I'm a concerned mother," says Carolyn Meinel. "I want to create a healthy environment in which young people can learn." Meinel's quest is little different from that of paranoid clipper chippers and neurotic surfwatchers - she wants to make the Net a better place for kids by teaching them how to hack.
Meinel, a 50-year-old horse trainer and sometime adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico, is hardly cut from the stereotypical hacker cloth. Neither a Doom-loving enemy of sunlight nor a slick industrial spy, she's instead a self-proclaimed "Happy Hacker" - and her eponymous ezine lives up to the moniker.
The Happy Hacker newsletter got its start at this summer's Def Con meeting, when Meinel spotted an educational void crying out to be filled. "I thought, 'Any kid can jump on the Internet and download tools that'll get him thrown in jail.' But I couldn't find any source for harmless, entertaining hacking." Within days, Meinel's first newsletter was circulating among sysops, security experts, and recreational surfers.
Meinel calls her zine "the guide to (mostly) harmless hacking," and true to the title, the majority of her tips are perfectly legal tricks for fingering, annoying spammers, and digging around seemingly off-limits spaces. Cheerfully dispensing information like Halloween candy, The Happy Hacker makes it very clear when Meinel's how-to hints can get a novice in too deep. Peppering her ezine with boldly marked "Newbie Notes" and "You Can Go to Jail Tips," Meinel warns, "If you are reading this column you don't know enough to cover your tracks. Tell temptation to take a hike!"
With the newsletter now humming along at a rate of two issues a week, Meinel is setting her sights on new teaching methods. "Ira Winkler of the National Computer Security Association and I are working up a proposal to set up an educational Hack Net," she explains. "Hacking is an effective way to teach computer skills. A kid who knows how to sysadmin can make US$50,000 to $80,000 a year, easily."
Meanwhile, Meinel's passion for hacking remains her own. "The golden age of hacking is just dawning," she says. "There are 10 million computers out there I can play with - I'm going berserk trying to explore it all."
