Cyberdelia NYC

The Crime is Curiosity. Ultimate cyberpunk lounge/club destination for random moments of Hackers movie nostalgia and lols.

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Oz and Yug? They’re flakes!

They’re elite!

Opening title logo of BBC's Making the Most of the Micro Live, October 1983. A line of white computer text 'MAKING THE MOST OF THE' including the BBC Micro Owl mascot icon after the word Making, followed by a large MICRO in blue and overlaid with a handwritten style LIVE in white.

Throwback to a funny moment for both live television and hacking lore. In 1983 the BBC had a number of initiatives to promote computer literacy including some television programs and one-off live specials. One such special aired in October 1983, Making the Most of the Micro Live. In one segment host Ian McNaught-Davis had John Coll in studio with a BBC Micro computer hooked up to a modem. They wanted to demonstrate a new BT Gold phone network that had electronic mail capabilties by dialing in and accessing the new-fangled “e-mail” service. Little did Coll know but the account password issued to them for their demonstration had been revealed to the studio and some guests up for a laugh got word to some hacking friends outside. Upon connecting to the online service, Coll got a surprise message.

Watch the whole sequence from the BBC archives here and see the message below.

BBC hacked live on air, Micro Live, October 2nd 1983, BBC Archive.
Screenshot of BBC Micro screen with white computer text: Computer Security Error. Illegal access. I hope your Television PROGRAMME runs as smoothly as my PROGRAM worked out your passwords! Nothing is secure! Hackers' Song: Put another password in, Bomb it out and try again, Try to get past logging in, we're Hacking, Hacking, Hacking. Try his first wife's maiden name, This is more than just a game, It's real fun, but just the same, It's Hacking, Hacking, Hacking. --The NutCracker ( Hackers' UK ) HI THERE, OWLETS, FROM OZ AND YUG (OLIVER AND GUY)
Unbelievable. A hacker!: Oz & Yug's message and song appearing on screen for hosts of Micro Live.

The Hackers’ Song is great. A classic bit of hacking antics and humor. No harm done really and John Coll kept his cool and carried on with the show like a pro. Oz and Yug? They’re elite!

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Morris - A Worm for Our Times

On this day in history the Morris worm was released onto the Internet, wreaking havoc on a number of systems and becoming notorious as one of the first worms distributed on the net. While the only crime was curiosity at the start, aiming to exploit a number of vulnerabilities and explore possibiltiies, the end result was a damaging viral spread thanks to the effects of including code that directed the software to replicate itself in many systems. The impact was far-reaching with systems being bogged down to an unusable state.

Photo of a display case at the Computer History Museum containing a single black 3.5-inch floppy disk. A yellow paper tag sitting beneath it with handwriting in pencil: Internet Worm - Source Code X1294.96A-D. A black museum description plackard sits to the left: 'The Morris Internet Worm source code - This disk contins the complete source code of the Morris Internet worm program. This tiny, 99-line program brought large pieces of the Internet to a standstill on November 2nd, 1988. The worm was the first of many intrusive programs that use the Internet to spread.' A red square logo is at bottom of plackard with binary ones and zeroes symbols and white text COMPUTER HISTORY MUSEUM. Original photo by the Intel Free Press.
Internet Worm - decompilation: a floppy disk at the Computer History Museum that contains the source code of the Morris worm. Catalog Number X1294.96A-D. Photo courtesy Intel Free Press.

With thousands of systems downed and high removal costs incurred its author Robert T. Morris was tried in the U.S. under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and was its first conviction.

This isn’t a virus. It’s a worm!

This may all sound a bit familiar with similarities to the later journeys of some of our own hacking heroes like Dade Murphy and villians like The Plague and his use of the Da Vinci virus. In more than a few ways we owe a debt of gratitude to the trail blazed by the Morris worm.

Internet Artifacts - Morris Worm source code

Screenshot of a web page from the Internet Artifacts Museum showing a blue and yellow DOS-style text editor screen mounted on a marble stand with marble background as in a museum. The editor screen as various C programming source codes for the Morris Worm. The year highlighted at the top of the interface for the website is 1988. Top corner says NEAL.FUN.
Thanks to the recent Internet Artifacts Museum project by Neil Agarwal you can see and interact with the source code of the Morris worm in a nice retro-styled IDE in your browser.

📍NYC/London/Fictional

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