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June 15, 2009

Comments

Jason Scott

This essentially represents a lot of the situation with the Phreak BBS culture through the 1970s and 80s, where the constant, unending balance was struck between spreading information (or fighting disinformation/incorrect information) and letting very useful cats out of very carefully crafted bags. "Code Kids", for example, where the range of simple codes required to indicate user accounts with small companies were traded mercilessly, or dropped in BBSes specifically as a track-covering move (drop the code and then start using it in the herd of people taking advantage of it, moving on within a short time or until it died).

"Overphishing", though, is a very unfortunate term, since "phishing" has gone on to new meanings (as has "zero day", actually).

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