"Hugo Cornwall "The Hacker's handbook"" - читать интересную книгу автора

Hackers vary considerably in their native computer skills; a basic
knowledge of how data is held on computers and can be transferred
from one to another is essential. Determination, alertness,
opportunism, the ability to analyse and synthesise, the collection of
relevant helpful data and luck--the pre-requisites of any
intelligence officer--are all equally important. If you can write
quick effective programs in either a high level language or machine
code, well, it helps. A knowledge of on-line query procedures is
helpful, and the ability to work in one or more popular mainframe and
mini operating systems could put you in the big league.
The materials and information you need to hack are all around
you--only they are seldom marked as such. Remember that a large
proportion of what is passed off as 'secret intelligence' is openly
available, if only you know where to look and how to appreciate what
you find. At one time or another, hacking will test everything you
know about computers and communications. You will discover your
abilities increase in fits and starts, and you must
be prepared for long periods when nothing new appears to happen.
Popular films and tv series have built up a mythology of what
hackers can do and with what degree of ease. My personal delight in
such Dream Factory output is in compiling a list of all the mistakes
in each episode. Anyone who has ever tried to move a graphics game
from one micro to an almost-similar competitor will already know that
the chances of getting a home micro to display the North Atlantic
Strategic Situation as it would be viewed from the President's
Command Post would be slim even if appropriate telephone numbers and
passwords were available. Less immediately obvious is the fact that
most home micros talk to the outside world through limited but
convenient asynchronous protocols, effectively denying direct access
to the mainframe products of the world's undisputed leading computer
manufacturer, which favours synchronous protocols. And home micro
displays are memory-mapped, not vector-traced... Nevertheless, it is
astonishingly easy to get remarkable results. And thanks to the
protocol transformation facilities of PADs in PSS networks (of which
much more later), you can get into large IBM devices....
The cheapest hacking kit I have ever used consisted of a ZX81, 16K
RAMpack, a clever firmware accessory and an acoustic coupler. Total
cost, just over ъ100. The ZX81's touch-membrane keyboard was one
liability; another was the uncertainty of the various connectors.
Much of the cleverness of the firmware was devoted to overcoming the
native drawbacks of the ZX81's inner configuration--the fact that it
didn't readily send and receive characters in the industry-standard
ASCII code, and that the output port was designed more for instant
access to the Z80's main logic rather than to use industry-standard
serial port protocols and to rectify the limited screen display.
Yet this kit was capable of adjusting to most bulletin boards;
could get into most dial-up 300/300 asynchronous ports,
re-configuring for word-length and parity if needed; could have
accessed a PSS PAD and hence got into a huge range of computers not
normally available to micro-owners; and, with another modem, could