My Hacker Theory in a nutshell (4) #39
This is the fourth installment of "My Hacker Theory in a nutshell (4)," part #39 of my Turin Shroud Encyclopedia. See Part 1 for more information about this 5-part series. Although a reference date may be the same, e.g. "18Feb14]," when clicked it will open at the correct place in the source.
[Index #1] [Previous: My Hacker Theory (3) #38] [Next: My Hacker Theory (5) #40].
■ Evidence that the hacker was Arizona laboratory physicist Timothy W. Linick (1946-89), aided by German hacker, Karl Koch (1965-89)
• The beginning of my Hacker Theory In the early 1990s I was the System Administrator of a wide area network of 7 Western Australian rural hospitals' UNIX computer systems[22Feb14; 05Jul14; 24Oct16; 23Jan17].
Clifford Stoll As part of my job interest in computer security, I read Clifford Stoll's 
1989 book, "The Cuckoo's Egg" [Right]. Stoll is a former astronomer in Berkeley University's W.M. Keck Observatory, who in 1986 was redeployed to help manage a large computer network at Berkeley University's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL)(not Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)[22Feb14]. Stoll recounted how lax was the computer security at universities in the 1980s[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. He described how easy it was then to hack into university networked computer systems[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. Any of LBL's scientists could log into LBL's computer, and then, over ARPANET (a precursor to the Internet) connect to a distant computer[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. Once connected, they could log into the distant computer by entering an account name and password[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. The only thing protecting the networked computer was the password, since account names were easy then to figure out[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. And Stoll was amazed that on many of high-security sites the hacker could easily guess passwords, since many system administrators had never bothered to change the passwords from their factory defaults, even on military bases, a hacker was able to log in as "guest" with no password[TCW]! No physical security was needed at LBL and laboratory doors were seldom locked[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. In 1986 Stoll detected, and eventually caught, a hacker Markus Hess (1960-), who dialied into LBL's computer from Germany, and `piggybacked' from there to hack into government, business and military computers[22Feb14; 03Jun14]. Hess was a member of the same Chaos Computer Club that Karl Koch was a member of[03Jun14]. Both Hess and Koch sold their hacked information to the KGB[03Jun14]. But it was more than a decade later, in January 2005, that I discovered the Shroud[30Jun07].
David Sox's "The Shroud Unmasked" In June 2007 I read in shroudie turned sceptic David Sox (1936-2016)'s 1988 book, "The Shroud Unmasked," the account provided by an eyewitness, Prof. Harry Gove (1922-2009), of very first radiocarbon dating of the Shroud at Arizona laboratory. That the "calculations were produced on the [AMS]
[Above: Page 147 of David Sox's 1988 book, "The Shroud Unmasked," with "The calculations were produced on the computer ..." outlined in red and "Timothy Linick, a University of Arizona research scientist, said ..." (which I did not notice at the time) outlined in blue.]
computer, and displayed on the screen"[23Jan17].
To be continued in the fifth installment of this post.
Notes:
1. This post is copyright. I grant permission to extract or quote from any part of it (but not the whole post), provided the extract or quote includes a reference citing my name, its title, its date, and a hyperlink back to this page. [return]
Bibliography
TCW. "The Cuckoo's Egg (book)," Wikipedia, 25 March 2025.
Posted 7 April 2025. Updated 11 April 2025.
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