Michael Calce, who went by the online alias "Mafiaboy", launched denial-of-service attacks in 2000 that temporarily shut down major websites like Yahoo!, eBay and CNN when he was 15 years old. This led to a manhunt by law enforcement agencies. Calce has now written a memoir, "Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken", recounting his criminal past and examining current online security issues.

1. hacker identity

2. Ex-hacker
'Mafiaboy' tells all
in memoir
Hacker history A former hacker, who temporarily shut down
several major websites and led the RCMP and
the FBI on a manhunt when he was 15, has
•Formed by a combination written a tell-all memoir about his criminal past.
of punk and cybnetic sci-fi
writers Michael Calce co-wrote with journalist Craig
•common themes were Silverman Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet
disillusionment and/or and Why It's Still Broken, which tells his story
sense of detachment from
dominant social groups, and examines the current state of online
rebellion, aggression security.
•birth of new com- In February 2000, Calce, who went by the
munities that recognized
the gap between reality and internet alias Mafiaboy, launched denial-of-
public awareness service attacks that temporarily brought down
•freedom of information five websites, including Yahoo!, eBay and CNN.
and self-empowerment The attacks caused millions of dollars in
damages and shook the confidence of the U.S.
government. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton

3. DON’T TRUST
ANYONE OVER 25

4. I believe that we live in an era where anything
that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe
that bits exist to be copied [. . .]. Me, I’m looking
to find ways to use copying to make more money
and it’s working: enlisting my readers as
evangelists for my work and giving them free
ebooks to distribute sells more books. As Tim
O’Reilly says, my problem isn’t piracy, it’s
obscurity.
— Cory Doctorow (“About”)

5. Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School, the chair of media
reform group Free Press, and a writer for Slate Magazine.

6. HACK series by tim o’reilly
The "Hacks" series says it "reclaims the term 'hacking'
for the good guys--innovators who explore and
experiment, unearth shortcuts, create useful tools,
and come up with fun things to try on their own."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?
docid=6272710823098922710#
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/oct/10/business/fi-oreilly10

7. The most alarming aspect of the DCMA for hackers is that it
embodies the fallacy that the only sources of innovation of the benefit
to society lie within the halls of research institutions or corporations.
Suddenly, it is a crime to explore, in the comfort of your own home.
Freedom of speech should not require a lawyer, and free thought
should not involve letters of authorization for research.
Andrew “bunnie” Huang,
Hacking the Xbox

8. For every copyright protection scheme that is
defeated by a hacker, there is someone who
learned an important lesson about how to make
a better protection scheme.
Andrew “bunnie” Huang,
Hacking the Xbox

9. The keys to decrypt a DVD are controlled by an org called DVD-
CCA, and they have a bunch of licensing requirements for anyone
who gets a key from them. Among these is something called
region-coding: if you buy a DVD in France, it'll have a flag set that
says, "I am a European DVD." Bring that DVD to America and
your DVD player will compare the flag to its list of permitted
regions, and if they don't match, it will tell you that it's not
allowed to play your disc. Remember: there is no copyright that
says that an author gets to do this. When we wrote the copyright
statutes and granted authors the right to control display,
performance, duplication,derivative works, and so forth, we didn't
leave out "geography"by accident. That was on-purpose.

10. So when your French DVD won't play in America, that's not because it'd be
illegal to do so: it's because the studios have invented a business-model and
then invented a copyright law to prop it up. The DVD is your property and
so is the DVD player, but if you break the region-coding on your disc, you're
going to run afoul of anticircumvention. That's what happened to Jon
Johansen, a Norwegian teenager who wanted to watch French DVDs on his
Norwegian DVD player. He and some pals wrote some code to break the CSS
so that he could do so. He's a wanted man here in America; in Norway the
studios put the local fuzz up to bringing him up on charges of “unlawfully
trespassing upon a computer system.” When his defence asked,"Which
computer has Jon trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own." (Microsoft
Research DRM talk.)

