What If You Got Hacked?
We’re talking about getting hacked. Ryan runs down the history of hacking, starting with model trains and long distance calling. Spencer talks about Gary McKinnon and how he stole pictures of UFOs from NASA. We also play the What In The F%$K Was That!? Wikipedia game.
Gary McKinnon
Gary McKinnon hacked nearly 100 American military and NASA servers from February 2001 to March 2002. His goal was to find evidence of UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation. He claims he did exactly that. However, he also managed to delete a lot of data in the process, and cost the U.S. government $700,000. McKinnon is a UK citizen, and did this hacking from his girlfriend’s aunt’s house in London. After 12 years of extradition attempts, Gary’s case was closed in 2005 when the UK government refused to turn him over to U.S. authorities.
“A NASA photographic expert said that there was a Building 8 at Johnson Space Center where they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging. I logged on to NASA and was able to access this department. They had huge, high-resolution images stored in their picture files. They had filtered and unfiltered, or processed and unprocessed, files.”
– Gary McKinnon
The ‘What In The F@%k Was That?‘ Wikipedia Game
- Go to Wikipedia’s list of unusual articles.
- Player one picks a number between 1 and 15. Player two matches this number to one of the 15 main categories in the Wikipedia list. (ex: player 1 selects 5 – section 5 is Science)
- Player one chooses another random number. Player two matches this number to one of the subcategories. (ex: player one selects 3 – section 5.3 is Chemistry and Material Science)
- Player one chooses a random letter. Player two matches this letter to one of the entries in the chosen subcategory. (ex: player one selects C – C correlates to Cosmic Latte)
- Player two then reads the title of the article, and player one must guess what it is about.
Hot Topics: Gary McKinnon, Phone Phreaking, Gef The Talking Mongoose, Dog Spinning, What In The F%$K Was That!?, We Have Been Bamboozled, Phantom Time Hypothesis, Hackathon, 1337 h4x0r, Self-deprecating Worms, and much more.
Have an idea for an episode? Share it with us here.
