http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/18616.html Retailer Frustrates Hackers by Leander Kahney 3:00 a.m. 20.Mar.99.PST Promoting a new line of backpacks aimed at "hackers," a European bag manufacturer is running a crack-the-password competition on its Web site. But to the fury of hackers trying to bypass the competition and crack the site in earnest, all attempts to date have been unsuccessful. According to an amusing line of posts to Slashdot, an information clearinghouse for computer nerds, the hackers reveal their mounting frustration at being unable to thwart the password competition. "Come on!" wrote one. "Out of the 10,000 people who have read this article, no one has found the username and password? I find that very hard to believe. It has to be something completely insanely easy, right?" Apparently not. The "crack and win" password competition is organized by Kipling, a manufacturer of travel bags, backpacks, and accessories based in Antwerp, Belgium. The competition promotes its Hacker line of bags and backpacks, which have names like bookmark, mailbomb, browser, spam, firewall, and download. "The game challenges every pirate out there to break into our security and win a Hacker bag," the company said in a press release. "You can find the code in two ways," the release continued. "Real computer freaks will find the information in the traditional hacker manner. Those with less hacking experience can follow the hints which appear on the screen, which refer surfers to a Kipling sales point. Those who remain alert will surely find the letter/number code." Kipling confirmed it would give a bag to everyone who cracks the code, which takes the form of a username login and password. Rising to the challenge, readers of Slashdot quickly encouraged each other to break the code, just for the hell of it. But after a week of trying, most efforts have been abandoned. "I'm sorry to say that so far no one has been able to beat the login," said Slashdot contributor Greg Boyce, who offered to buy a Slashdot hat for the first person to crack it. "Turns out it was a bit more complicated than I thought it would be." The most ambitious attempt adopted a "brute force" strategy generating all possible combinations of username and password. Special software to automate the process is available on the Web. Other attempts ranged from examining the source code for the Web page, which is coded in Javascript, to breaking into the site. However, Kipling said attempts to breach the site's security have so far failed. "No one has cracked it," said Edith Iris, Kipling's marketing manager. "We've had no problems." To add to the hackers' irritation, Kipling also garbled the definitions of cherished computer terms in its marketing blurb. According to Kipling's site, "A hacker is a cunning computer expert who cracks the security systems of computers in order to steal or destroy information." But in the programming community, a malicious computer expert is called a "cracker." A hacker is simply a harmless programmer. "Hacker is the term in common parlance," countered Larry Lein, executive vice president of Kipling USA. "If you asked me what a cracker was, I'd say someone who lived in a trailer park down South." -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Hacker News Network [www.hackernews.com]
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