I'm not sure that placing free long distance calls isn't harmful to the org whose infrastructure you're using for your own benefit, but 2600 (Hz) is a respected hacker magazine and phreaking and Cap'n crunch whistles are seen as cool
Hacking the Internet Archive and only placing an alert with a provocative message, I could see my teenage self do that. My judgment of the character is going to depend on what it turns out they've actually done
Of course, my grown up self (or late teen also, as I've done responsible disclosures back then as well) would rather have seen them do a coordinated vulnerability disclosure, but alas, I just meant to remark upon the "special place in hell" for not having a plan or motive bit
*Edit:* wait, I just saw in the article (I opened the thread before the link was changed) that this quote refers to a DDoS, not the alert() message that the thread was initially about
> the site was experiencing a DDoS attack, posting on Mastodon that “According to their twitter, they’re doing it just to do it.
That's indeed just destructive and not related to (hacker) curiosity...
There's a spectrum and case by case judgement. I'd agree your examples are harmless even if technically they harm the phone company. Taking down the internet archive just for the hell of it has a distinctly less "cool" or "fun" flavor, to my eye.
> I'm not sure that placing free long distance calls isn't harmful to the org whose infrastructure you're using for your own benefit,
If there's a call you wouldn't make unless it was free, the infrastructure isn't at capacity, and you're not acting otherwise in a detrimental fashion to other users of the infrastructure-- there's no harm to that organization.
Certainly a fair point, but it also costs a lot of person-hours to patch up that infrastructure's security and trace who's placing the calls when one could just choose not to do this fraud in the first place. I am not old enough to know whether carriers also charged each other back then, but at least nowadays it could also incur charges for the originating party; costs which the caller isn't covering
Toying with the system, learning how it works and finding what you can make it do, there's a certain art to it and I'd encourage anyone to at least tinker with the systems they own (and everything else within reason and ethics), but there's two sides to nearly everything
I get your point and your edit. I think most people reaction is less because of the destruction itself and more because The Internet Archive is being targeted. It is a place that most would say are representing the hacker values, and few such places exist on current internet landscape.
There are so many other possible targets that would get even positive reactions from people. The only kind of people that might be happy about TIA being down is maybe some big corporations that want to control and sell the information being freely preserved there.
Hacking the Internet Archive and only placing an alert with a provocative message, I could see my teenage self do that. My judgment of the character is going to depend on what it turns out they've actually done
Of course, my grown up self (or late teen also, as I've done responsible disclosures back then as well) would rather have seen them do a coordinated vulnerability disclosure, but alas, I just meant to remark upon the "special place in hell" for not having a plan or motive bit
*Edit:* wait, I just saw in the article (I opened the thread before the link was changed) that this quote refers to a DDoS, not the alert() message that the thread was initially about
> the site was experiencing a DDoS attack, posting on Mastodon that “According to their twitter, they’re doing it just to do it.
That's indeed just destructive and not related to (hacker) curiosity...