Beto was a hacker

[blogslut]

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-politics-beto-orourke/

One thing you didn’t know: While a teenager, O’Rourke acknowledged in an exclusive interview, he belonged to the oldest group of computer hackers in U.S. history.

The hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows. It’s also known for inventing the word “hacktivism” to describe human-rights-driven security work.

Members of the group have protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise his political viability. Now, in a series of interviews, CDC members have acknowledged O’Rourke as one of their own. In all, more than a dozen members of the group agreed to be named for the first time in a book about the hacking group by this reporter that is scheduled to be published in June by Public Affairs. O’Rourke was interviewed early in his run for the Senate...

[Dr Hobbitstein]

1. I used to have so much fun with CotDC's Back Orifice tool.

Mostly messing with friends’ systems. They were an iconic group for a teenage nerd in the 90s.

[mr_lebowski]

2. Cool! (nt)

[Gothmog]

3. Beto O'Rourke's hacking universe, explained

I like the Washington Post's explanation of this https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/15/beto-orourkes-hacking-universe-explained/?utm_term=.0b9e2d0b9d53

At the time that O’Rourke was engaged with the group, the Internet wasn’t the Internet we have today. This was the late 1980s, and it wasn’t until the early 1990s that Americans began to regularly use something like the Internet as we understand it now, connecting over networks to pages on the Web. O’Rourke wasn’t sitting in front of a computer and clicking a Web browser. In fact, he wasn’t clicking anything.

What O’Rourke was using was a “bulletin-board system,” or BBS, which is to the Web what going to a restaurant is to going to a food festival. A food festival that’s also on Seamless.

How much of this is familiar to you will depend on how old you are. You may, for example, remember modems, little boxes attached to your computer or (in later years) built into it, into which you’d plug a regular phone landline. (If you don’t know what a phone landline is, which seems plausible, it’s the physical cord that ran phone lines into houses before cellphones became ubiquitous.) The modem converted a signal that could run over a phone line into one that a computer could recognize.

In the early days of the Internet, people used modems to connect to Internet service providers (ISPs), which would connect them to the broader Internet. But in the BBS era, modems were used to connect directly to other computers that were running software that could host small communities of users. To connect, you would actually call a specific phone number with your computer and connect to the computer hosting the BBS.

This story actually makes me like Beto more.

BTW, I still remember using something called mag cards and floppy disks to revise documents.

[blogslut]

4. As I said to blogslut jr upon reading this piece:

"Every bit of dirt they dig up on him just makes him cooler."

[JCMach1]

5. I can't confirm or deny I actually probably knew him back then

Was a hacker during that same.timeframe... lived in some of the same.virtual.spaces...