Late last year we discovered that MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson, arguably the most popular individual on the Internet with 240+ million MySpace friends (he is added by default to every MySpace account) was actually 37 years old, not the 32 that he continues to claim on his MySpace page.
Now we’ve learned a much more colorful part of Anderson’s history: In 1985, when he was fourteen and in high school in Escondido, California, Anderson was subject to one of the largest FBI raids in California history after hacking into a Chase Manhattan Bank computer system and subsequently showing his friends how to do it. He was never arrested because he was a minor, but the FBI confiscated all of his computer equipment and some newspaper accounts of the incident stated incorrectly (see image below from a 1986 LA Times story) that he was “convicted in federal court of computer hacking and placed on probation” (the statements were corrected in subsequent articles). Anderson used the hacker name “Lord Flathead.”
MySpace and Anderson would not comment on this post. But most of the information is now available online as news articles from the 1980s (and earlier) have been added to Google and other search engines. We came across an initial article accidentally and started investigating from there. Some of the information in this post has been obtained by a source close to Anderson, including the connection between Anderson and his hacker name.
Lord Flathead Goes Too Far
Anderson, using the name Lord Flathead, was a computer hacker at least since he was 13 years old, which is just about the time the movie WarGames came out in theaters. Like David Lightman in WarGames (played by Mathew Broderick), Anderson was able to hack into computer systems by simply figuring out the right phone number (this was called “war dialing” and was done with the help of a simple computer program that dialed sequential phone numbers until it received a modem response, signaling a computer system on the other end, usually a UNIX mainframe that often had a default password or no password at all). Once you were past the password security, you often had deep access to whatever system you had called.
According to a New York Times article in October 1985, “Lord Flathead,” was the leader of an early black-hat hacker group when he was 14 years old. In July and August 1985, between his freshman and sophomore years, Anderson hacked into a Chase Manhattan Bank DEC VAX computer system (like the one in the image below) that handled “much of Chase’s data processing and record keeping, including records of home mortgages and…portfolios of major customers such as pension funds.” He subsequently showed up to 40 of his friends how to do it.
Anderson obtained or guessed the passwords necessary to get through the first level of security and, once connected, changed at least two passwords to prevent bank officials from accessing the system. According to the New York Times article the group also created fictitious accounts, and Anderson, using the Lord Flathead name, left a message saying that unless he was given free use of the system he would destroy records.
The bank notified the FBI and they set up an “electronic trap in the computer system that traced the calls to at least 23 homes in the San Diego area.” Fifty FBI agents then raided the homes of Anderson and his friends and seized 25 personal computers. The raids were conducted simultaneously at 7 pm to prevent anyone from notifying the other hackers and giving them a chance to destroy evidence. This was one of the largest FBI raids in California history. Our source says the FBI was expecting a serious criminal conspiracy ring of hardcore hackers, not a group of teens led by Anderson, a high school freshman.
Tom was hacking for quite a while before the raid, says our source. Tom, a minor at the time, agreed to stop committing computer crimes and was put on probation. His computer was never returned.
One of the reasons Anderson would hack into living room sized mainframe systems was to get access to computers that could run a C compiler to learn programming. There were no open source or free C compilers at the time, and personal computers had very limited memory and processing power, so hackers would try to access them on other systems.
As far as we can tell Anderson never attempted to destroy records or transfer funds. We can’t find any records of prosecutions being made against any of the people raided.
Supporting documents are here. The LA Times article linked above and the Newsweek article talk about a friend of Anderson, a hacker named Bill Landreth, a published author for Microsoft Press on computer security issues. At Bill’s suggestion Anderson spoke with a literary agent and published books about computer security as well (we are trying to track them down).
Landreth was living with Anderson’s family and disappeared in September 1986 after leaving a suicide note. We haven’t been able to determine Landreth’s fate, although based on this article from 1991 he or someone with his name became a government agent investigating security crimes.
Frankly, my opinion of Tom Anderson just rose significantly. This was pretty hard core stuff in the 80s. Twenty years later he would go on to cofound what would become the largest site on the Internet.
