I've been thinking, we know that are a lot of hackers around the world, hasn't there been one who tried to break in secret files. Files like ufo and other mysteries?

Excellent question,

moving to the conspiracies section, as I believe that would be more apropriate.

Gary McKinnon is probably the most well known. He broke in to many different U.S. Militiary networks looking for information about UFO's and a few other things he thought the government is hiding.

Click.

yeah the government probably hired all the anti hackers and prolly some of the best hackers in the world. so im not surprised that they can trace other hackers that are trying to get info from their database and network. haha i remembered in dark angel with jessica alba...eyes only hacks the government + eyes only investigates while releasing info on tv that cant be stopped....hope that happens one day so we can find out the truth about the stuff that is being kept from us.

The US government is the owner of the internet. If anyone knows how to keep people out of their private servers, they do.

Not exactly...

Who Owns the Internet?

Hah you'd be surprised as to how insecure government systems are. Really there's never anything too interesting. And no they don't have thousands of files with aliens in them.

The US doesn't really own the net so much as it controls it. See... The US has this insane thing called free speech and expression that the rest of the world really doesn't fire up to.

Going on to the net, yes the US seeks out and hires some of the brightest and best of the bunch of computer experts in the world.

Though, if any government in the world should be hacked it really ought to be China just to bring the infomation to the people and give them a chance to learn more about the world rather then what the Chinese government wants them to know and find out.

I don't think my gov't actually owns it, so much as they THINK they own it.
They would, however, (i think) have some sort of control over US web sites.
Or not, it's probably just me again.

Are you sure about that? They neither own it or control it.

Just because the US developed the starts of the internet, doesn't mean they own it. They own the internet in the USA and that's it, all though most of the Root servers are in the USA (the servers that resolve ip's for the domain level of com and net and org etc)

The majority of internet traffic is routed through the united states. All name servers bar one are in the united states. Most traffic is monitored.

For those who know where to look there are ways to evade this but for the average user it's all through the united states which is why America is/was arguing that it should own the internet seeing that the internet originated in America.

However if that were to take place I see the hacker community pulling together to build a second internet, probably with faster speeds and more security.

I have a horrible feeling that a technically minded member will rip that post to pieces.

Actually, there are 13 root domain servers, 7 of which are in continental US and 6 of which are distributed using anycast. A number of the Internet root nameservers are implemented as large numbers of clusters of machines using anycast. The C, F, I, J, K and M servers exist in multiple locations on different continents, using anycast announcements to provide a decentralized service. Also, the majority of internet traffic is not routed through the US, the only traffic that hits the US are requests going to servers inside the US, which is indeed quite a few, but not enough to warrant the 'majority' of internet traffic. The only traffic that hit's the US from around the world are iterative DNS queries that are sent to the 6 root domain servers, even so I'm not to class that as internet traffic as it's a DNS server making the query and not the client. Secondly. Most traffic is monitored? Are you kidding me!?!? Do you know how much information passes over the internet? The best way to describe it is a lot, a hell of a lot. I'd estimate that 99.9% of internet traffic is actually not monitored at all. By monitored I assume you mean looked at in some sort of detail and not just flagging words up. Also, it's not just as easy building a second internet with faster speeds (globally that is), it's damn hard thing to do and would take years to organise.



Seeing as though I work for the UK government's IT sector, and the program I manage deals with security I feel qualified to comment on this. There are 100,000 machines across the UK, and not once have I heard of any of them being succesfully hacked. The testing procedure before programs can even hit these machines is meticulous and thorough. It's by no means un hackable, as nothing is but our systems are one of the most, if not the most secure system in the entire country. It's that secure, that there are seperate areas to it that aren't actually on the internet. The entire test environment for the DWP infrastructure doesn't have any net connectivity at all. Even if you do manage to get into one of the workstations on the internet, to get into the servers you would need to know usernames (which are long random digits and letters) and passwords which are around 20 characters long full of random letters, numbers, symbols and capital letters.

Sounds like someone knows their stuff

Yes it does .

Gavsto ... With all the knowledge you have about this , would you consider yourself to have the capabilities of being a hacker if you wanted to ?

I'm pretty sure if I wanted to I could turn the tables around and do something destructive, I could perform basic tasks but not the one your thinking about, as in MSN hacking - I of course never would.

No , I wasn't implying that you hacked any MSN conversation ...

So your answer is , you could be a hacker if you wanted to be but you don't think it's right to be destructive in that way ?

Do you have any knowledge of how a computer could possibly be hacked or crashed, even though only temporarilty , by going through the MSN IM maybe ?

Sounds like someone has some ideas already...

I have removed some posts as they were irrelevant and as someone so aptly put it "imported drama". Lets stay civil and on topic without the accusatory tone of the removed posts.

Thanks

Daughter of the Nine Moons ... I was only asking a technical question about hacking , to someone who obviously has much computer knowledge ... I apologize if he or anyone else thought that I was implying that he was a hacker , as that was not my intention at all .