Beto: The Beta Version

[WhiteTara]

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



As the Texas Democrat enters the race for president, members of a group famous for “hactivism” come forward for the first time to claim him as one of their own. There may be no better time to be an American politician rebelling against business as usual. But is the United States ready for O’Rourke’s teenage exploits?

By JOSEPH MENN in SAN FRANCISCO

Filed March 15, 2019, 3:30 p.m. GMT

(This article is adapted from a forthcoming book, “Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World”)

> Some things you might know about Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman who just entered the race for president:

• The Democratic contender raised a record amount for a U.S. Senate race in 2018 and almost beat the incumbent in a Republican stronghold, without hiding his support for gun control and Black Lives Matter protests on the football field.

• When he was younger, he was arrested on drunk-driving charges and played in a punk band. Now 46, he still skateboards.

• The charismatic politician with the Kennedy smile is liberal on some issues and libertarian on others, which could allow him to cross the country’s political divide.

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.

[Kurt V.]

1. maybe he can hack the coming hack.

[WhiteTara]

2. I fear that he will be too busy

to take care of the old business because he has new business.

[Kurt V.]

3. the coming hack would be new business. very important business

[Gothmog]

4. 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.