Beto O'Rourke outed as Cult of Dead Cow member, phreaker and writer of screeds

[Sgent]

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/it-turns-out-beto-orourke-stole-phone-service-pirated-software-as-a-kid/?comments=1&start=80

Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman and Senate candidate and recently declared Democratic candidate for president in 2020, has been outed as a former member of what has been described as America's oldest hacking group—the Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC). O'Rourke admitted to his membership in an interview for an upcoming book, as Reuters reported in an exclusive based on the book.

O'Rourke's role in the group, starting in the late 1980s, was more focused on writing screeds for the CDC's text-file essays than hacking. O'Rourke, like other teens of the time, did find ways to avoid paying for long-distance dial-up phone service time to connect to bulletin board systems (BBSs) of the day across the country with his family's Apple IIe computer and 300 baud modem, which he often used to search of pirated games.

He eventually launched his own bulletin board system (BBS) called TacoLand, which Reuters' Joseph Menn reports was largely about punk music. "This was the counterculture: Maximum Rock & Roll [magazine], buying records by catalog you couldn't find at record stores," O'Rourke told Menn.

For those too young to remember, BBSs were the social media platform of the pre-commercial Internet era. They hosted files for download and discussion boards and were islands of anarchy in a time when there were few online services—and usage was billed by the minute. Connecting to CompuServe, for example, could rapidly become expensive for the online-obsessed—especially when the billing was layered atop phone charges to connect to distant dial-up access lines. O'Rourke called the BBS world he connected to "the Facebook of its day."

[msongs]

1. "outed" versus "identified" one is neutral, the other is a bias nt

[TCJ70]

19. It's quite click bait-ish...n/t

[SFnomad]

2. The divisive BS around this place is certainly going to get old, long before the first vote is cast

Have some people not learned anything from 2016? Or is that the point?

[marylandblue]

5. People don't learn from their mistakes, but Beto is a campaigning genius

You can expect nonsense to come out on every candidate. And it will carry on through election day. So look at how each candidate defuses whatever bomb gets thrown at them. The one who does it best is the one to take on Trump.

[SFnomad]

14. That's an interesting take on things ... and it has merit too n/t

[bitterross]

3. That's awesome!

He's a nerd! Not excited about some of his voting record though.

[Devil Child]

8. I agree bitterross, no crime in being a nerd!

[happybird]

16. Yep

It bumped up my opinion of him. Need more solid policy ideas and plans from him before he could even be considered for my primary short list. As I see it now, he'd make a good VP.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

18. Every candidate should be evaluated on their voting record... that's fair!!

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[NastyRiffraff]

24. Even Bernie?

He has some rather problematic votes on record.

[sheshe2]

27. Beat me to it, NR!

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

28. LOL... I said "EVERY candidate"... thought that was pretty clear.

Bernie's record ALREADY has been commented on incessantly... does not the same "Bernie standard" apply to other candidates??


Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[NastyRiffraff]

40. Actually, this time he WILL be vetted

He was given a pass by many last time. Chris Hayes, for example, turned his show into the Bernie Sanders Hour.

Yes, indeed, Bernie should be treated just like other candidates. He shouldn't be exempt from criticism.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

41. Couldn't agree more... except for the "pass" part. Bernie's been vetted incessantly...

and, yes, ALL candidates SHOULD be treated alike, just as you stated. That's only fair... and even Bernie deserves a fair contest.


Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[bitterross]

26. I totally agree!

That's one reason I wasn't ready to throw Northam under the bus when so many here went there over a thirty-plus year-old picture.

While Beto's being a nerd is very endearing to me, it doesn't mean I'm going to vote for him. Or even support him at all. There are many factors about him and his ACTIONS after that period in his life that should be weighed.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

29. Yup, without question... put EVERYTHING on the table and let the chips fall where they may!!

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[marylandblue]

6. He wrote a violently disturbing fiction story and a really nasty poem.

He's admitted they are his. He seems to have been an angst-ridden technogeek, not an All American jock. That's what this is really about. Kavanaugh got blotto drunk and raped girls. That's okay. Beto smoked pot and played with computers. That's apparently a big problem.

I want to see how Beto handles this. It's not the attack that counts it's how well you counter.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

30. Yes, it's how Beto handles this NOW that'll be critically important if he ends up being our nominee.

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[Tipperary]

7. It is already out there what he wrote; there was a thread about it here today.

He (while a teenager) wrote a story about running over children with a car. He has admitted it and apologized.

[nolabear]

36. Boy, Stephen King had better never run for office.

Or the writers of The Walking Dead, The Lovely Bones, most of the Disney oeuvre, half the fairy tales ever written and a whole lot of doctor and police procedurals.

Come on...

