My opinion of computer hackers, never all that high to begin with, has just taken a precipitous plunge downwards with an article in the March 9 New York Times about Hector Xavier Monsegur, a.k.a. “Sabu”, the hacker who turned snitch and helped the FBI break into the LulzSec and Anonymous groups. A plethora of arrests followed.
I wasn’t particularly surprised by the so-far released pictures of the various hackers: young guys every last one of them. Judging from the portrait painted by the Times, Monsegur is what in the bad old days we would have called a ‘born loser’—i.e., somebody born with a gun pointed at his own feet and an itchy trigger finger with which to screw up his chances for success, one after another. To be sure, he got dealt a lousy hand in the gin rummy game of life. Both his father and aunt served prison terms for dealing drugs. Hector was living in a New York project, raising his aunt’s two children on a combination of stolen credit cards and hacked computer records. He was a party animal who drove the neighbors crazy with loud rock music. His life reads as a depressing, sordid tale.
And yet Hector was the self-taught possessor of a valuable skill. He was something of a mastermind amongst network hackers. He even held down a real job for a while, using his computer skills to benefit instead of destroy. But in his zeal to attack what he saw as the perpetrators of capitalist injustice, I doubt he ever gave a moment’s thought to the people he was actually hurting—the innocent shareholders, most of whom likely held their stocks via mutual funds or retirement plans, the employees of the company, and in the final analysis all of us, since it’s all of us who had to pay—however indirectly—for the damage he caused. Certainly none of his actions particularly harmed the companies in question, save leaving them with much stronger network security than before.
He could have worked properly and legally. Instead he chose to disrupt, to hurt, to destroy. He was also foolish: he was caught by the FBI via a series of stupid mistakes. Once caught, he pleaded down his sentence in return for helping to snare other members of Anonymous, which has duly come to pass. That’s a good thing. Impulsive young guys who attack without thinking need to be kept in check. Hacking has an aura of adolescent glamour about it, but the glam stops cold at the exit door from childhood.
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As they say on Monty Python, now for something completely different. I picked up an Apogee Duet 2 (external audio processor for the Macintosh) as a replacement to the original Duet that provides audio input/output for my office computer/sound system. The impetus for the change was nothing more serious than a different interface: the original Duet is a FireWire device, while the Duet 2 works on USB 2.0. Apple has been discounting FireWire of late. Only one of my home computers—the Mac Pro on which I do most of my audio engineering work—has a FireWire interface. I got the Duet 2 in order to be able to record on my other Macs as well.
The Duet 2 presented me with an unexpected surprise: dramatically better sound quality than its predecessor. I hasten to add that the original Duet is no slouch in that department. I have been using my Duet as my DAC for my home computer, as well as my ADC for recording, for some time so I have become thoroughly familiar with its clean, rich sound profile. But the Duet 2 does it one better; the sound is more vivid, even cleaner, but without a hint of shrillness or stridency—problems that can plague exceptionally transparent digital-to-analog interfaces. My office stereo system, consisting of a Mac Pro outputting into the Duet 2, hence into an Arcam DiVa integrated amplifier and a pair of exquisite B&W 805s speakers, now sounds even better than it did. That takes some doing.
Thus it was that equipment upgraded for convenience wound up providing a significant audio improvement as well. Way to go, Apogee!