> You broke rules for personal enjoyment and weren't even good enough to not get caught.
Otherwise known as being young and in their formative years. Plenty of HN had similar experiences and luckily even 15 years ago this harsh view on teenage stupidity was in the minority.
He also doesn't seem claim to be a l33t whatever.
> Not being prevented from accessing the system is not the same thing as successfully hacking a system unless you aren't caught either.
> You didn't beat them, they beat you.
They beat themselves, which was understandable back in the day but that's a popular narrative to this day. If a school kid with random scripts or untargeted ransomware gets into a system I put far more blame on the process that prevented them from being patched than said kid.
Re:Ken Thompson's Unix Password
by CodexArcanum on Thursday October 10, 2019 @11:27AM
(#21215606)
He points out below that he was caught because another student overheard him discussing it and ratted on him. I feel like a real hacker wouldn't make a bunch of untested assumptions about situations they have no context for.
You broke rules for personal enjoyment and weren't even good enough to not get caught. You didn't beat them, they beat you. It doesn't matter if you went unnoticed for several months, the fact is standard monitoring and logs were your down fall. Nobody ever thinks of the log files and network monitoring tools as being part of security. Not being prevented from accessing the system is not the same thing as successfully hacking a system unless you aren't caught either.