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Television Media

MTV Profiles "Hackers" 237

Posted by Roblimo from the you-can-all-stop-submitting-this-now-thank-you dept.
Christopher Sypal writes "I just found out that MTV is going to have a special this Wednesday (10pm eastern) called 'True Life: I'm a Hacker'. Looks exactly like what you would expect from an MTV show with 'hacker' in the title." If MTV wants to put *real* (and funny) hackers on the air, they ought to send a camera crew to the (highly photogenic) Geek Compound and do a show on Cmdr Taco and Hemos. Perhaps we should all write to mtvdart@aol.com and tell them so, eh?
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MTV Profiles "Hackers" More

MTV Profiles "Hackers"

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  • MTV (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This story does seem proper when you look at the typical MTV Viewer - Backstreet Boy Loving 14 year old, whose idea of a "Hacker" is someone on AOL trying to get their password or cybersex. Personally, I'd rather watch a "Behind The Hacker" special on VH1. but that's just me -spicy bisquit

  • Re:Highly Photogenic? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    wierd... I thought it was just me. Of course only ever at home or VERY late at night when I am ABSOLUTELTY sure there is nobody else in the office.

    -AC ('cause other people here read this *grin*)

  • Get over yourselves (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "If you want to see real hackers you should come to the Geek Compound and see us blah blah blah...."

    At what point did the grand poobahs of slashdot become so full of themselves? Sorry, I guess I was just under the impression that you guys were a little more modest.

    Slashdot is an impressive piece of work. It's creators have combined a clever piece of software with interesting content. Along the way, they've attracted a community and helped them communicate with each other. That's no small achievement.

    But this, "Yeah, man, MTV sucks. We're the real geeks" attitude is really grating -- not only in the original article but in many of the response posts.

    These self-proclaimed "geeks" and "hackers" mock the "jocks" and other self-important people with a narrow range of talents. At the same time, the "geeks" indulge in the same chest-thumping and penis measurement. Instead of "Yeah, man. I could kick his ass," it's "Yeah, man. I could write that script," or "I could own that box."

    I have no doubt that many of the Slashdot posters are very skilled. I'm sure many of them do qualify for the title of "real hacker". However, proclaiming yourself a "real hacker" with a post on Slashdot is a pretty pathetic way to prove it.

    I'm reminded of a sig from a Slashdot member -- "Slashdot has more wannabe managers than hackers" I never see that person posting anymore. Now, I think I know why.
  • Woho! A man with some taste!

    I've been hearing about that live album for years. Will believe it when I see it. As for Oh My God, I almost died when I heard it. I hope to God that GNR's not gone electronica. That crap scared me.

    Slash was the real genius of that band; he wrote, played, and sang. Axl has a one in a million voice, and is a fantastic frontman, but their best epic stuff (Don't Cry, November Rain, Estranged, etc) came from Axl and Slash together. Their best hardcore rock came from Slash (Think About You, Mr. Brownstone, etc). Don't get me wrong, GNR will be a force again, but without Slash they're a ghost of what they were.

    And if you liked that Top 100 videos stuff, you've gotta by Guns N Roses "Welcome to the Videos." Make a trip to amazon.com, and cough up the $18 or so. It's all their videos (minus Civil War for some reason) with NO commercials, NO Carson Daily, and no interruptions of any kind. I love it.