Thanks to TechCrunch intern Cameron Christoffers for assistance in researching this post.
cool
The Vax 11/780 has a DEC admin and password which was usually NEVER changed, I am pretty sure this is what he used to get it. It gave him superuser rights. Finding the right phone number was probably harder than using the DEC u/p.
May not necessarily be the same Andersen..I’m sure there are least 20 Tom Andersens born each year. If it is him, then I do admit I think higher of him.
Much more interesting story than that elitist little snob from Harvard who stole the pre-Facebook code… right on!
Don’t all havard drop outs buy/steal code to build there companies? (Microsoft?)
Just ranting I have no facts.
Interesting article. Why is he not open about it?
Ah, those weekend stories …
Quite amazing. Nice find.
Imagine all the personal information that a former hacker could harvest with a site like MySpace!
anyone remember “Hackers” with Angelina Jolie? Sounds just like it.
Jim - it’s very, very similar to the WarGames movie from 1983.
A War Games sequel came out this year. It’s extremely horrible and was filmed in Quebec with Fronch Canadiuns.
It’s called war games 2 the dead code and I reviewed it here.
http://tinyurl.com/wargames-sequel
Besides, this resembles the movie Hackers with Angelina Jolie far more than War Games.
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Hackers/567905
You’re showing your age Arrington. Though the protagonist from Hackers is far smarter than Tom. Tom is like the kid with dreadlocks yelling hack the planet.
No, it was like Wargames, not like Hackers. Hackers takes place in the early 90s, Wargames in the mid 80s.
tic-tac-toe?
Want to read about the “real” David Lightman?
See http://www.wired.com/entertain.....ntPage=all and http://venturebeat.com/2008/08.....war-games/ , in Wired and VentureBeat.
War Games is true classics along with Tron. Hackers was just another movie with Angelina Jolie.
ya! that movie made hacking look soooo cool.
I needed a good movie to rent. I’ll have to see if i can find it in Midland, Texas. Cool stuff.
Crazy, crazy, crazy shit
This dudes a hero !!!! Take on the FBI, be smart enough not to get prosecuted and fk up the rest of his life, create one of the biggest sites on the internet, make $100mil+ and lie about his age to score a fk load of chicks.
Hats off to you Tom, hats off to you …..
That’s crazy! My respect for Tom just quadrupled.
Funny thing, Wargames was on yesterday.
(linkback) Wow! or Meh? MySpace cofounder was a real life ‘War Games’ hacker in the 80s [VOTE] - http://www.thriveorfail.com/b2877
Ahh, the good ol’ days
Good story. That’s pretty funny.
Awesome. Liar. Hacker, pornographer and gay. This guy should be in the hall of fame. This is exactly who i want my 14 year daughter to be friends with on Myspace.
How did this guy get funding with a blemish like that from his past?
are you saying you wouldn’t have funded myspace if given the opportunity, lawrence?
(: everybody can be a good man after all bad hobies..
Wow, crazy stuff. And now I need to delete my myspace acct.
Knowing this, do you really trust him not to misuse his data access on MySpace?
You should also know that Tom set up 2 high school students from NYS ?
http://www.mycrimespace.com/20.....l-myspace/
They offered to show MySpace vulnerabilities in their code, and Tom Anderson personally lured them to LAX at their own expense where they were arrested.
What he should have done? Hired a Q&A team and patched the vulnerability and simply ignored them.
Tom went out of his way to punish these kids. Now that I know that he himself is a cyber hacker, this would seem extremely heinous of him to have done.
“Frankly, my opinion of Tom Anderson just rose significantly.”
Mine just fell. He could have coded basic on C64, or he could have used MSDOS.
I thought Tom was just another marketing guy, but if this is true, he really is very heinous.
BTW, EVERYBODY on http://www.SiteSpaces.net is about to know that Tom is a computer hacker.
I thought ChrisR was banned….
