22 Security De-engineering
and there could have been as many as twenty miniprojects underway
simultaneously.
I mentioned in the previous paragraph about the miniprojects and
“may or may not have anything to do with ongoing business inter-
ests.” Actually, from the view of the Hacker, the activities “absolutely
were totally” related to business interests, and I could sympathize
with this viewpoint in most cases. Managers, however, were in many
cases at odds with the Hackers’ views (more on that in various later
chapters).
e Hackers’ computers invariably either ran FreeBSD or some
Linux variant as an operating system, and the machines were cong-
ured in VGA console mode. is was essentially a display conguration
with no graphical user interface ...