Story time from an oldfag.

Around 1990 my friend and I wardialed thousands of local numbers to find networked UNIX boxes to hack (internets did not grow on trees back then, if you wanted it you had to take it). He got a visit from a police officer because one of the ranges he dialed was a pager company so it caused every local doctor at every hospital to get paged for nothing which they weren't happy about, especially since he was dialing overnight. Officer talked to his parents, they told him to stop, and that was it. We stopped wardialing and hacked one of the servers we had found (it was very easy to hack shit back then but lets just pretend I was some amazing movie-level hacker). I used that server to hack other servers which I used for the nefarious purpose of... learning networking and UNIX development. I got Stevens' book and I'd login daily and build things and use my hacked machines as clients and servers. They were so ridiculously powerful and sophisticated compared to our DOS boxes with modems. Today I'm the head of design at a networking company I helped found and things are looking good. I've got some cutting-edge stuff in the works and I'm pretty confident we'll sell the company for a lot of money.

Looking back on that, had the kind of zero-tolerance policies that exist today been in place then, it would have ruined me. I'd likely have wound up jailed, banned from using computers, I'd have multiple felonies and couldn't vote, own guns, or get employed in the tech sector. I'd never have learned networking and I'd probably be working at a supermarket somewhere. My advice to you: be super careful as the current system is blind, stupid, and bloodthirsty. Keep your head down, hide your power-level.

I didn't get my first computer until I was 16. It was a Gateway with an AMD K6 processor, 256MB of RAM, 5GB of hard drive space, running Win98 and connecting to the internet at a blazing 28.8Kbps. That was 2006. I had read so many computer books and written programs on paper that I was fucking dying to try it out. So what was the first thing I did? I looked up child porn on Limewire of course. Then I had a moral crisis and wanted to stop, but fucking windows wouldn't delete it for still unknown reasons. I figure that this is Jesus Christ trying to make me face punishment for my sins, so I panic, drop into DOS, and format c:. It took me three months to find a Windows install disk and several trips to the library trying to find drivers for that fucking US Robotics modem before I could get everything working again.

Looking back on that, had the kind of zero-tolerance policies that exist today been in place then, it would have ruined me. I'd likely have wound up jailed, banned from using computers, I'd have multiple felonies and couldn't vote, own guns, or get employed in the tech sector. I'd never have learned networking and I'd probably be working at a supermarket somewhere. My advice to you: be super careful as the current system is blind, stupid, and bloodthirsty. Keep your head down, hide your power-level.