    --

  • It's a neon green soda (pop, coke, whatever) that has a citrus flavor, is loaded with sugar and caffiene. Pretty good stuff actually. I have a friend who prefers mellow yellow to it, which is almost the same thing. Whatever. IMO, one of the good things about mountain dew is when the hours melt away whilst staring at a display, the mountain dew goes flat, but it still tastes ok. Jolt on the other hand tastes like crap flat. I've recently tried bawls, made from guarana beans (speeling?). It's pretty good also. There's always the standby coffee too, controlled via X10 and crontab to wake me up with the smell in the morning.. mmmmm
  • Yes, this sounds very familiar. I'm 16 and have been dealing with these types of people... well, ever since elementary school, I think :) They don't understand what I'm doing and write it off as boring and a waste of time. I discovered an interesting facet of this, though. While they could all care less about my kludges [linuxstart.com] over the years, when I burnt a CD of some music I had been tracking, everyone seemed to go into shock :P Ohhh... so /that's/ what you were doing... No, that's just a part of it... Moral of the story: blind them with a shiny CD. I also took it upon myself to deal with the script kiddie overpopulation problem... no, I didn't pull a BOFH, I just worked for about a year to convert one to UNIX hackerdom... well, something like that. He runs linux and is learning C and various graphics libraries now. Originally, he wanted to learn vishul basik to do some horrid AOL thingie. Well, I put a stop to that with some good ol' trickery. So, you can learn to coexist with them, you just need to convert the unwashed masses when you see potential, and maybe expand your digital work to something they can identify with (music, gimp-art, etc.). Of course, I don't mean all of them. The ones who don't see what at all this has to do with football have no hope at all, ignore them. :)
  • Hey Dave, Whats up? I didnt know you read slashdot.
  • Actually, Quite literally, he undoubtly has that knowledge and probably more. When I think of hacker, thats what I also think of, not someone who can download all the latest tools and run them, and reads bugtraq and stuff. Is is vary familiar with unit/nt/routing (i think he might even have cisco cert, if not getting it right now), tcp/ip,etc.. And he does do professional security consulting. But really, a serious major company, thats bs. What makes you a good security firm, because you name gets well known. That doesnt mean anything. Anyway, he knows his stuff, and when I mean stuff, I mean what you consider to be true hacker knowledge.
  • You Tell them, I tried to, but maybe they will take you more serious because you are L0pht. I do know how MTV wont air anything technical. They kept telling mantis to rephrase what he was saying in what they call english, phrase it to the MTV audience. So dont exspect technical information. Mantis also told me how you L0pht people called them kiddies, hehe. :)
  • Ok, So I dont know anything about security because I cant read your mind? When people use terms as "serious security company" and other terms, its all subject to interpretation. You meaning could mean something completely different then mine, but that doesnt mean I know nothing about security.
    I also said now were that certification ment anyting, your putting words into my mouth again. I also agree that certs dont mean anything, and that anyone can get a cert , doesnt mean they know what they are doing.
    About his skills and qualifcations. If you want to know more email him, his email is probably on the parse page on www.biztechtv.com. The intention of me writing the comment was not neccesarily to promote his skills, as much as it was to tell me not to judge things by there cover. People had comments all over about how its probably some lame script kiddie, etc.., you really should go off saying such things that you dont know to be true, watch the show, then you can rant on how lame the person is.
  • First of all, How could the cops bust them? They do do anything illegal on the show as far as I know.I know Mantis was nervous as hell with the camera around , so he did little more then common unix commands. Second, who says the are hackers in the sense that they go around breaking into computers illegal, and for that reason must hide there identity. Its is alias anyway, Mantis isnt his name. They got the Lopht thing going on, although you could probably find there names alot easier.
  • You guys really dont have a clue who the hacker is in this MTV special, so you really shouldnt judge until you have seen it. Actually, the hacker is a friend of mine named Mantis, from the famed Parse hack/phreak tv show broadcast over the Pseudo Network. He is very skilled, and lectured at SpookTech and demonstrated techniques to government officials. So you can knock on mtv all they want, on the quality of the show, but the hacker knows his shit. He isnt someone who just learned about BO2K or something and installed it. They found him through New York Times article on him and Shamrock's lecture at SpookTech. MTV reads the news also.
    To tell the truth though, dont exspect anything extravagent. Mantis felt kinda nervous with a MTV camera man following him around all day, so he didnt do anything besides typing 'ls' and 'cd' on his unix machine all day. The show is actually already online in realvideo, I will post a url later if someone doesnt beat me to it.
  • That's the trend, don't confuse cheap with what the people are demanding. That's the whole idea behind calling music "alternative" if we try to make people think that it's not produced and not big budget then it will be cool. Viacom has plenty of money and as far as road rules and real world go, they could be renting a place in Manhattan, or driving a fleet of ferarris downtown and it would be "cheap" compared to what the TV and movie industry is used to historically.


    It's all about marketing to the masses, the masses don't want to be marketed to right now so they will market us non-marketing.


    The funny thing about "hacking" is that it's just not entertaining. They could probably find someone real and someone good and our hacker community will be amazed at how good he's not (crackers don't code a lot) but the masses would never find it entertaining. It only makes sense to put a script kiddie up there or someone "who could break into a bank, but doesn't" which might as well be a script-kiddie for all practical matters. It's just not entertaining stuff.

  • "It's like being a God," says one of host's Serenea Altshul's cyberrenegades on his ability to wreak online havoc. But just when you're convinced that, yes, hacking's just an ego-boosting revenge of the nerds, along comes another keyboard cowboy with more righteous aims as he asks,"If Big Brother is watching me, why can't he be watched also?"

    Grade: B

  • why would you want to be?

    --
    Insanity Takes Its Toll. Please Have Exact Change

  • I must be getting too old... I find myself watching VH1 more than MTV (yes I know that MTV owns VH1) VH1 seems to have more music shows than MTV....
  • I've noticed too, that in any highschool there's always a few kids that are convinced that using aol and downloading warez makes them "uber-cool hacker guys." Then on the other hand, there's always a crowd that knows UNIX, and are capable of making 47k straight out of highschool.
    Fortunately I fell in with the latter. And have been happilly running some form of unix or another since I was 12.

  • It is amazing the comments and speculation from people who have no idea about what is in the show except for a couple of sound bites.

    Here is a link to the Press Release [l0pht.com] I put up on the L0pht web site which should give a better discription of the contents of the show.

    L0pht was interviewed and we tried to describe what hacking really is. We specifically told MTV that it wasn't downloading a scanner someone else wrote, then looking up a sploit on rootshell and running a script.

    I haven't seen the show so I don't know how much of what we said made it in. I will reserve my judgement of the show until I at least see it.

    -weld

    For a cool article in the NY Times about real hackers look here [nytimes.com].
  • I think the fact that you consider being '313373' as being something to aspire to says it all.

    I'll give them a chance - first, I don't give a damn what boxes they've rooted or whatever (that's just childish). What software have they coded? Have they contributed to the Linux kernel or any other open-source projects? Have they created their own project from scratch and had it become moderately successful?

    We're waiting. If your friends are as good as you think they are, show us the code.

    - Darchmare
    - Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
  • The thing is, if these guys allowed themselves to be raped by the MTV conglomerate for the sake of ratings, they deserve whatever they get.

    - Darchmare
    - Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
  • MTV doesn't play my music all the day, MTV doesn't
    comment on hackers right all the day.

    It's right, they're sending what their audience
    thinks it already knows a little bit of. I remember
    at school when everybody was sooo cool talking
    about how some systems could be cracked and how
    to send trojan horses by eMail. That was so cool
    for them, they didn't even ask if they were right
    at all.

    Once I talked to a "hacker", a student on my old
    school, 19 years old, and he told me there was
    a way to hide viri inside of a JPEG which would
    be started the first time you view that picture
    from your hard disk.

