Теория и практика перевода. Терехова Г.В. - 82 стр.

        Popular films and TV series have built up a mythology of what hackers can
do and with what degree of ease. My personal delight in such Dream Factory output
is in compiling a list of all the mistakes in each episode. Anyone who has ever tried
to move a graphics game from one micro to an almost-similar competitor will already
know that the chances of getting a home micro to display the North Atlantic Strategic
Situation as it would be viewed from the President's Command Post would be slim
even if appropriate telephone numbers and passwords were available. Less
immediately obvious is the fact that most home micros talk to the outside world
through limited but convenient asynchronous protocols, effectively denying direct
access to the mainframe products of the world's undisputed leading computer
manufacturer, which favors synchronous protocols. And home micro displays are
memory-mapped, not vector-traced... Nevertheless, it is astonishingly easy to get
remarkable results. And thanks to the protocol transformation facilities of Pads in
PSS networks (of which much more lately), you can get into large IBM devices....
        The cheapest hacking kit I have ever used consisted of a ZX81, 16K RAM
pack, a clever firmware accessory and an acoustic coupler. Total cost, just over 100.
The ZX81's touch-membrane keyboard was one liability; another was the uncertainty
of the various connectors. Much of the cleverness of the firmware was devoted to
overcoming the native drawbacks of the ZX81's inner configuration--the fact that it
didn't readily send and receive characters in the industry-standard ASCII code, and
that the output port was designed more for instant access to the Z80's main logic
rather than to use industry-standard serial port protocols and to rectify the limited
screen display.
        Yet this kit was capable of adjusting to most bulletin boards; could get into
most dial-up 300/300 asynchronous ports, re-configuring for word-length and parity
if needed; could have accessed a PSS PAD and hence got into a huge range of
computers not normally available to micro-owners; and, with another modem, could
have got into view data services. You could print out pages on the ZX 'tin-foil'
printer. The disadvantages of this kit were all in convenience, not in facilities.
Chapter 3 describes the sort of kit most hackers use.
        It is even possible to hack with no equipment at all. All major banks now
have a network of 'hole in the wall' cash machines—ATMs or Automatic Telling
Machines, as they are officially known. Major building societies have their own
network. These machines have had faults in software design, and the hackers who
played around with them used no more equipment than their fingers and brains. More
about this later.
        Though I have no intention of writing at length about hacking etiquette, it is
worth one paragraph: lovers of fresh-air walks obey the Country Code; they close
gates behind them, and avoid damage to crops and livestock. Something very similar
ought to guide your rambles into other people's computers: don't manipulate files
unless you are sure a back-up exists; don't crash operating systems; don't lock
legitimate users out from access; watch who you give information to; if you really
discover something confidential, keep it to yourself. Hackers should not be interested
in fraud. Finally, just as any rambler who ventured past barbed wire and notices