In effect, the Internet is a global connection of interconnected computers. It has been described as truly a peer-to-peer system with many distributed nodes and no central point of control architecture.
Originally, I was in both software and in online computing. The first innovation really was sort of at that time that we're marrying the telephone and the computer so that people wouldn't have to drive to the computer center. We didn't have $1,000 computers.
Cyberspace
A lot of unexpected things do happen on 'Mr. Robot.'
When we talk about computer network exploitation, computer network attack, we're not just talking about your home PC. We're talking about your cell phone, and we're also talking about internet routers themselves. The NSA is attacking the critical infrastructure of the internet to try to take ownership of it. They hack the routers that connect nations to the internet itself.
No computer network with pretty graphics can ever replace the salespeople that make our society work.
When I started thinking about 'Mr. Robot,' I thought about it as a movie, and I thought about the complete arc, and that is the one story I'm going to tell.
I had e-mail in 1984! I had an e-mail address then, which means that all you could write to was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. There were three of us, writing to each other.
I really didn't understand why hackers would want to hack into a classroom. Are they going to learn algebra? Maybe calculus?
Should we fear hackers? Intention is at the heart of this discussion.
A hacker is someone who uses a combination of high-tech cybertools and social engineering to gain illicit access to someone else's data.
Flying down a tunnel of 1s and 0s is not how hacking is really done.
I don't have a computer. A computer's a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.
The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.
They went back there, looked at all the computers, asked me to come in and tell them what all the computers were for specifically so they knew how to dismantle the network I had been running.
Mesh networking is an old idea. Oddly enough, the low-cost XO Laptop built by the 'One Laptop Per Child' organization - the so-called $100 laptop - was designed with built-in mesh networking. The idea with the XO machine was that many kids using those laptops would be out in rural areas without reliable Internet access.
For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers.
I worked in IT for about three years for a tiny firm with ten other people.
The Internet is a testament to a connected system that works - it's a global network where any computer can reach another, and easily transfer information across.
Communicating online goes back to the Defense Department's Arpanet which started in 1969. There was something called Usenet that started in 1980, and this gave people an opportunity to talk about things that people on these more official networks didn't talk about.
What, exactly, is the internet? Basically it is a global network exchanging digitized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a device called a 'modem', can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo
The invention of email evolved from a challenge to solve a real world problem.
In 1978, there was a 14-year-old boy working in Newark. He did in fact create the inter-office mail system and called it email. What they did before 1978 was text messaging.
'Cyberspace' is a metaphorical idea which is supposed to be the space where your consciousness is located when you're using computer technology on the Internet, for example, and I'm not entirely sure it's such a useful term, but I think that's what most people mean by it.
I was hooked in before hacking was even illegal.