    No comment.
  • I'm sure they know all about this, but this will probably get good ratings, and that is all that maters, right? The show is only going to be bad in our eyes. In the eyes of everyone else, it will be informative and entertaining... <sigh>

    Welcome to the MTV Generation... it's all good as long as you have fun. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHH!!!!!

    --

  • ... well, ancedotal evidence supports the theory that one codes better when wearing only your underwear.

    --
  • Oh, it's funny alright. :^) I am just alittle annoyed that /. posted something like this - haven't we had enough "Hey look over there - it's another clueless journalist trying to write about us! Hahahhahahahaha!" stories in the last month?

    --

  • ... (Score:3)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @10:56AM (#1624835)
    d00d u r s0 l335! I'm a really l335 d00d because I can download warez and pr0n for free!! d00d, I am l335! Now I'm on MTV, and wow, I get to talk with all these, like, totally l335 d00ds. But I'm not gonna tell them anything, because they might have been sent from The Man.

    Let me guess, they're interviewing some kid that has probably just recently figured out his johnson can be used for more than utilitarian purposes? Comeon people... first, it's "cracker", not "hacker", and secondly crackers by their very nature are going to be difficult to find. Do 'ya really think some 13 year old kid appearing on MTV is a national threat blah blah blah invasion of privacy blah blah credit card blah blah info-criminal blah blah. Give me a break. Throwing stuff like this up on slashdot is a slap in the face - it offends our understanding of how this culture works. The fact that today's media is willing to believe anything a "hacker" says to be true without doing alittle fact-checking is disheartening to say the least. If I called up Channel 4 right now and said I just launched a tactical nuke at washington DC, what would the response be? Probably laughter. Now, if I say I *could* do that, all of the sudden they take me seriously. Go figure.

    Solution: *click* *click* *delete*

    --

  • Ohh! (Score:1)

    by Splat ( 9175 )
    Hey guys, I wonder if Abe Ingersol from Road Rules is going to make a special cameo apperance! Wouldn't that be great!
    [all sarcasm fully intended]

  • Highly Photogenic? (Score:4)

    by chromatic ( 9471 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @10:50AM (#1624837) Homepage

    I'm not sure MTV wants to show Rob and Jeff not wearing pants all day, unless it's "Hackers: Living in an Underwear Commercial".

    Sorry guys.

    --
    QDMerge [rmci.net] 0.4 just released!
  • I happen to be close friends with an ex-gH member, and I must say, there more than a half of a notch from a script kiddie.

    If you ever saw gH code, you would understand.


    -Mike
  • Damn this media hype is coming up to the nerves.
    It's everywhere. Hackers do that, broke that. They are watching you even in the bathroom. Looks too crazy? Well this week one of the police departments to combat cybercrime was shown on TV on how they adverted the attempt to kill a crime testimony in intensive care. It seems that the artificial breath system was connected to.. Internet! :)))))))))))))

    That's the funny part. The sad one was that, last week, one journalist decided to dig up on my personality and "discovered" that I'm one of the 100 most dangerous hackers in the world. And it seems that he describes all this with some good detail (still I couldn't get my hands to this piece of crap).
    The newspaper possesses a nationwide spread and it is known for its scandalous notoriety.

    Well I'm a hacker. But I don't have any will to be on the first or last of these 100 "hackers/lamers" of the Universe. I would send this guy to Hell if it was not a problem. I have some good job here. What will happen tomorrow when I'll come in? "Sorry man but we have some bad news for you". Or "Don't leave the town until we check all you have done!"

    The worst of all is that it was the brother of my wife that first discovered this piece of crap. So imagine what's going home...

    Really these guys are going too far. All them to the Gulag. Or stamp in each of their heads a display with Slashdotters comenting their crap.
  • Ok I got this damn news. Well here it goes. Some
    years ago a colleague decided to spread a very sad joke about me. Frankly I don't belong to the saints. But what he described was a Hell. That I even broke into a major worldwide bank. However at that time this didn't make too much noise. Mass media didn't even know what was FIDONet or BBS...

    Now this bastard journalist decided to write some blockbuster article and picked that damned piece of crap. Somehow he managed to go with my full name on it. With the usual media overexageration. He even incorrectly published my alias of some years ago.

    Really he made two silly mistakes and my bosses considered this as a very very bad joke on me (THANKS GOD!..).but I had to pass some hellish minutes explaining that all that this guy published is pure yellow-press and nothing more.
  • Doesnt mathematica use a Lisp-esque language? -Laxative
  • Keeping with the usual quality of progrmaming exhibited by MTV, I think JP of AntiOnline is going to be one of the principal sources on this god-awful teeny bopper extravaganza. In one of the "mailbags" on AO, he mentioned being interviewed by MTV for a TV show about hackers....

    xm@GeekMafia.dynip.com [http://GeekMafia.dynip.com/]

  • When coding, I wear:

    • Pants
    • A skirt
    • Boxers
    • Briefs
    • Panties
    • Chastity Belt
    • I go sky-clad
    • Ur m0m dO0Dz

    Jay (=

  • Re:... (Score:1)

    by alhaz ( 11039 )
    No, I'm actually pretty certian they'll make the same mistake over and over.

    We're a pretty small demographic, all things considered. And as long as the general public thinks we're people of godlike capabilities, we'll all have job security.



  • I love the "be a nonconformist, buy our overpriced designer crap" ads that they carry.

  • gH is not a "real" hacking group for christs sake. I'm not sure who LoU is (not that involved). but they're probably much the same. I know/knew plenty of gH, they're hardly what you'd call sophisticated hackers. They're maybe half a notch up from these wanna-bes.....



  • I have. Its nothing impressive. I've yet to see non-derivitive code from them that actually _does_ something. Most of it is trivial crap, or doesn't work as claimed.

