Below the surface of the Internet lies a new community that is testing its moral and ethical boundaries. The advent of the computer has brought about many new subcultures. Its technology has helped form the ethics and morals of this new underground. They have thus far developed, with a liberal 60's attitude of free speech and little government control. This report will hopefully give some insight on the views within the subculture, as opposed to what is generally depicted in the media. The opposing views generally come from the computer security industry and the public. Although some of the practices are clearly illegal, it will be the ones that fall into the gray areas that I will be discussing. The three subcultures in the computer underground that I studied are hacking, phreaking and warez. Each provides history and characters, that help form morals and ethics in this community.
Hacking is the unlawful entry of a computer system with the purpose of
Phreaking is manipulating the phone companies computers so that you can get free calls. Back in the 80's the phones where controlled by tones that where not audible to the ear. A special tone, 2600mhz was played when the phone was hung up, to tell the phones computer that the phone was not being used. What a phreaker would do was hold a blue box, a machine built to play the specific tone, and trick the computer into thinking the phone was in the hung up position. You could then call a long distance number and not get charged for it. So hacking and phreaking went hand in hand, because no one could afford the long distance charges for being on the phone connected to a computer, for five hours. One of the more famous phreakers is John Draper (A.K.A. Captain Crunch), who used a whistle that came inside boxes of Captain Crunch serials, which emitted the 2600mhz. Today phreaking lives on, by understanding how a simple invention like the telephone operates, and
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