Offered? You mean extorted.
instantmessagingplanet.com/security/article.php/3484861
“He also offered to protect MySpace against other sp@m advertisers for 150 per day.
When MySpace did not respond, Greco threatened to show other advertisers how to send messages to MySpace users. In his messages, Greco noted that sharing his knowledge would “open a Pandora’s box of spam” on MySpace’s computer system and potentially take MySpace offline.
The threatening e-mail eventually led to several telephone calls between Greco and MySpace.”
Tom should have just refused his offer, checked the server logs and patched it.
“several telephone calls between Greco and MySpace.”
I read that they were talking to Tom Anderson personally.
There is no way 2 teens from NYS are going to develop a bug that big bad 100k+ a year developers can’t patch from checking server logs.
Tom went out of his way to do this in my opinion to fulfill some kind of twisted Magnum PI wanna be wish. The fact that he was a Zero Cool style child hacker only reinforces this.
You have a strange sense of the law, and ethics. It’s typical of geeky hackers / idealist to think this way, but your response is absurd. The “hacker,” by all accounts, threatened the company–even the ones you cite. He was not a “hacker” he was a businessman trying to spam MySpace users. He did not “offer” to help them, he attempted to extort them and win exclusive rights to mass blast his spam to all the users of MySpace. In other words, he’d show MySpace how to fix the hole IF HE COULD CONTINUE TO USE IT. In any case, MySpace did fix the hole (without his help), and they had every right to prosecute the individual for threatening the company and attempting to extort them. He was busted (as your articles show) for SPAMMING and for EXTORTION, not for exposing a security flaw. Get the facts straight. And as for Anderson’s involvement - who cares (though you dont even cite these facts). If he bothered to get that closely involved while running a 1,000 person company than kudos to Anderson.
“You have a strange sense of the law, and ethics.”
Yes, I see in gray, not in black & white.
I see this as such. They were 2 high school students. Not really sure of how to monetize their finding. They obviously made a mistake.
On the side of MySpace, Tom Anderson. Normally when an exploit is made to be known such as this, it would be found on the server side, by examining logs, and patched. That’s what devs in SoCal are paid 100k a year plus dental plus 401k benefits for.
Tom, in my opinion, went out of his way to get the young men to fly here to “nab them”. There were many other avenues he could have taken, and he really used the methods available to resolve the problem in a bad way in my opinion.
He probably wanted to appear to be a hero to himself or co-workers and conjured up the plan to lie to them and get them to go to Cali as part of a diversion from his boring life or to tell his friends.
That’s my take on it. As a programmer, I would have simply patched the bug and said “no thanks” to the sales people.
“If he bothered to get that closely involved while running a 1,000 person company than kudos to Anderson.”
I read that he did. That he personally took care of it.
you’re so right, I should totally trust Facebook instead!!!!
I was personally involved int he investigation of those two kids. They ran a site that made use of security holes in flash and XSS to create myspace “trackers”. They later decided to blackmail myspace and travel across state lines on their own dollar to do so.
The FBI was waiting for them at the Myspace offices. Tom had nothing to do with it
http://www.oag.state.ny.us/pre.....8a_05.html
Who’s Idea at Intermix/MySpace was it to create all this spyware that NYS sued them over? Now I really don’t know anymore. I thought Tom was just a marketing guy?
i dunno, being a hacker makes him kinda hotter than knowing him as the myspace co-founder default friend guy? lol.
Keanu Reeves was a “Mr Anderson” in “the matrix”. What’re the odds?
Where *hasn’t* myspace tom been?
In fact his name in “The Matrix” was Thomas Anderson or Tom Anderson for short.
Well, doesn’t this worry you, if you’ve got a myspace, that he could hack into your personal information? Frankly, I’m a little scared about what he could do..
I don’t know, I’m more concerned with his driving record when he was 4… he couldn’t even keep his Power Wheels on the sidewalk.
As to your question: no - it doesn’t worry me; I know people do stupid things when they’re young… and yes, I have a MySpace account.
DEC Vax systems used to ship (?still do) with default passwords for some system accounts.