  • I agree totally..this is a slap in the face. Why does *anything* that MTv does suprise this crowd? Haven't we all agreed that there is no end to their cluelessness? If so..let's move on! Stop posting these..."Oh look at the clueless journalist/writer/company" stories. These are getting uncomfortably close to .."We're Slashdot..we're l33t!" types of stories. As was pointed out here recently, "Us vs Them" type stories are *not* the way to go.

  • The Media just doesn't know it, because, well, watching a bunch of geeks slurping Mountain Dew and poring over man pages is *boring*. ;]

    Speaking of Mt.Dew... I'd love to seem them do a realistic commercial some day. Show the real demographic that they sell to: A bunch of geeks coding, playing games, etc.

    As if Sk8r d00dz and Busta-Rhymes are their real market... yeah, right!

  • Especially guys named Bill G Says the man with the MSN account.....

    First time it's been noticed. It was intentional. It's had been up there for about six months.

    Like this one better? ;)
  • The Media just doesn't know it, because, well, watching a bunch of geeks slurping Mountain Dew and poring over man pages is *boring*. ;]

    Nah, you just have to learn how to market yourselves.

    Q: What operating system do you use?
    A: One a bunch of us wrote from scratch.

    Q: Where do you get your gear?
    A: Well, mostly stuff that other people throw away. Some of the more creative ones acutally build their machines from scratch.

    Q: Have you like, broken into the FBI's computers yet?
    A: Not worth it. We already know everything they do. Some of us are employed to keep the low lifes out of machines anyway.

    Q: When do you hack?
    A: Anytime, we spread all over the world, so it always daytime for someone. Besides, computers don't sleep.

    Q: Have you ever caused other people harm?
    A: Every day, baby. Especially guys named Bill G.

    Q: What is your goal in life?
    A: World Domination, of course.
  • Which would mean what exactly?

    They're going to hack a couple ISP's and do some password sniffing? Try to read email in a language they don't understand? Thats the extent of their hacking ability.

  • Woopsy (Score:1)

    by ddt ( 14627 )
    It airs Oct 13. They finished filming & editing some time ago.
  • how funny would it be if someone *cough cough* just happened to replace the file at http://www.mtv.com/index.html with a little dissertation on the difference between a hacker and a cracker? (EG, Alan Cox and the people at L0pht are hackers, people playing war games on EFNet and defacing web pages using downloaded scripts aren't..)

    C'mon, it would be doing mtv a _favor_. It would give them some free extra content for when their special goes on air.

    Where's HFG when you need them?

    -_-
  • Hey, I'm a coder and a skateboarder and i drink mt dew while doing both =] Besides, Jolt Cola's better.

  • no, and it's not short. i dyed it black once.. that looks pretty weird with red facial hair.. i dislike short dyed blonde hair.. it's scary looking

  • I thought this was going to be an expose of a day in the life of Carolyn Menial. Since she is obviously the l33t Uberhax0r they are looking for. Where can she sign up?

  • Then imagine how your kids are going to feel!

    And assuming pollution hasn't made them infertile, their kids are look back on you Generation Y fogeys and curse you with envy at how easy you had it, and blame you for leaving them with a dead world. You'll scream, "The Gen Xers did it! The Baby Boomers did it!" but they'll just shake their heads with contempt. And that's nothing compared to what their kids are gonna say... And if you're still alive to hear it, you'll laugh when they whine, because they get to drive those cool "The Jetsons" type cars.

    In other words, quit complaining. It gets worse and it gets better, all at the same time. No, no one will ever give you any respect, but it's the same for everyone.


    ---

  • Beer (Score:2)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 )

    Just what the hell is this Mountain Dew, anyway?

    Carbonated water, sugar, caffeine, artificial yellow-green coloring. Best of its class, because except for the coloring, it doesn't make any pretenses about what it's for.

    Maybe I'm showing my age here, but I've always preferred a few tins of beer (real beer, not that piss you get in the US, I mean 2.7% alcohol by volume?) followed by a gallon or so of coffee to prop you up in the final few hours of those 70 hour coding marathons we programmers love...

    Well, I must be showing my age here ,because I can't do 70 hour marathons anymore. :(

    As for beer, you can get real beer in USA, it's just that it is less common and costs more. The beer market is in a feedback situation similar to the PC hardware market: The tasteless stuff costs so much less than the good stuff, that people buy it regardless of its quality, thereby creating a big economy-of-scale, which in turn gets more people to buy it, leading to Budweiser and IDE hard disks having domination.

    (Aside: I didn't start drinking beer until I was about 27 years old! I hated beer, because all I had been exposed to was the popular pissy stuff, and it just didn't appeal to me. I thought that's all there was. So I drank caffeinated carbonated sugar water beverages when the weather was warm, and coffee when the weather was cold. It wasn't until a few years ago that (at an office party, of all things) someone handed me a Sam Adams and I found out that beer could actually be tasty.)

    Anyway, as for hacking while under the influence, many years ago, I discovered two things:

    • It can be done! I can hack while buzzed. The code even makes sense later, when sober.
    • When buzzed, I don't want to hack. It kills my motivation.
    I guess it must not be the same for everyone; I'm surprised you start your marathons with the stuff. Maybe if I'de been exposed to good beer in my younger formative years, things would be different. So, my fellow Americans, I say this: do the younger generation a favor, and sneak 'em a good beer now and then, so that they don't get used to the pissy stuff or give up on beer altogether. They'll thank you for it when they're older.

    Oh, and while you're at it, expose 'em to real Heavy Metal so they don't grow up thinking that MTV industrial rapcore shit (e.g. Korn) is real thing. DTFM!


