response 60 of 145:

Sep 29 18:32 UTC 2000

that's how "big pussy" got his name, on the soprano's

response 62 of 145:

Sep 30 00:18 UTC 2000

yeah, ignore response #53 

the prelim is a hearing where the d.a. presents enuff evidence to try to
convince a judge that there is sufficient evidence to support the charges
against an accused.  if the judge so finds, the defendent is "bound over"
- which means, the accused gets a trial.  there can also be evidentuary
and other motions presented to the judge at that time.

one of the more famous prelims was the televised one before judge kennedy,
in california, where o.j. simpson plead "aboslutely, 100% not guilty."

response 64 of 145:

Sep 30 12:45 UTC 2000

They can have it, since M-Net upgraded to a new box anyway.

response 66 of 145:

Sep 30 14:53 UTC 2000

this is becoming quite amusing.  one more time:  the economic impact had to
do with entities in *addition* to those that might have involved m-nut
directly.

shall i type that a few more times, or do you think you might finally get it?

response 68 of 145:

Sep 30 18:13 UTC 2000

their time indeed has value.  however, all the people volunteering to help
defend this moron are doing so because they believe there wasn't an economic
impact to m-nut in excess of $1,000.00   

whether or not that is true, is irrelevant to this case. he caused damage in
excess of $1,000.00 not involving the hardware or hourly workload of staff
of m-nut.

response 70 of 145:

Sep 30 18:38 UTC 2000

The old M-Net was actually quite a substantial looking box.  It took two
people to lift it.  But I fail to see how that's relevant to anything.  There
are certainly smaller looking boxes wtih considerably more processing power,
that are used as mission critical servers in expensive corporate networks.
Your point, Richard?

response 72 of 145:

Sep 30 23:15 UTC 2000

        Does your Apollo have a richard hatch?

response 74 of 145:

Oct 1 13:32 UTC 2000

A confessed cracker gets a penalty for breaking a law. Simple.

response 76 of 145:

Oct 2 02:56 UTC 2000

What luck for me.  I am new to Grex, I am new to puters and the net,
relatively, and part of why I got an account here on Grex was, in all honesty,
to understand the portion of society that calls itself 'hackers'.  Now that
everybody knows that I am a newbie who doesn't really know peas from carrots
as far as computer and internet security are concerned, nobody should be
offended by what I say.

Firstly, as regards the whole issue of dammage incurred (and please remember
all of my information is coming from what I have read on this item); from what
I have managed to understand thusfar about the hacking community is (beyond
the very discernable difference between hackers and crackers) that a good part
of the purpose for such interactions/activities/behaviours is to test the
security of information systems because information shoul be more than free,
it should be secure.  (Of course there are more than just a few psychologial
theories which pair hacking and sexual and/or intellectual development, but
I am going to leave those aside for sake of ease and succinctity.)  Also from
what I understand no physical dammage was done to the system.  I do recall
mention of the boy using the m-net systen as a intermediary to U of MNaryland
(pardon if the school is incorrect) systems, which he also did no dammage to.
(This last part is confused and contrary information would cause me to revise
my statements here.)  If no physical dammage was done, this rules out most
laws which could effect him.

As far as software:  my first question would be 'does (did) m-net claimn their
system to be secure?'  If they do, they have been grossely negligible, and
as far as I am concerned have no real business pressing charges, since there
are a number of charges they would be eligible for.

In respect to the downtime:  the length of time that the system was
unavailable is not a factor of whatever the boy did while in the systems, it
is a factor of the system administrators and service providers being
limited--something the boy is not responsible for.

Now, for the actions he chose to take (completely hacking the systems instead
of simply reporting the security breaks to whoever was responsible for them
(and actually the irresponsible party)), certainly there were better ways to
handle the information he had than to use it against the system, although,
also from what I understand from other sources, this is not unacceptable in
the culture.

Personally, I think he will suffer most from his colleagues for getting
caught, and this is a good tool--public humiliation--and he should definitely
NOt be sentenced to any jail time (as it has been proven an ineffective
measure), and monetary punishement is not something he has much control over,
and so that should probably be avoided also.  Personally, I think the
best-fitting punishment would be for him to rebuild the system, securely, by
himself.  But then again, we all know how little I know about these things.
Thatnk you for reading this.

response 78 of 145:

Oct 2 11:27 UTC 2000

The trouble with just "poof" doing a tape restore is that staff had no idea
how long root had been compromised.  So how far back does it make sense to
restore, versus a clean start with a  known non-compromised fresh install?

response 80 of 145:

Oct 2 14:25 UTC 2000

        The time to repair isn't really relevant.  If you start a fire in a
warehouse and the warehouse puts out the fire because it was properly equipped
with a fire extinguishing system, it's still arson.  But in this case, it was
about a month of volunteer and unpaid effort.

response 82 of 145:

Oct 2 16:50 UTC 2000

Could somebody please explain to me the rationale under which the amount of
time requred to fix something that's been vandalized, or at least the amount
of time it could be reasonably expected to take, shouldn't be considered in
figuring out the amount of damage incurred?  In that case, how do you measure
the cost of damage?