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Thursday, February 01, 2001 By David Radin
Many of us have strong opinions about hackers. Some think that they use their skills as mere annoyances. Others, such as me, think that those who break into businesses and government are vandals -- some are even terrorists. But most of us never have the opportunity to really understand why hackers do what they do.
Jason Cox recently tracked down the most notorious of all hackers -- Kevin Mitnick -- for an interview for this week's Internet Insider national radio show. Kevin has become an icon for the hacking community. According to urban legend, he can launch a nuclear warhead by simply whistling into a telephone connected to a computer. Unfortunately for Kevin, he has hacked too many times into the wrong places. That earned him a spot on the FBI's most wanted list, a jail sentence including a term in solitary confinement, and a ban on his being able to touch a computer keyboard, or even talk about his exploits.
Now that's rough. Kevin tells Jason that he isn't responsible for all of the havoc attributed to him. But he has done his share of illegal hacking.
Now, if Kevin gets such harsh punishments for his crimes, what does Mafiaboy deserve? Mafiaboy is the Canadian teen-ager who attacked Yahoo!, CNN and others with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks last year, creating countless dollar losses for these and other companies. Plus, he showed other hackers how much havoc they could create with such attacks -- so we've recently seen even more of them, such as the recent DDoS attack that shut down Microsoft Web sites for hours.
Mafiaboy's attack last year was blamed for lots of e-commerce losses. The recent Microsoft attack might have even further-reaching consequences. We don't know how many people had been in the middle of crucial upgrades using the Microsoft Web site; nor how many people needed information from the Microsoft support site to aid them in situations in which using Microsoft-supplied information to fix computer problems would help them save lives, create new drugs or complete business deals. And what about those 60 million hot-mail users who got stuck without e-mail capabilities? Point is that when a hacker terrorizes a resource such as Microsoft's, the effects could be well beyond what many of us can visualize.
I've previewed the Mitnick interview, and it has softened my stance a bit on hackers. But I reiterate my stand on hacker terrorists. Throw the book at them! After you listen to the Mitnick interview (available this weekend at www.InsiderRadio.com), tell me if you still have the same view on this terrifying subject.
Q: Is there a way I can skip the step in Microsoft Word that requires me to pick a template when I start a new document? I always use the same template.
A: There are actually two ways to create a new document. One is to select a template from a list of templates that pop up in a dialog box. The other is to create the new document from the default template, which is called normal.dot. When you select the [New] command, MS-Word will automatically use the default document. When you select [New...] (notice the three dots), it brings up the dialog box so you can choose your template. I actually put both commands on my standard toolbar, so I can use one click to open either kind of document. If your favorite template doesn't come up automatically, replace the current normal.dot with your template. That is, change the name to normal.dot, and move your template to the same folder as the current normal.dot. The next time you start MS-Word, it'll use your new default template.
Thursday, February 01, 2001
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