    ---
  • LOL!
    In my calculus lab Red Hat was recently installed (seems WSU is trying to save some cash by trashing their Unix lisences). I switch virtual terminals out of X (they boot at init 4), telnet to our mail server, open an xterm (not available in their fvwm95 startmenu) and the whole section knows me as "that hacker guy". Nevermind that being fluent in C syntax I don't struggle with mathematica.
    Then my group members ask what hacking is about, and they choke on the buzzwords. Chances are that MTV is targeting the 95% of the class that has no clue. This helps convince me that no matter how "jet set" popular culture percieves us as. Geek culture will never be a pop culture icon.
  • Thing is, we all know that the most the 3l337-haxor AOL kiddies will do is get telnet accounts, ping each other, WinNuke each other, download canned cracks, etc, etc. But they're mostly harmless. Just bandwidth hogs and arrogant adolescents.

    We need to fork off a separate network just for script kiddies. The only allowed TCP packets are SYN fragments, all hosts have open root logins via telnet, ports 137-139 have unpassworded root shells (oh wait, this is already the case), all HTTP transfers must consist of annoying animated GIFs, and Microsoft provides a GUI front-end to ping -f. :)

  • could run a Chimpanzee simulator. :)
  • ...that years ago crusaded (via their "Rock the Vote" campaign) for young people to get out there and vote against things like censorship and the like? I don't know if they still do that (I'm no longer in their target demographic, and they've stopped sending me "Rock the Vote" stuff) but at the time it was a fine and noble effort. How the mighty have fallen.

    Ten years from now, little Johnny will be old enough to vote, and MTV will remind them to do so. Of course, the issues are complicated, however, Johnny knows who's good and who's bad, thanks to MTV.

    Oh, sure, MTV is still advising the newly-enfranchised to get out there and vote, but the things they're advised to vote for aren't the same.

    They paraded some kids in front of the camera, and had them say (with blank stares of course) that they were glad that they were in uniforms, and that police were walking around in the halls with guns, and things are so much better now that there's a barbed wire fence around the campus....

    And this is the idyllic future we're supposed to want to live in? Oh, sorry - it's the present, and we already live there.

    Y'know, I think they used to show music videos too. Whatever happened to that?
  • GreyFauk walks up to you and Stamps a HUGE
    Red-Ink stamp that says "Clueless!" on your forehead.

    Yeah.. I liked the movie hackers... but only for it's
    humor value. That and the cute chick 'Acid Burn'

    MTV should've stuck to what they started with. Music Videos. That's it... nothing more.
    Anyone else here not watched it for years?

  • I hate to say this (because it's true), but if you've
    been impressed by the quality of ANYthing MTV has
    done in the last 15 years... Well... You're drifting
    in that same fantasy world as 90% of the population
    of sheeple in the U.S..

    Turn OFF the TV... and pick up a book some time. No...
    Not the pOrn mags, you dimwit, good quality reading.
    A little bit of culture never hurt anyone.

    How can you tell you've aquired a bit of taste in life
    and culture?

    Easy... When you watch MTV.. it will seem as immature,
    uninsightful, droll and annoying as it really is.

    If you read enough.. you might even catch on to what
    kind of unthinking moron they are programming kids to be.
    Have you seen all the junk they portray as being needed
    to be popular these days?

    *sheesh* As if a T1 wasn't enough :>
    I'm so glad I'm wearing the 'Right' jeans...*look of ecstacy*
    now ALL the chicks will think I'm hot.
    Pullleaaase!

    Ok.. so I'm starting to ramble.. :> hehe... Oh well. :>

  • MTV doesn't produce the videos.

    They should stick to just showing them.... :>
  • Sucks (sometimes) to have been raised in a family
    that welcomes and prefers intelligence...

    I wanted MTV as a kid (10yrs old)

    At 16yrs old (the next time I saw it) It sucked...
    Yeah.. I watched it a few times just to make sure. heh...
    That was... Ohhh... over 10 years ago... I've not seen any
    improvements worth watching since.

    Yeah.. caught a few bizarre cartoons... but one or two
    of those a year is good enough for me.. *shrug*
  • Those guys who label the generations haven't even settled on a name for us yet. But, of course, there's more than one generation reading /..
    • If you were born before 1961, you're a "baby boomer". That's the only one that's decided, more or less.
    • If you were born sometime between '61 and '77 or '81 (Yep, they haven't even decided on the year for that yet) you're "new lost", "baby buster", "x", "y", "13"... (no decided name either).
    • And if you were born after that, you're "millennial" or some other name that hasn't been proposed yet. Cutoff'll probably be somewhere between last year and 2002.

    And, if you're one of the x/y/13/whatever generation, you're screwed. But then, you already know that anyway, considering the way society has treated us... Maybe we should be called the Screwed Generation.

    -----

  • Go ahead, add it to the list for whichever year range. And let me know which is the Coke generation too ;)

    -----

  • I've been a major dew-aholic for years. It's so smooth and chuggable. I can't drink Coke or Pepsi. They are so heavily carbonated that you end up drinking a mouthfull of froth. yew..
  • learning something.

    Recently on .tv (bSkyb Television's IT channel here in the UK) they had an advert explaining the difference between cracker and hacker - I was proud and I thought that the GP had heard the squealings of hackers, that they should be differentiated from crackers, but no, MTV, the mainstream dead-head TV of america have done it again.

    Why oh Why, When oh When.

