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Knee-Deep in Julian Assange's Hilarious Memoir
When I started hacking you were just one layer above the bare metal. You were typing into this wonderful emptiness, waiting to be populated with minds. A few of us were interested in projecting our thoughts into the computer to make it do something new. We began writing codes and we began cracking them, too…. It was certainly addictive. You'd dive down into a computer system – typically, for me at the time, the Pentagon's 8th Command Group computers. You'd take it over, projecting your mind all the way from your untidy bedroom to the entire system along the halls, and all the while you're learning to understand that system better than the people in Washington. It was like being able to teleport yourself into the interior of the Pentagon in order to walk around and take charge…. As experiences of young adulthood go, it was mindblowing. By day you'd be walking down the street to the supermarket, meeting people you know, people who have no sense of you as anything other than a slacker teenager, and you'd know you had spent last night knee-deep in Nasa.
—Who ghost-wrote the Julian Assange memoir, Jackie Collins? No disrespect to the talented lady! But boy this is purple. Also, if you've seen Swordfish, and of course you have, basically don't bother with this excerpt.
So Julian Assange is…. Halle Berry in a wig?
@deepomega "When I say Assange, you say, 'yes please.'"
I know Halle Berry's $500,000 bonus for going topless in Swordfish. Halle Berry's $500,000 bonus for going topless in Swordfish was a friend of mine. You, 500,000 pound advance for Julian Assange's bio, are no Halle Berry topless in Swordfish.
#quietlyovulating
Julian Assange was born in 1971, so the VERY EARLIEST he would have been doing any hacking would have been … 1983 or '84? Wikipedia says he started when he was 16, so 1987. While he may not have been playing with any fancy GUIs or iTuneses or Facebooks or whatever back then, I think we can be pretty sure that whatever computer he was using and the computers he was hacking in to were using full-fledged operating systems (probably a Unix of some sort). Anyone who used a computer between, say, 1949 and 1965 would like to speak to him about this "one layer above the bare metal" business. SORRY I AM A HISTORY PEDANT AND A DORK BUT IT BOTHERS ME SO MUCH WHEN PEOPLE SAY THINGS ABOUT THE PAST THAT ARE NOT TRUE.
@jfruh +1!
@jfruh You mean UNIX commands don't direct robotic arms to rearrange vacuum tubes and punch cards? Now I'm sad.
Eh, it's no Drudge Manifesto.
It's not even a Grudge Report.
Strangely enough, "Knee Deep In Nasa" is the name of a chapter in my memoirs, the one that recounts the time I worked at a fetish dungeon in Tokyo.
@resipsaloquacious You just know his editor changed it from "balls deep".
Ick, ickety icky ick.
Also, Ray Davies would like to discuss the theft of his subtitle.
As corny as it sounds, what he says is true.
I should know. And I have a felony Computer Trespass conviction from 1989 to prove it.
It was exciting to traipse through the systems we hacked. Boeing, NASA, various military and government sites. Reading documents, memos, seeing how to companhy hierarchy was put together.
Sometimes we would play the Darth Vader theme as we tried to gain access. It was heady stuff for an 18-year old. You DID feel powerful.
Assange's words might seem a tad romanticized for most, but for those of us who have been there, we relate. :)
@jkonrad I don't disbelieve you exactly…but neither do you, or Assange, give us a concrete reason to believe you. Your tales (here) are all abstraction. I'm a programmer, I would understand details, if you deigned to suggest them.