www.woodlandssucks.com
Interview with the Hacker

Student backlash against the authority of this school and its administration is not a new phenomenon. As long as there have been windows, students have smashed them, and as long as there have been bathroom sinks, students have tried to flood them using paper towels.

As we enter this so-called information age, however, the school has found itself exposed on an entirely new front. In its mad rush to leap onto the Internet bandwagon, the Woodlands has stumbled into the path of a new way of expressing student anger; namely hacking. Several months ago, the school's webpage was taken off-line for a few days and replaced with a angry parody entitled "The Weedlands: Striving for Vengeance". The creator of the page gave his identity as "Lord Dragen of the Black Hand", and stated that the purpose of the page was to "crush the fat egos and fat heads of The Woodlands administration". The centre piece of the page was a picture of Mr. Pirk with his nose replaced by a penis, and above this was an angry manifesto that read as follows:

Pretty smart now? Who laughs last? The secure and fulfilled persons do not understand what power goes on beneath their feet, and the extent of how much they are `0wned'. People trust computers because they believe computers cannot make mistakes, so ultimatly...computers never lie. Man is smarter than machine. We *MADE* computers. People talk about computer security but basically it all comes down to a shit load of 1's and 0's. Knowledge is never a crime in the eye of the beholder. You have misused your authority and now I shall subdue it.

I am not working alone anymore. You are the bounty are we are the hunters.

Unlike the administration, Here Title Place has actually managed to track the hacker down, and he has agreed to do an interview with us. Lord Dragen, or Rale as he prefers to be called, spends his days like any other Woodlands student, attending classes of an unspecified grade level, eating lunch in the cafeteria, and doing whatever else the average ordinary student does these days.

Rale does not actually like to be called a hacker. "Hacker is a bastardised word that actually meant a fuck before, but now anyone who can drop to MS-DOS is a hacker." He said. "I did not hack the site to get publicity This was a personal hack that was derived from the anger within me for the Woodlands administration ... I just wanted to send a little `up yours' to the administration. Besides, it was too fun to pass up."

Was the school's page very difficult to hack? No, according to Rale who said "Their mistake was using Microsoft as their server. Unix is the operating system of champions. But seriously, any two-bit individual who had persistence and skill could compromise it." Unable to describe the complicated procedures of hacking in a way the average person could understand, Rale simply explained that he had taken advantage of a "hole" in the system, which has now been closed.

"They had some permission problems with some of the Peel School directories." He said, trying to clarify the situation. "In fact, I was planning on taking over Port Credit, Applewood, Woodlands, and Clarkson on a little "spree" of hacks. Same shit only it would've taken longer." For those who are, as Rale puts it "technically just", he offers this advice. "Woodlands now uses Microsoft Frontpage. So at home you can use your copy of Frontpage and just open up `www.peel.edu.on.ca' and you will get a bunch of servers, only you got to know the password."

Hacking into the school webpage seems to be a pretty good way to wind up suspended, or expelled, but Rale was quick to point out how little risk was involved. "I had to remove the system logs to stay safe. The log files took about 15 minutes to find on that mangled-piece-of-shit system they use. Once I found it, I deleted them, and I proceeded to do my job." he said matter of factly "Minimum risk for me."

Knowing how Rale cracked the page however, still doesn't answer the larger question at hand: Why? Rale answers by talking of his anger at the administration, whom he says "are cocked full of themselves". He says that the administration are too uptight when it comes to their computer policy, and he offers this example "I remember a kid in my Computer class being sent to the office and interrogated for doing nothing but changing the resolution of the screen. Then they called it `tampering' and now that guy is hassled by every teacher when he's around computers. It literally makes me furious."

The school's use of the Internet on a whole has left Rale unimpressed. While he admits to admiring the spinning 3-D logo, Rale brushes off the school's page as "crap about courses and bullshit about clubs" He felt much the same about the way the school uses the Internet as a learning tool, saying "I think they're buying into something they can't control and for the most part can't enforce. Besides, people usually have more success using a CD-ROM Encyclopaedia or books for information." Rale certainly has learned a great deal both about and from the Internet, but his learning has been extracurricular in nature. The kinds of computer skills he has picked up are not taught in any DIC course, or explained by friendly school librarians.

Some parts of the hacked page seem to need explaining. The doctored picture of Mr. Pirk is self explanatory, but what about the reference to the Black Hand? "The Black Hand is my Unit" Rale explained "We are a group of individuals who are gifted in the fields of: telephone manipulation, computer manipulation, electronic theft, and just basic security auditing. We derived the name Black Hand after the Serbian nationalist group that assassinated the Arch-Duke in the early 1900's to start WW1."

Twice on the page the termed "Owned" is used. What does Rale mean by this? "0wned", he explained "is a term widely used by the underground when someone hijacks a network or takes over a web page. A mind game if you will. When the so called `Webmaster' or `Administrator' sees that someone says they're 0wned, they tend to worry, and that is good." So is the intended purpose of the page to shake people's faith in computer security? "Absolutely." Rale said "Like it said on the page.. People believe that computers don't lie, and that whatever you tell them they will do."

Some people would compare what Rale has done to a petty act of vandalism, the computer age equivalent of scrawling a message on the door of a toilet stall. Rale however was quick to make a distinction, "Well, for one thing, the school web page was viewable by anyone in the world and I'm sure it would hit an audience much larger than the boys who use the washrooms at Woodlands." he said, though he conceded that, "the risk factor isn't that different. You could write `Wu-tang Forever' on the stall while taking a shit and never get caught, and same with what I did, except my approach was much more ‘creative’ in pulling off."

Perhaps the main difference between Rale and your every day common vandal, overlooking for the issue of hacking skills, is the anger he feels towards the administration. With that in mind, is there anything he would like to say to them, since I assume they eventually read every issue of HTP? "I was waiting for you to ask that." He said, with an evil grin on his face. "I think you should cut your access from the world until you have the balls to fight the world that wants to fight you. And remember, you can stop one of us, but you can't stop us all...mother fucker!" He paused, and then added "Oh...and for all you happy-go-lucky readers out there, to dial up into the schools network from home or anywhere, the schools network data line is 905-712-2617."

What are we to think of our friend Rale? Unlike the vandal of days of yore, Rale can lash out at the school without leaving his house, and stands little chance of ever being caught. In today's ever changing world of technology, slow moving institutions like our school will increasingly find themselves victimised by angry young people on the cutting edge. Is Rale is a hero sticking up for the rights of the down trodden students, or just some lunatic computer "nerd" on the warpath? Whatever his motavation might be, Rale must certainly worry the administration, to whom he says that next time he "will not be so generous as to simply deface your page, next time it will hurt."