    It sucks...
  • so what.. mtv has another show people are gonna dis because its not true, nobody understands us, blah blah blah..

    c'mon people.. you either A) Will watch this show B) Won't watch the show C) will be to stoned to do anything anyway..

    this is just another rant on my behalf, BUT.... go ahead and dis the show, but don't request to be on it and dis it at the same time.

    and real hackers.. what is a real hacker, what qualifies someone else to be "real" "hacker" over any other goober with a pc and alot of spare time?

    just some ponderings, but you know, it is t.v. show, hopefully it wont be cheasy like the "Ghost in the machine" is. and hopefully it won't be the fight between good and evil of mitnick and such.

    anyone have any info on what they will cover? MTV have a link?

  • If that kid had any idea what the DoD did with really sensitive info, he would never even pretended to have broken in. Stealing sensitive information is considered treason, which means you get killed for that kinda crap. They wouldn't have not arrested him, like he claims.

    The intelligence of the average MTV viewer is amazingly low. At least the GAP might be able to sell a few more $1000 grunge look outfits out of the show...

  • Sadly enough... (Score:5)

    by RawkettPenguiN ( 24437 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @11:22AM (#1624875)
    *takes off red hat for a few minutes and puts on asbestos helmet..*

    ..As a representative of the teens-early-20's generation (What is that called now? I'm too young to be Generation X...) this IS the kind of thing everyone believes. Say I bring a Linux manual or some Perl pages to school to read in my spare time--which I've done a few times this year.
    "What are you reading that's so interesting?" Joe Average Student asks.
    I tell them.
    "That's boring," they scoff.
    Then let's say I bring some printouts of 'Guide to (Mostly) Harmless Hacking' or some phrack exploits, stuff like that...(Last year I did this...I admit it. But it IS what brought me to Slashdot..;] ) Instantly I'm the center of negative attention by students AND teachers alike..."That's illegal!" "Hacking is against the law." "You're not going to DO that, are you?" "I can't believe you. Throw those away."

    Thing is, we all know that the most the 3l337-haxor AOL kiddies will do is get telnet accounts, ping each other, WinNuke each other, download canned cracks, etc, etc. But they're mostly harmless. Just bandwidth hogs and arrogant adolescents.
    I believe that a person with actual knowledge of *nix and how programming works is more dangerous than 100 AOL kiddies. The Media just doesn't know it, because, well, watching a bunch of geeks slurping Mountain Dew and poring over man pages is *boring*. ;]
    So MTV slaps the "hacker" label on a bunch of stoned-drunk-whatever 20-somethings who want to break into school/bank computers. And they call it entertainment.
    This is how the public thinks, I guess. So instead of bemoaning the AOL hax0r 31337's who like to make real geeks look bad, perhaps we should just go on with lives...and make more money than they do...

    Just my $.02. Flame away.
  • Anyone wanna place bets on whether this show is going to be bad, or really bad?

    It reminds me of an Humorist: "You see worse? Ok, this will be even worse"
  • Your comment and your signature make for an amusing combination...
  • The tasteless stuff costs so much less than the good stuff, that people buy it regardless of its quality,

    cheap solution for beer drinkers. buy a six pack of an expensive favorite brew and a 40oz. of any malt liquor. drink from the expensive stuff until you are noticably drunk (varies between user). then finish up with the ML. i know that by the third or fourth beer i can't tell the difference anymore, so it saves me having to buy another six-pack again...
  • I don't even understand why MTV is doing this. Obviously, the movie "Hackers" told me everything I needed to know about the computer underworld. I can't imagine there being a more relevant, comprehensive, or realistic documentary about the subject.. except for maybe "Hackers 2".

    :-)
  • I don't see at all how putting it on Slashdot is a slap in the face. It's obviously just for everyone to laugh at. I don't think anyone is suggesting or even pretending to imply that this is anything resembling accurate or useful journalism.

  • Bank-hacking warrior children (Score:4)

    by Plasmic ( 26063 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @11:13AM (#1624881)
    Some choice quotes from the RealAudio streams that require no external comments to make you realize what a quality piece of journalism that this isn't:

    "All I did was sell weed and listen to loud music and stay out all night. I was one of those kinds thinking 'Wow, I can change my grades or I can hack into a bank and do wire transfers'. It's the glamour of that that drew me in."

    "There's no people telling you what you can and can't do. At 16, Chameleon left high school and became a superstar at the hacking underground. Working from a computer in his mother's garage, he penetrated some of the government's most secure military computers."

    "Gotta breath. Your heart's beating. You don't know what you're getting into but then yet again you wanna do it. Typing the final commands and then you're wondering whether the other guy at the other end is waiting for you to come and bust you. You break into somebody's system, that's not allowed. Just by having the password for the other account, that's not allowed; it's all illegal."

    Well, at least MTV didn't just find a buncha wannabes who thought they were radical dudes. Er.. doh!
  • I know this has probably been said hundreds of times, but WHEN WILL THE MEDIA LEARN? It seems that scr1pt k1dd13s are more favorable press materials than the real crackers that no one knows about. I've been using Linux for over two years, but kept it to myself through the last of my school years, for fear that the freaks they call 'administrators' would size me up to be the next Kevin Mitnick in their eyes. After all, throughout the middle school and high school years for me, until the last two years, I was considered a nerd (and therefore was disliked for some strange reason) because of my interest in computers. Who's laughing now, when the same ones who disliked me are asking me how to fix their damn computers...

    But that's another rant altogether. :)

    Here's a plan to at least help fix the cracker/hacker mixup - point anyone who mentions the word 'hacker' as the malicious sense to the Jargon File...at least they can start figuring things out for themselves, instead of having the media force-feed it to them. It won't completely fix the problem, but it's an effort.
    _______
    Scott Jones
    Newscast Director / WKPT-TV 19
    Game Show Fan / C64 Coder
  • I have a bad feeling this will inspire kids to go on the internet and try to be hackers. But instead we'll have a rush of script kiddies on our hands. AOL KEYWORD: HAX0R
  • ...have you dyed your short hair blond?
    ......
  • Would have to be the 80's, or did you mean cola?
  • ...Generation Why.

