoors” by which it entered, wouldn’t have had “hooks” that could have caused even more damage than it did, wouldn’t have had a mistake on it as the actual worm did.

Did they know that when Morris was in elementary school in New Jersey, he was so precocious the school let him use its computer to assign students to lunchroom tables? That he let it be known that for a dollar he’d work it out so you sat with your buddies and not your enemies and definitely not with your unfavorite teacher?

“Maybe he was rebelling against the authoritarianism of assigning kids to tables,” said Poskanzer, the middle-of-the-road hacker.

“He’s a cracker,” Leres said. “I hope he does time. It would be a precedent for others who might try the same thing.”

Poskanzer turns off his moon. “I got 39 requests for it when I offered it on bulletin boards. I’ve copyrighted it, but I give it away. I don’t care. But I copyrighted it so no one else could put his name on it. That I do care about.”

Then, Hacker Ethic modified by Poskanzer’s Amendment, he drives home. A real, uncopyrighted new moon, just like his on the machine, shines in the night sky across the bay.