Hacker

On August 27, 2003, EDWIN HACKER, beloved father of Dwin Constable and Leslie Stout, dear brother of Evelyn Alexander, loving grandfather of Mark Constable, Stephen Constable, Anna Kristen Stout, Paul Stout and Kendall Stout, great-grandfather of Emily Caroline Constable, dear friend of Eric Juratovac and his family. Relatives and friends are invited to call at Schimunek Funeral Home of Bel Air, 610 W. MacPhail Rd., at Rte 24, on Friday from 3 to 5 and 7 to 9 P.M., with a Funeral Service on Saturday at 10 A.M. Interment Parkwood Cemetery.

When I bought Marlin Steel in 1998, the extent of its technology was an old fax machine. Today, our factory is full of industrial robots that are fed computer-aided designs and churn out steel containers for industry 60 times faster than before. We're winning jobs that used to go to China and elsewhere. My employees, who once made $6 an hour, average $26 an hour now. This isn't your grandfather's small factory: We depend on the Internet, cloud computing and other new technologies, just like thousands of other manufacturers our size.

On January 2, 2005, CHARLES WALTER "BUCK" HACKER, beloved husband of Susan Jane Hacker (nee Buck). Visitation Tuesday from 4 to 8 P.M. at the Cvach/Rosedale Funeral Home, 1211 Chesaco Ave. Funeral Service Wednesday, 11 A.M. Interment Bel Air Memorial Gardens.

Servers that host internet service for more than 30 state agencies are vulnerable to a cyberattack, according to a legislative audit released this week. The Maryland State Archives, which oversees the five servers, did not update the operating systems in more than five years, auditors found. Without the protective software patches and updates, Internet service for nearly the entire state government could be at risk, Legislative Auditor Thomas J. Barnickel III said. Auditors said there was no evidence of hacking, merely a weakness in the system that could hypothetically knock most state agencies offline or direct state Internet traffic to malicious sites.

On December 3, 2005, RICHARD EUGENE HACKER SR., beloved husband of the late Charlotte M. Hacker, devoted father of Norma Crouse, Richard Hacker Jr., Sandra Croy, and Jeffrey Hacker, dear friend of Lorena Gaydos. Also survived by ten grandchildren, three brothers and one sister. A funeral service will be held at the family owned Duda-Ruck Funeral Home of Dundalk Inc., 7922 Wise Ave. On Friday at 11 A.M. Interment Holly Hill Memorial Gardens. Friends may call on Thursday from 3 to 5 and 7 to 9 P.M.

On April 20, 2006, ROBERTA MAGDALENE HARTNETT-HACKER; loving mother of Michael G. Hartnett of Baltimore, MD, Patrick J. Hartnett of Baltimore, MD, Maureen Koppelman of Mineral, VA, and Kathleen A. Rupert of Catonsville, MD; devoted sister of Elise Yeakle of Towson, MD and Cora Pencek of Aberdeen, MD; grandmother of 13; great-grandmother of four. Visitation will be held on Sunday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 at the Hardesty Funeral Home, 851 Annapolis Road, (Rt. 175) Gambrills, MD. Funeral Services will be held on Monday at 9:00 A.M. at St. Joseph Catholic Church, 1238 Odenton Road, Odenton, MD. Interment to follow at Holly Hill Memorial Gardens, Middle River, MD.

Hacker group Anonymous claimed to have taken over the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission in protest of attempts by federal officials to prosecute open-data campaigner Aaron Swartz. Swartz killed himself earlier this month. And in a YouTube video Anonymous said he did so because he was faced with "an impossible choice" after federal prosecutors charged him in connection with copying academic journal articles from an online repository. The video was reportedly posted on the website of the sentencing commission, but as of Saturday morning the site appeared to be offline.

Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Men and Women, by Andrew Hacker. Scribner. 240 pages. $25. In the modern age, we have publishing's answer to the infomercial, and Mismatch seems to be a perfect example of this new development. The authors of these books try to sell you information you already know, and they do so with a cynical interest in market share that is simply breathtaking. Academics write these books in a language that is distinguished by its slipperiness and the use of the passive voice, along with a smarmy condescension to the reader.

The most horrifying book about computer culture that I've ever read landed on my desk last week. The title is "Gigabites: The Hacker Cookbook" by Jenz Johnson.It has nothing to do with viruses, worms, Trojan horses and other things that go bump in the eternal night of cyberspace. It's far more insidious. It's about food, hacker food. It's about Twinkie Casserole, Chinese Leftover Lasagna, Liverwurst and Anchovy Tub, Fish Stick Stir-fry, Hot Dog Stroganoff, Spam Sushi and Cold Pop Tart Soup.

"Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw - By the Man Who Did It," by Tsutomu Shimomura with John Markoff. Hyperion. 324 pages. $24.95Kevin Mitnick is no John Dillinger. When FBI agents burst into his Raleigh, N.C., apartment a year ago, Mitnick didn't pull a gun. He threw up.That anticlimax reflected the nature of his crimes - stealing software, tampering with telephone systems, reading other people's electronic mail. Though his scams required skill, they were seedy and sophomoric, never grand or terrifying.

Hacker group Anonymous claimed to have taken over the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission in protest of attempts by federal officials to prosecute open-data campaigner Aaron Swartz. Swartz killed himself earlier this month. And in a YouTube video Anonymous said he did so because he was faced with "an impossible choice" after federal prosecutors charged him in connection with copying academic journal articles from an online repository. The video was reportedly posted on the website of the sentencing commission, but as of Saturday morning the site appeared to be offline.

Here come the #HurricaneHackers . Take a peek at this online Google document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SGcfQz13ce4FfB-QHKF3WLwxHoCRGBouuvZn-3aoX0k/preview?sle=true Here you'll find the collaborative brainstorming of people -- hundreds? thousands? -- working to come up with ways to use the Internet to track, analyze, inform, as Hurricane Sandy bears down on the East Coast. For as long as we all have power. Already, you see the work of the crowd bearing fruit: Check out the Sandy Timeline (which is still in test mode.)

Byron Wien has been publishing a New Year's list of possible economic and political "surprises" for years, often with impressive results. The idea is to identify events that are likely to happen but that the market believes have a low probability of occurring -- and that are therefore mispriced. Since the consensus outlook for 2012 is pretty miserable, most of his surprises are positive.  Wien is calling for oil to fall to $85 a barrel, for gold to return to $1,800 or for stocks to surpass 1,400 as measured by the S&P 500. Some of these would seem to be mutually exclusive.

A former team leader of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning testified Tuesday that she told superiors on several occasions that Manning should not be allowed to handle classified information or be sent to Iraq, but her warnings apparently went unheeded. Manning, then an intelligence analyst, deployed with his unit to a base south of Baghdad, where Army prosecutors allege he gave hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks in one of the largest security breaches in U.S. history.

Hackers Ink Man Cave 1 Hamilton St. Ellicott City, 410-744-6512 www.hackersmancave.com What's In Store: Specialties include comics, gaming, movies and “everything a growing man needs,” says owner Eric Smith. A carryout menu features food from nearby Tersiguel's restaurant. Don't let the name fool you -- ladies are welcome, too. Style Finds Consignments Harper's Choice Village Center 5485 Harpers Farm Road Columbia, 410-715-4579 What's In store: Stocking everything from kids' clothing to bridal gowns, Janina McNinney is helping customers save some cash.

Like skilled cat burglars, teams of college-age hackers slithered past defenses to probe the soft underbelly of a sophisticated computer system. Their mission: to steal secrets and leave an electronic calling card. As they tapped away on laptops and spoke in low voices, knots of educators, business leaders, parents and government officials hovered nearby, smiling and nodding with approval. In the eyes of the organizers of the Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference, today's hacker could be tomorrow's cybersecurity hero.

"Hackers" is, like, really now. It's so now, so really, really now, so blessedly, incredibly super now, it seems unable to recognize that there'll ever not be a now or that in some sad but inevitable distant time, someone will say, "You know, that movie was so now. But no more. Now it's really then."When will this happen? Oh, I don't know, but certainly by Tuesday.Anyway, the movie is a superheated, superedited, hyperkinetic,rockin', rollin' razzle-dazzle paean to heroic cyberkids, who surf the Internet having a laffriot at the expense of their befuddled elders.

She was only 16, only 16, already a 6-footer, and from Baltimore, not exactly the cradle of tennis champions. "I was a pretty unusual package," Pam Shriver was saying the other day, thinking back to the late summer of 1978, when she became the youngest U.S. Open finalist ever.Her racket was the strangest part of it all, though. She just had to walk onto a court at the Open and the crowds started humming. Her racket was . . . was . . . just amazing. It was this big butterfly net laced up tightly with acres and acres of string.

A security consultant named Mike Davis, working for IOActive, got a lot of attention last year for buying a "smart" computerized electricity meter on eBay and hacking into its software. At the Black Hat hacker convention in Las Vegas, Davis ran a simulation showing how a "worm" (similar to a virus) could take over a smart grid by replicating itself and passing from meter to meter. "Malicious code could quickly propagate throughout a neighborhood, ultimately causing power disconnections and calibration modifications, rendering the meters inoperable," IOActive, a Seattle-based computer consultancy, wrote on its website.

About 40 college students from four schools are trying to defend their networks from a team of hackers during the fifth annual Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. Saturday was the second day of competition. Participating are students from Asheville-Buncombe Technical College, Community College of Baltimore County, Millersville University and Towson University. - Associated Press