    Human Genome, nano-tech, quantum computing, creating life, Hubble telescope, the Internet, etc. All this stuff has been or will most likely be realized within our lifetimes. Interesting times, indeed.
  • That would be a company with lots and lots of radio stations, and a company with MTV,VH1 (plus lots of other stuff, like a TV network). What's that mean? The same songs, over and over, until SOMEBODY buys 'em. Long live MP3.
  • ...per second of air time for the videos to be produced. Very expensive if what you say is true. Pay to make, pay to air. While MTV gets the advertising dollars. It will get worse, quality wise, check my other post on CBS-Viacom.

  • A lesson in demographics (Score:4)

    by Wah ( 30840 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @01:45PM (#1624890) Homepage Journal
    Anyone else here not watched it for years?

    Anyone here over the age of 24? If you are you shouldn't be watching MTV, at least from thier eyes. They target an audience from 13-24, that's it. Did you watch it then? Did you like it then? Does it suck now, to you?

    They also target by psychographics, i.e. intelligence. Guess which end of the spectrum they go for there. Guess which one /. goes for.

    I liked it when they played videos, but do you know how much videos cost to produce? A 3-minute video costs much more than a 30-minute edit job (Real Rules & Road World). When you have to fill up 24/7 creative programming is important, cheap programming is very important, and quality programming is what HBO does.
  • [Offtopic Redundant etc.]
    That's no good for me
    I don't need nobody!
    One LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE


    Ah the old prodigy. They used to rule my world... Not anymore (sniff)


    --

  • ...and they have an AOL e-mail address.

    What's worse is all the AOL lusers that will see this and begin to ph33r all the d00dz that IM them with "Hi, I'm from AOL support! Please e-mail me your password and credit card number at once!"

    Ever have the misfortune to catch a glimpse of their show (Yack Live?) where they had a split-screen showing music videos and an AOL chat room? It goes a little something like this:

    LuSeR4078: DUDE THIS VIDEO ROX
    I liKe BSB 8029100: put on sum bsb! bsb's kewl
    MannSONN12: hi im a 12/m with a pic
    (repeat for an hour)
  • nah. code naked.
  • Huh?

    With the obvious exception of SoBE, not much tastes better after a long hot day of downhill mountainbiking or even cross country on me Santa Cruz than a dew.

    Their target audience is just fine, thanks! :)

    (but I do drink a lot more of the stuff at work where I'm hacking away at something all day long)
  • Actually, I was thinking script kiddy.
  • I know this is way off topic, but the comment about "publicity" jarred this thought: Andover, SlashDot and Rob got mentioned in the latest copy of Wired (7.11) on page 99. Keen.
  • Please go Own that page if you know how.
  • We are the Used Generation.

    To companies, we are merely numbers to be exploited and bent to their will, just another source to supply their greed with fuel.

    To adults, we are looked down on as children, rebelious and lazy. Yet, those of our generation that actually prescribe to this are merely doing what their parents or role models taught them.

    Our generation is also the generation that has, to say, gotten it up the tail pipe. Abortion has killed off more of our generation than any other. Once we get out into the work force, we will have more work to do than any other generation, merely because there are more retired people to support.

    To the government, we're a force to be controlled and manipulated to submit. This is done through the public schools. We are no longer allowed to have individual thought. It is controlled by the restriction of freedom of speech. We can no longer talk about things that we believe in freely. All to the ends of political campeigns.

    -------
    CAIMLAS

  • Um....first off, why the heck would you be announcing that you hacked military computers on MTV? And secong, why isn't he being arrested? This proves that this is a fake (not that there was any _real_ doubt...).

    Second, why is MTV doing more and more about crap and socity (which I am proud to _NOT_ be a part of) and less and less music? What does `M'TV stand for?

    Third, they say hackers, they mean crackers, I know it's redundant, but worthy of mention.

    Fourth, they portray these as the regulr geek/nerd type of person. Just a question, how many of you would _ever_ appear on MTV?

    Fifth, s0m3 1337 h4x0rs appearing 0n M7V pr0v1ng 7h47 7h3y c4n t41k f0r h0urs w/0 b31ng c0h3r3n7 w01n'7 d0 much f0r publ1c 0p1n10n 0f g33ks 4nd n3rds 3v3rywh3r3. Get my point?

    Sixth, why does everybody get so scared when you say your a hacker (or even a cracker), I mean, except very few, they can't do any real damage at all. I hate the sterotype that we are all evil and out to destroy the world.

    Seventh, why does everybody think of these people as the `computer elite'? They download a script, run it, and call it `hacking'. My hamster can do that. Try writing that script, in 4 diffrent languages, for 3 platforms, then you've got a hacker.

    Eighth, I wonder if they have ever even been to Slashdot? It would be cool to get some publicity (It has appeared in the Paper (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) once or twice). But, then again, most people would find quantium mechanics, Echolen and geek culture in general boring.

    In conclution, well, you figure out for yoursef.

    That's my $(2^4*3+1/7%3*2/100)

  • erg...MTV (Score:4)

    by Ribo99 ( 71160 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @11:37AM (#1624933) Homepage Journal
    Anyone out there remember when MTV actually showed videos? Videos on Music Television, who would have thought.
  • Ok, regardless of our opinions of the MTV hype of the "hacker," I must say that I really enjoyed the colorful naked pictures flashign to the right of the article...
  • Unfortunately, the ramifications of this (and other) shows aired on MTV won't be realized for another 10 years or so.

