Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak admits he has enjoyed many adventures in hacking often for the sake of pranks on friends and family, especially back in his college days and during the early years of working on computers and the Internet.
"I like to play jokes," Wozniak said jovially as he addressed his audience of thousands of security professionals attending the ASIS Conference in Chicago last week. The famed inventor at Apple admitted he also had some fun with lighthearted forays into hacking computer and telecommunications networks several decades ago back in his college years and while learning about electronics and computers.
Curious but cautious
People with imagination in engineering are naturally drawn to the idea of finding ways to bypass security controls as part of the process of discovering how things work, and Wozniak said this was especially true of himself.
"But I never once hacked a computer for real," he told his audience, meaning his break-ins and intrusions were done in the spirit of exploration, never for profit or malice. One youthful prank involved some experimentation into a shared computer system several where he left nine pages of Polish jokes that were dumped on users.
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