11. This is the overweening characteristic of every single successful
new medium: it is true to itself. The Luther Bible didn't succeed
on the axes that made a hand-copied monk Bible valuable: they
were ugly, they weren't in Church Latin, they weren't read
aloud by someone who could interpret it for his lay audience,
they didn't represent years of devoted-with-a-capital-D labor by
someone who had given his life over to God. The thing that
made the Luther Bible a success was its scalability: it was more
popular because it was more proliferate: all success factors for a
new medium pale beside its profligacy. The most successful
organisms on earth are those that reproduce the most: bugs and
bacteria, nematodes and virii. Reproduction is the best of all
survival strategies.
http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

12. digital rights Management
Doctorow’s Microsoft Research DRM Talk
is his most famous position paper on DRM.
http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt
Here's how anticircumvention works: if you put a lock -- an access control -- around a
copyrighted work, it is illegal to break that lock. It's illegal to make a tool that breaks that
lock. It's illegal to tell someone how to make that tool. One court even held it illegal to tell
someone where she can find out how to make that tool.

13. Here are the two most important things to know about computers
and the Internet:
1. A computer is a machine for rearranging bits
2. The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to
another very cheaply and quickly.
Any new medium that takes hold on the Internet and with
computers will embrace these two facts, not regret them. A
newspaper press is a machine for spitting out cheap and smeary
newsprint at speed: if you try to make it output fine art lithos, you'll
get junk. If you try to make it output newspapers, you'll get the
basis for a free society. And so it is with the Internet. At the heyday
of Napster, record execs used to show up at conferences and tell
everyone that Napster was doomed because no one wanted loosely
compressed MP3s with no liner notes and truncated files and
misspelled metadata.
(http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt)

14. digital rights Management
• DRM is a mechanism for unbalancing copyright, for betraying the statutory limitations on copyright, for
undermining the law itself. By granting rightsholders the ability to unilaterally confiscate public rights
under copyright, DRM takes value out of the public's pocket and delivers it to rightsholders. ( Cory
Doctorow, DRM Talk for Hewlett-Packard Research Corvalis, Oregon
• The Darknet Paper: Microsoft employees write a position paper that argues against watermarking and
DRM (in opposition to company policy) . Got public attention b/c it suggested illicit activity and criminal
mindset. Also suggested a divide btwn the legitimate Internet and the “underground” Net. The difference
is technology rather than content, encryption for whatever purpose, legal or illegal.
• “The paper makes a three-part argument. First, there is really no way to stop file sharing, as long as
people want to share files. Second, in the presence of widespread file sharing, a copy-prevention
technology must be perfect, for the presence in a file sharing environment of even a single un-contained
copy of a work enables anyone who wants to infringe its copyright to do so. (This is what I call the
"break once, infringe anywhere" model.) Finally, there is little if any hope that a copy-prevention (or
"DRM") technology can be strong enough to prevent the creation of single un-contained copies of works.
So the conclusion is that the current DRM approach will not work.” Freedom to Tinker Blog Ed
Felten - Posted on November 25th, 2002

15. • Doctorow’s Xnet is taken from the Darknet
concept
• Darknet is any closed private network of
computers used for file sharing
• don’t learn to hack - hack to learn

16. CRYPTOGRAPHY
Modern industrial cryptography consists of three crucial components: first, a "cipher" - a system for scrambling messages. These are always public
and never secret or proprietary. Banks, spies, retailers, child pornographers and your web browser all use the same basic set of ciphers. That's
because the only way to prove that a cipher works is to expose it to public scrutiny and see if any clever bastard can spot a flaw in it.It's a little
counterintuitive to think of full disclosure as a prerequisite for security, but it is a basic tenet of cryptography – and it has been so ever since Alan
Turing and the lads at Bletchley Park broke the Nazi ciphers and spent the rest of the war reading Hitler's secret dispatches and snickering to
themselves.
Second, there is a "ciphertext" - a blob of data that has been encrypted with the cipher.Finally, and crucially, there's the "key". This is a very small
piece of information - usually less than 1000 characters - that is kept secret from all but the legitimate senders and receivers of the information. The
key is the secret bit of information that the cipher uses to unscramble the ciphertext.
As a system, it works brilliantly. You can download an email privacy program that uses standard, public encryption algorithms to scramble your
email so that only its intended recipients can read them. You know that messages can only be read by the authorised sender and the authorised
receiver because you are the only ones who know have the key.

