Introduction To The Three Kinds
Have you been to a mall lately? I mean one of those huge, sprawling malls that not only have clothing stores, electronics shops and food courts, but miniature golf courses, arcades, banks, post of-fices, and anything else you can or can not think of?
Instead of the large "You are here - >` maps they used to have, you now often find computers set up with touch-sensitive screens that help you find your way around the mall and inform you about mall happenings.
Personally, I've never hacked a mall computer - but the potential is there - and the motivation to do so is there as well. Hackers hack because they are in love with the idea that any accessible com-puter has a secret side that can be broken into. The computers at the mall have a secret side - the gen-eral public is not supposed to be able to change around the names of the stores on the computer-ized map of the building - but there is a way of doing just that. Similarly, when you go to Ellis Island and look up your ancestors in the computers, there is obviously some rear end to the system that you are not being allowed to see. All public computers have a secret side. A hacker is a person who wants to get at it.
This chapter addresses two aspects of publicly accessible computers:
• How to get into the behind-the-scenes parts, and
• using public computers to collect information you're not supposed to know about the people who use
them.
The computers and dumb terminals that are publicly available are a great boon to anyone inter-ested in hacking. Even if a general-access computer doesn't have a modem hanging off the back, or does not allow out-dialing, hackers can benefit by using the computer to gather information about legitimate users of on-line
databases, school net-works and other computing systems.
Computers are publicly available in lots of places - lobbies of office buildings, malls, muse-ums, airport club lounges, public fax machines, public and private schools, and in stores. However, the place they are most often seen is at libraries; consequently, the following discussion is based mostly on the computers found
there. Computers for the use of the general public are available now at most public and academic librar-ies. They fall into three groups:
• CD-ROM databases and information computers,
• public access terminals, and
• general purpose microcomputers.
Let's look at each one of these in turn, and see how these can help the hacker help
himself.