[Blue_true]

11. The OP ignored the fact that Beto advocated for inclusion of female hackers on their team.

Like everyone in the hormonal 16-18 age rang, he said something about the opposite sex that he cringed at once fully grown up.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

20. All candidates should be transparent about everything they've writen & all speeches they've given...

We need to know before the first primary vote is cast... transparency is a must!!


Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[sheshe2]

32. We should, yes indeed.

InAbLuEsTaTe

20. All candidates should be transparent about everything they've writen & all speeches they've given...

We need to know before the first primary vote is cast... transparency is a must!!

.................................

ALL CANDIDATES should be transparent about everything they've written & all speeches, whether they are 16 or 30.

We also need to know every vote they made and every piece of legislation they voted for and or initiated/ passed during their years of service.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

34. Nothing wrong with full transparency.

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[Devil Child]

9. Who cares if he had a nerdy past?

This is pretty weak.

[Blue_true]

15. The thing about running over children with a car and liking it more as more were killed

was disturbing to me, even if he was a teen. I never had violent fantasies like that ever. For me, he has to explain that part, the other stuff I can write off as the behavior of a teen whose hormones were boiling. I know that at his teen age, what I noticed first about females my age and even some that were older make me ashamed today to even talk about, but I grew up and changed.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

21. It's better Beto splain NOW, rather than later... that would be a politically wise move.

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[Adrahil]

31. It was a work of fiction....

I don;t think that Teen Beto was actually advocating this position.

New Flash, some teens write provacative fiction that explores some extreme characters.

My daughter wrote a short story from the point of view of bully... she does not advocate bullying... in fact, far from it.

[Blue_true]

35. It just leaves me could. I am no fan of dark literature unless it involves

a situation where the entity doing the darkness gets defeated by good. Maybe Beto had the bad character defeated, it didn't seem that way from what I read. To just let the bad character kill without meeting justice seems a little over the top to me, but that is just me.

[NastyRiffraff]

25. Personally, I love nerds

Yes, they can be irritating at times, but so can almost everybody. At least most of them don't strut around flexing their muscles and bragging about how the "girls" love them.

[doc03]

10. Trump criticized the the way Beto uses his hands when he talks, that may be the pot

calling the kettle black. But I find it annoying how he like hops every time he speaks a word
and his exaggerated arm and hand gestures. I saw him speak the night when him and Trump had dueling rallies
his speaking style is distracting.

[Blue_true]

13. I have also been distracted by the hopping motion.

The hand movement not so much because I too "talk" with both my hands and voice.

[doc03]

17. When I have seen him speak instead of hearing

what he says I am watching his weird gestures. He doesnt seem charismatic at all to me like I hear people say. I noticed that way before Trump ever said anything about him.

[forklift]

38. What do you think of Bernie's hand gestures? nt

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

22. Yes, the hop needs to stop... drives me crazy!!

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[Ferrets are Cool]

12. SO?

[McCamy Taylor]

23. Phreaker with a ph! If I was not already supporting him, this would sway me to his campaign.

We have never had a president who was a phreaker! This is almost as good as having Timothy Leary running for president again! Party on!

[George II]

33. And the "hits" keep on coming. "Outed"? Give me a break....

...shall we discuss .........?

Oh, not worth the effort.

[Sgent]

39. That's the title

that Ars Technica gave. They aren't a political site, they are a nerd culture / technical news site.

[forklift]

37. I respect him more now

We need a POTUS who understands how computers and the internet work.

[Gothmog]

42. Beto O'Rourke's hacking universe, explained

I like the Washington Post's explanation of this https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/15/beto-orourkes-hacking-universe-explained/?utm_term=.0b9e2d0b9d53

At the time that O’Rourke was engaged with the group, the Internet wasn’t the Internet we have today. This was the late 1980s, and it wasn’t until the early 1990s that Americans began to regularly use something like the Internet as we understand it now, connecting over networks to pages on the Web. O’Rourke wasn’t sitting in front of a computer and clicking a Web browser. In fact, he wasn’t clicking anything.

What O’Rourke was using was a “bulletin-board system,” or BBS, which is to the Web what going to a restaurant is to going to a food festival. A food festival that’s also on Seamless.

How much of this is familiar to you will depend on how old you are. You may, for example, remember modems, little boxes attached to your computer or (in later years) built into it, into which you’d plug a regular phone landline. (If you don’t know what a phone landline is, which seems plausible, it’s the physical cord that ran phone lines into houses before cellphones became ubiquitous.) The modem converted a signal that could run over a phone line into one that a computer could recognize.

In the early days of the Internet, people used modems to connect to Internet service providers (ISPs), which would connect them to the broader Internet. But in the BBS era, modems were used to connect directly to other computers that were running software that could host small communities of users. To connect, you would actually call a specific phone number with your computer and connect to the computer hosting the BBS.

This story actually makes me like Beto more.

BTW, I still remember using something called mag cards and floppy disks to revise documents.