17. Privacy almost always includes an element of personal/
political power.
Children want privacy from their parents.
Employees want privacy from their bosses.
Political dissidents want privacy from the Chinese secret police.
DRM Talk for Hewlett-Packard Research
Corvalis, OregonCory Doctorow European Affairs Coordinator, Electronic Frontier Foundation

18. where digital rights Management
and cryptography meet
In DRM use-restriction scenarios, there is
only a sender and an attacker, who is also the
intended recipient of the message. I transmit a
song to you so that you can listen to it, but try FOR EXAMPLE: Amazon's new movie download service
is called Unbox and it outlines what DRM implies. The
to stop you from copying it. This requires that user agreement requires that you allow Unbox DRM
your terminal obey my commands, even when software to monitor your hard drive and to report
you want it to obey your commands. activity to Amazon. These reports would thus include a
list of: all the software installed; all the music and
Understood this way, use-restriction and video you have; all your computer's interaction with
privacy are antithetical. As is often the case in other devices. You will surrender your freedom to such
security, increasing the security on one axis an extent that you will only be able to regain control
by removing the software. But if you do remove the
weakens the security on another. A terminal software you will also remove all your movies along
that is capable of being remotely controlled with it. You are restricted even geographically, and you
by a third party who is adversarial to its lose your movies if you ever move out of the USA. You
of course have to agree that they can change these
owner is a terminal that is capable of terms at any time. Microsoft's newly upgraded
betraying its owner's privacy in numerous Windows Media Player 11 (WMP11) user agreement has
ways without the owner's consent or a similar set of terms.
knowledge. A terminal that can never be used (http://www.defectivebydesign.org/what_is_drm)
to override its owner's wishes is by definition
a terminal that is better at protecting its
owner's privacy.

19. doctorow on crypto
In DRM, the attacker is also the recipient. It's not Alice andBob and Carol, it's
just Alice and Bob. Alice sells Bob a DVD. She sells Bob a DVD player. The
DVD has a movie on it -- say,Pirates of the Caribbean -- and it's enciphered
with an algorithm called CSS -- Content Scrambling System. The DVD
player has a CSS un-scrambler.Now, let's take stock of what's a secret here:
the cipher is well-known. The cipher-text is most assuredly in enemy hands,
arrr...So what? As long as the key is secret from the attacker, we're golden.
But there's the rub. Alice wants Bob to buy Pirates of the Caribbean from her.
Bob will only buy Pirates of the Caribbean if he can descramble the CSS-
encrypted VOB -- video object -- on his DVD player. Otherwise, the disc is
only useful to Bob as a drinks-coaster. So Alice has to provide Bob -- the
attacker -- with the key, the cipher and the cipher-text. DRM systems are
usually broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely, months. It's not because
the people who think them up are stupid. It's not because the people who
break them are smart. It's not because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the
end of the day, all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide
their attackers with cipher-text, the cipher and the key. At this point, the
secret isn't a secret anymore.

20. What type of info/work/code can be copyright?
Where is it freedom and where is it protection?
InterNet new medium - must change business model
Cryptography - how do we catch the bad guys?

21. Literature
or
manifesto?
Does Little Brother
aim to entertain us,
teach us, or convince
us?
how well does it do any
of these things?

22. If you love freedom, if you think the human
condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be
left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas
provided you don't hurt others, then you have
common cause with the kids whose web-browsers
and cellphones are being used to lock them up and
follow them around.
If you believe that the answer to bad speech is
more speech not censorship then you have a dog
in the fight. If you believe in a society of laws, a
land where our rulers have to tell us the rules, and
have to follow them too, then you're part of the
same struggle that kids fight when they argue for

23. DO SOMETHING
This book is meant to be something you do, not just something
you read. The technology in this book is either real or nearly real.
You can build a lot of it. You can share it and remix it . You can
use the ideas to spark important discussions with your friends
and family. You can use those ideas to defeat censorship and get
onto the free Internet, even if your government, employer or

24. “I believe that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds
of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these
ideas out to their logical consequences.”
(Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of
George Orwell)
“…nationalism, religious bigotry, and feudal
loyalty are far more powerful forces than sanity.”
(Orwell, Wells, Hitler, and the World State)

25. The scene of the book is laid in
Britain in order to emphasize
that the English-speaking races
are not innately better than
anyone else and that
totalitarianism, if not fought
against, could triumph
anywhere.
(Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism,
and Letters of George Orwell)

26. I do not believe that the
kind of society I
describe will arrive,
(the book is a satire),
but that something
resembling it could
arrive.

27. http://craphound.com/littlebrother/2010/07/10/iranian-
activists-release-free-persian-little-brother/

28. More
RESOURCES
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
technology/2007/sep/04/lightspeed
http://craphound.com/hpdrm.txt
http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt
http://www.boingboing.net/
2009/04/15/my-drm-and-ebooks-
ta.html