    Nobody reading this would for a second be fooled by the obvious folding, spindling, and multilation of reality that will inevitably be this program (key word here, more on that later). However, Johny 8-12 year old will accept it as the gospel truth. (MTV told me that Sprite tastes good... It does; MTV told me that Super Marios Brothers 20 comes out in a week... It did; MTV told me that evil hackers want to kill me and my family... They do). Ten years from now, little Johnny will be old enough to vote, and MTV will remind them to do so. Of course, the issues are complicated, however, Johnny knows who's good and who's bad, thanks to MTV.

    Another case in point, on a recent "Your Rights" bit that they aired, they applauded turning public schools into high security virtual prison camps. They paraded some kids in front of the camera, and had them say (with blank stares of course) that they were glad that they were in uniforms, and that police were walking around in the halls with guns, and things are so much better now that there's a barbed wire fence around the campus.... Fortunately for Sony corp (I think they still own MTV, of course, didn't someone else buy them recently?), the current generation of kids don't know enough that anytime they hear a group of people with zero disagreeing opinions, that they are probably hearing nothing more than propaganda. Too bad there isn't a way to keep them in check... Or at least something close to honest...

    I weep for the future. Do your kid a favor, kill their television.

  • Re:Sadly enough... (Score:5)

    by deepgeek ( 83267 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @04:21PM (#1624944)
    Speaking of Mt.Dew... I'd love to seem them do a realistic commercial some day. Show the real demographic that they sell to: A bunch of geeks coding, playing games, etc.

    (Fade in to back of person typing furiously. Computer next to him has not case and the hard drive is on the desk next to him. We see him exit out of pico and attempt to compile the program he just wrote. Instantly the screen scrolls with errors.

    Cut to his face, we see him smile.

    Cut to his hand. It reachs for a Mt. Dew, pops the top, and the camera follows the can to the mouth. While he's chugging we see him hit the Up arrow key to recall the last command, hit enter, and the program compiles without problem. Flashy logo with lame slogan like "Choice of a Gnu Generation.)
  • MTV is no longer the music television network it once was. It is now a core network in the quest to turn teenagers into mindless zombies who spend money on MTV's sponsors.

    And of course, this is a special on crackers, and I'm sure they'll feature a bunch of script kiddies using BO2K and other such things. I suppose that the term hacker, to everyone else but a real hacker, is synonimous with cracker or script kiddie, or even people who run "Warez" sites and stuff like that. The press is a very powerful force, and the "true" term of hacker is probably lost forever except among slashdotters and other geeks.

  • MTV.. True Life: I am a script kiddie (Score:3)

    by ezzewezza ( 84083 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @11:39AM (#1624946)
    When I was in high school, I beat up the geeks and stole their lunch money. Then I found out about the internet and "hacking." I mean, I was like wow, I can run this little script and do stuff to other people. I don't even know what I'm doing half the time, but you should all fear me because my friends and me, we started this new hacker group called Legndary Attackers, Maliciously Evil Reconnaisance Specialists.

    just my $0.02

  • Re:Bank-hacking warrior children (Score:3)

    by Spamizbad ( 87449 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @12:13PM (#1624949)
    Every time my system is due for a kernel upgrade, I get baked off my ass, then chug a 40oz, compile it, then take a drive. By the time I get out of jail for the DUI, my kernel is done compiling on the 386 in my mom's garage.
  • The trouble is that any single member of their target demographic will think that about 50% of videos violently suck. And when such a vid comes on, they change channels. Big long shows about l33t h4x0R types are bound to suck, but are specifically designed so that their coefficient of suckage is not quite enough to justify the caloric expenditure required to lift one of their fat, cheese-munching fingers out of the chicken bucket and onto the remote. So they're more likely to be there when the adverts start. That's my understanding anyway.

    jsm

  • Cheap... that's why.. (Score:3)

    by Issue9mm ( 97360 ) on Sunday October 10, 1999 @11:15AM (#1624966)
    Everyone wants to know why MTV is going to do a show on 'hackers'? Cause it's cheap. I don't know if anyone has noticed, but MTV's shows are becoming, by practice, cheap shows. Think about it. Doesn't REALLY cost a whole lot to produce Beavis n Butthead. Marketing and air-time aside, not a whole lot just to produce. B&B were out the door when they got too expensive. Replacement? Sifl n Ollie... c'mon, ya can't get much cheaper than that. (not to say it's not funny tho. cracks me up.) Big shows? Lessee, Real World is a pretty big show right? They take seven people (who they're NOT paying), and stick em in an apartment. What's that cost em? Rent. Road Rules. Kay, I'll grant that a Winnebago probably costs a lot of money, but still, I don't even think that they put gas in it. (or maybe they do, I dunno.) Anyway, that's my take.

    Dustpuppy inside...
  • 8 Hackers,Desert Island,1 Can of Mountain Dew...you do the math
  • Actually, I can relate to that. Last year at my school there were three or four kids who were completely convinced they were hackers. They were quite convinced they could send eachother viruses on e-mail which would "make their computer crash" and also use such cool things as "pinter punters" (that was the terminology used) which kicked other people off of AOL. What the hell is this? And of course they thought I was a complete dumbass because all I did was code a multiplayer online RPG (you can follow the URL if you wish, the page sucks but the game is pretty good) and thought I didn't know anything about computers because I wasn't about to go get AOL so I could harass some innocent people in chat rooms. And yet for some reason people convince these kids that they are "hackers" and as such it gives them some kind of greater-than-thou mentality. A really sad state for our culture I must say.
  • everyone here is very pessimistc, and i must admit i took their whole idea with a grain of salt. But if Mtv does a good job and really does a good job it might be able to inform a lot more people about what a hacker truly is

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