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.In the meantime, we are on the threshold of a new age ofopportunities for the hacker.The technology we can afford hassuddenly become much more interesting.The most recent new free magazines to which I have acquiredfile:///E|/Books/Hackers Handbook.htm (102 of 133) [11/28/2000 5:58:50 AM] Hacker's Handbooksubscriptions are for owners of the IBM PC, its variants and clones.There are two UK monthlies for regular users, another for corporatebuyers and several US titles.The IBM PC is only partly aimed at small business users as astand-alone machine to run accounting, word processing, spread- sheetcalculation and the usual business dross; increasingly the marketingis pitching it as an executive work-station, so that the corporateemployee can carry out functions not only local to his own office,but can access the corporate mainframe as well--for data, messagingwith colleagues, and for greater processing power.In page after page, the articles debate the future of thisdevelopment--do employees want work-stations? Don't many bosses stillfeel that anything to do with typing is best left to their secretary?How does the executive workstation relate to the mainframe? Do youallow the executive to merely collect data from it, or input as well?If you permit the latter, what effect will this have on the integrityof the mainframe's files? How do you control what is going on? Whatis the future of the DP professional? Who is in charge?And so the articles go on.Is IBM about to offer packages whichintegrate mainframes and PCs in one enormous system, thus effectivelyblocking out every other computer manufacturer and software publisherin the world by sheer weight and presence?I don't know the answers to these questions, but elsewhere inthese same magazines is evidence that the hardware products tosupport the executive workstation revolution are there--or, even ifone has the usual cynicism about computer trade advertising ahead ofactual availability, about to be.The products are high quality terminal emulators, not the sort ofthing hitherto achieved in software--variants on asynchronousprotocols with some fancy cursor addressing--but cards capable ofsupporting a variety of key synchronous communications, like 327x(bisynch and SDLC), and handling high-speed file transfers in CICs,TSO, IMS and CMS.** Page 109These products feature special facilities, like windowing orreplicate aspects of mainframe operating systems like VM (VirtualMachine), giving the user the experience of having several differentcomputers simultaneously at his command.Other cards can handle IBM'ssmaller mini- mainframes, the Systems/34 and /38.Nor are othermainframe manufacturers with odd-ball comms requirements ignored:ICL, Honeywell and Burroughs are all catered for.There are evenseveral PC add-ons which give a machine direct X.25; it can sit on apacket-switched network without the aid of a PAD.Such products are expensive by personal micro standards, but itmeans that, for the expenditure of around 8000, the hacker can callup formidable power from his machine.The addition of specialenvironments on these new super micros which give the owner directfile:///E|/Books/Hackers Handbook.htm (103 of 133) [11/28/2000 5:58:50 AM] Hacker's Handbookexperience of mainframe operating systems--and the manuals to go withthem--will greatly increase the population of knowledgeable computerbuffs.Add to this the fact that the corporate workstation market, ifit is at all succesful, must mean that many executives will want tocall their mainframe from home --and there will be many many morecomputer ports on the PTSN or sitting on PSS.There can be little doubt that the need for system security willplay an increasing role in the specification of new mainframeinstallations.For some time, hardware and software engineers havehad available the technical devices necessary to make a computersecure; the difficulty is to get regular users to implement theappropriate methods--humans can only memorise a limited number ofpasswords.I expect greater use will be made of threat monitoringtechniques: checking for sequences of unsuccessful attempts atlogging in, and monitoring the level of usage of customers forextent, timing, and which terminals or ports they appear on
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