DEF CON 30 - Winn Schwartau - My First Hack Was in 1958

My first hack was in 1958, and it was all my mother’s fault. Or perhaps I should also blame my father. They were both engineers and I got their DNA. As a kid I hacked phones… cuz, well, phones were expensive! (Cardboard was an important hacking tool.) At age 6 I made a decent living cuz I could fix tube TVs. True! In roughly 1970 (thanks to NYU) we moved on to hacking Hollerith (punch) cards to avoid paying for telephone and our utilities, and of course, shenanigans. As a recording studio designer and builder, we dumpster dived for technology from AT&T. We never threw anything out and learned how to repurpose and abuse tech from the 1940s. As a rock’n’roll engineer, I learned to live with constant systems epic failures. Anything that could break would break: before a live TV event or a massive concert. Talk about lessons in Disaster Recovery and Incident Response. This talk, chock full of pictures and stories from the past, covers my hacking path as a kid then as a necessary part of survival in the entertainment industry. 1958-1981. Come on down for the ride and see how 64 years of lessons learned can give you an entirely different view of Hacking and how and why I have embraced failure for both of my careers!