So, in 2009, when I lived in San Francisco, I decided to see if I can hack the smart parking meters that the city was
using and ended up figuring out enough about how the communication
mechanism worked between the smart card and the parking meter to create my own
emulator. So, I thought it'd be fun to come back and see if my smart card
emulator still works. This should work. I'm informed that within 30 minutes,
the seven of you could make the internet unusable for the entire nation. Is that
correct? That's correct! Actually one of us with just a few packets. Morning, my name is Kingpin. I am the
youngest member of The Loft and one of the electrical engineers and hardware
hackers. I definitely was born as a hacker 100% the second I breathed air. For the past four years, the seven of us has been touted as
just about everything from the hacker conglomerate, the hacker think-tank, the
hangout place for the top US hackers, network security experts and a consumer
watch group. In reality, all we really are is just curious. The Loft was basically a group of hackers in the Boston area that was part of what kept me out of trouble.
I learned a lot from them about sharing information and how important it is to
empower other people. "The microprocessor is like a demon dialer..." The guys at The Loft essentially saved my life. "It does all the tones, blue box red box, green
box..." Eventually, some article about the work we were doing was in The
Washington Post. Somebody with the Senate committee saw the article and then
suggested that they invite us to come in. "...and in the defense context you may be
modern-day Paul Reveres except in this case it's not the British coming,
we don't know who's coming, that's the problem." It was a groundbreaking thing! I mean the fact that the government was inviting seven
known hackers to Washington DC, it had never been done before. Like it's not about how to use a soldering iron, how to write code, those are technical concepts
that I feel like anybody can learn. That mindset of it's okay to ask questions. It's okay to not agree with everything somebody tells you. To be able to
question and think on your own really is the hacker mindset. It's not a career, it's a lifestyle! You wouldn't really read about hackers
every day in the news so when you did, it was like a big deal. So, I made a whole
cut out of different types of articles. The hacker world was just so small and
it was so fun when you found something related to hackers or phone
freaker's or anything in any mainstream environment. And this was
everything that I could find. Here was friend of mine there getting
arrested for counterfeiting. That was not good. That's like real crime. I call myself a technological juvenile delinquent because I was doing a lot of
delinquent things with my friends. Skateboarding and messing around with
people and going into places I shouldn't be and messing with
society. But then, doing it also on a computer. But it all seemed normal to me.
None of it was ever done in a malicious manner. It was just curiosity. I
wanted to learn stuff. I wanted to go where I wasn't supposed to go and do things that I wasn't supposed to do and that's just how I think. Here's a write-up in the local newspaper in Michigan of us getting in trouble. Police
investigating a report of suspicious persons lurking around a Michigan Bell
facility captured five adults and one juvenile who apparently broke into a car
lot on the grounds to stock up on electronic equipment inside company
vehicles. I first got involved in computers in
1982 when I was 7 years old and I was just lucky that I have an older brother
and an older sister so they already had the Atari 400 computer and a modem. And I would just watch what they were doing. And so, I would connect to
computer systems, older bulletin board systems with the modem and I thought
that was amazing! To discover this world where I could communicate with
other people was wild. From that, I started trading video games
with people and then figuring out how to make free phone calls so I could connect
to longer distance computer systems. And it just sort of evolved from there. But
at the same time, I'd always been interested in the underlying hardware,
how the computer worked. And then, those two worlds sort of came together. I realized that I could take a project that maybe I saw from a
bulletin board or from an electronics magazine and build it and now, I had this
physical manifestation of something that was once on a piece of paper and then
later on, something that was an idea in my head, now could be a real thing. But
being able to build something physical and then use it, have it do
something in the real world was just like, blew my mind. This looks like a normal garage door
opener but if you open it up, see there's a little tiny circuit board in here. This
is a universal garage door opener. So, I replaced the dip switches with a hand
etched circuit board and a 555 timer and a counter to basically count through all
the possible combinations of passwords. So, I could go to any garage door that
used this system and just hold it up and wait and then the garage door will open. And I
never went in any garage doors that I opened with this, promise! Sometimes, you have chips that let you program, read, and write. So, other things
that we can do to manipulate systems instead of messing with signals directly,
we can find debug interfaces. So, you can control the chip like I talked about, you
step through code, modify memory, change registers, extract code if that's what
you want to do. Affect the system as it's operating, we might be able to bypass
that security. I wouldn't consider myself an activist. I don't break into
websites to make a political statement or things like that but I do have that
mindset and I do my best to contribute to causes that I feel are helping the
world in some way. A lot of times, if you have some system that you want to glitch,
you'll set up kind of a test environment. I don't know if it's possible to fully
teach the hacker mindset really at a deep level. I try to share that knowledge
and hope that they can absorb enough of it to form thoughts on their own about
it. But you need to know exactly where do you want to do your glitch? What
line do you want to do it on? There's always a possibility that not
everybody there is to learn for good. There might be people that are
learning for malicious purposes. I can't really control that. I make a point to
not ask where people are from, what their interests are, really just
respect their privacy and respect the fact that they want to come to the class
to learn and it's my job to make sure, that I empower them with the
information and I provide what they're there for and make sure they
have fun at the same time. "Have you done this before?" Freedom fondle, I get it
every time. It's a good demonstration of security theater. I worry about the direction that we're
going as a culture and as a community and as a world. With technology, I feel
like we're losing some of what makes us human. I know how these devices are designed. I
know what these companies are doing. I know that devices are insecure. There's
just too much money to be made and as long as companies are financially
motivated and governments are motivated for power and control and everything, the problems are going to persist. Modern technology has really kind of
turned me off to technology as a whole. I like to go to surplus stores and buy
junk to hack on and kind of see what's out there and I went to a surplus store
outside of Portland and actually saw a box full of a project that I had worked
on about eight or ten years ago and they probably had a good run. But just
seeing it there kind of made me think about what's the real
purpose of designing technology. Maybe it's good enough that I designed the
product, people learned from it, got inspired and then it reached its end of
life and that's just how it goes. But then, at the same time, it's like I spent
a year of time working on a product, it goes out the door and then it ends up in a surplus store. Do you want me to sign up for Karate lessons, so you can take them? "I can take karate lessons with you? Okay, I will do that" And it's sort of like do I want to do that for the rest of my life? What's my
legacy really gonna be? So, ever since I was a kid I'd always
known that I wanted to be an engineer. And I wanted to be a hacker. So, I just
always knew. But right now, I'm at a point where this is the first time in my life
that I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I don't know what's next.
Whatever it is, I'm gonna be a hundred percent and go for it but I'm not gonna
force myself to design a product just because I feel like I should. I got to
think back to my hacker roots and figure out how can I do things
differently and do things that I enjoy and stay passionate doing it. I'll figure
it out. I'll eventually figure it out and I'm not gonna rush it but I
know it's gonna be something related to hacking and technology and engineering.
It's just doing it in a way that is gonna move things forward. Ah, that doesn't work either. Darn it! Haha I guess they fixed it maybe with this
new version of the meter. I guess that's good. Better than having it work after ten years. Haha Thank you for
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