My respect for MySpace Tom almost rose significantly, until I got to this bit...

"Anderson obtained or guessed the passwords necessary to get through the first level of security and, once connected, changed at least two passwords to prevent bank officials from accessing the system. The group also created fictitious accounts, and Anderson, using the Lord Flathead name, left a message saying that unless he was given free use of the system he would destroy records."

Not cool. Pretty stupid too.

14 years old hacking into a major banks computer system in the 1980s, with a group of (40+) hackers looking up to him.

At that age he was bound to let that go to his head and get a little too confident.

I, fortunately, did absolutely nothing idiotic at the age of 14.

Yup, that's a recipe for bust.

That was actually a damn fine article. Informative, and completely devoid of that TechCrunch fluff. I've got a whole new look at Tom now..

The things you find out about your friends...

I used to think that Myspace left open the possibility for embeds by sheer ignorance. It now seems a lot more likely that they knew what they were doing...

Part of the thing that people think is fun about myspace is the feeling that they're hacking it by customizing their profile.

Exactly. Customization pushes a very fundamental human button.

I'm reminded of some archaeological studies of human culture, using gene studies and recovered tools and a million other pieces of evidence. They determined that clothes were developed nearly 70,000 years ago, whereas spoken language, as we now know it, arose around 50,000 years ago.

In other words, fashion predated language.

To say fasion/clothing predated language assumes language as we know it arrived very suddenly, and also that this event can be accurately dated. As I recall, neither assumption is generally agreed upon. It seems more likely to me (not that I know that much about it ;) that modernish language evolved over a long period, overlapping with development of other technologies like clothing.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Language]

clothing != fashion

Good point. As wikipedia informs me, "the oldest art objects in the world: a series of tiny, drilled snail shells about 75,000yrs old, were discovered in a South African cave," yet any indisputably fashion art from that period would be irrecoverable by now.

"Customization pushes a very fundamental human button."

You wouldn't think so based on all these trends to REMOVE customization from user interfaces in the name of ease of use. It may push a button with hackers, and it may push a button with the myspace crowd, but not all customization is created equal.

Ah, thanks for the link.

Sorry, deleted and rewrote the comment to better explain what I was getting at.

+1 for techcrunch doing actual investigative journalism.

Smart people tend to do smart things that keep surprising the rest throughout their lives.

I wonder if he hacked into his schools mainframe and altered his academic record (like in the movie). hmmmm...

kids...

I don't see what's so interesting about this article...

Anyone care to enlighten me?

edit: I just reread the article... Let's see, Tom Anderson created MySpace, did war-dialing in the WarGames times, got access to the Chase bank system (apparently with a default or weak password), told 40 of his friends how to do it, and they all got raided simultaneously.

Public figure + black hat hacking in the past = interesting?

There's one thing I found really interesting:

"One of the reasons Anderson would hack into living room sized mainframe systems was to get access to computers that could run a C compiler to learn programming. There were no open source or free C compilers at the time, and personal computers had very limited memory and processing power, so hackers would try to access them on other systems."

I think most people assumed the MySpace guys knew just enough PHP to get MySpace off the ground and then got lucky. It's interesting to see there's a little more to it than that.

Dialing into a no password-system is hardly any tougher than knowing a bit of PHP.

What's tough about it is that he was 14 and it was the 80's... way before it was popular to take pot shots at PHP.

Actually, it was Coldfusion. But you're right on point.

For a long time, I wondered whether Tom was a real person.

It's nice to have a criminal record to go with his face.

Makes him feel a little more real.

He is my friend, u know...

Well, I worked at myspace so I can tell you that he is very real.

He is actually a really cool guy.

Right on :)

I voted the article up simply because it was a good piece of original, well-balanced, interesting investigative reporting.