M. Arrington strikes again.
Cool! Does Tom have a facebook account? I’d like to add him as my friend on there too.
try this http://app-store.appspot.com
This is neat to learn, but this kind of hacking wasn’t exactly ‘hardcore’ back in the day. In fact, it was often incredibly easy.
Plenty of businesses that exposed their systems to the telephone system figured that not publishing the phone number was security enough, and wouldn’t password-protect anything.
Also, back then, the feds were only beginning to figure out how to prosecute these crimes, so lots of people — especially minors — got off with a slap on the wrist.
It is neat, though. I miss those days.
kevinmitnick.com
Kevin Mitnick, the man behind the movie Trackdown
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Track_Down/70002918
has written a couple books. You may want to check them out. Unlike Tom, Mitnick wasn’t a minor and he did hard time. He also cracked/stole the secret Nokia cell phone backdoor which allowed people to listen in on cell phone calls.
Mitnick was the real thing.
I don’t look up to hackers. Quite the opposite really. http://www.kosmo.com/blogs/techno/?p=384
Ha! I didn’t know that!
http://www.KidTechGuru.blogspot.com
There were free C compilers and interpreters back in the very early 80s; you just had to plop a CP/M card in your micro and use the public domain apps. The Apple ][ also had a free C compiler (interpreter ?) coming with the IAC disks. You didn’t need to hack into anything. By the time WarGames came out a lot of the languages that were common on mainframes had an equivalent on the most popular micros.
Don’t ruin the innocent sounding justification. Mitnick just wanted to see how Nokia’s worked. That’s why he needed the backdoor code.
Tom is one lucky bastard to have gotten off.
http://www.myspace.com/sophisticatedndetermined
What about all the hackers that did get caught and were banned from using a computer. Are they different than him?
But now that I think of it - MyCellSpace.com MySpace for Prisoners
That could have been his company instead.
http://afewtips.com
Thanks for the story. I linked to it this morning.
Fascinating…kind of makes MySpace actually cool ; )
Here’s some supplemental information about Tom for those that need a background into his later ventures.
en.wikinews.org/wiki/Bloggers_investigate_social_networking_websites
tinyurl.com/TomMySpace-A-Video-Walkthrough
and this last one is from Tom’s old boss Brad Greenspan, also the man behind the new OTOY cityspace which was featured on TC and Vidilife. Brad was the first person to confirm that Tom was lying about his age on his profile.
http://freemyspace.com/?q=node/2
flickr.com/photos/8606487@N03/2811492502/sizes/o/
here’s a hard link to Brad’s email about Tom’s age. This was before it was confirmed anywhere else
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8.....2/sizes/o/
I used to read Boardwatch magazine when I was a kid, before it was a mag for ISPs, and the stories about FBI raids were always the same: computers confiscated and never returned. If someone pieced all these stories together into a novel, like Steven Levy style, I’d buy it. I vaguely remember reading about similar raids of encryption algorithm programmers, e-gold types, warez rings, etc.
PJ - “computers confiscated and never returned” This is intriguing: computer and electronic equipment (and a lot of other stuff) confiscated by law enforcement agencies, including federal agencies, eventually end up sold at government auctions or private auctions with items bought at government auctions.
I attended a government auction in the Washington DC area in 1994 and bought a “lot” of computer and electronic equipment for a few dollars, with many terminals and PCs, mostly in good shape.
A couple of those PCs had quite a few names and addresses from the San Diego area and small software programs. Who knows? Maybe one of those old PCs was the one taken away from Anderson…
Prediction: Tom Anderson gives talk @ DefCon next year.
I love the movie Wargames- a classic. Just watched it within past two days. Reminds me of the 1980s … (early), when I was a senior in high school, one of my best friends - a total goof off/party nut but brilliant - kept hacking into our high school system to mess with things. Nothing nefarious, just bored and wanted a challenge. He’d do it from our computer science classroom, finally got caught and suspended for a couple of days. At 17, he knew more than the teacher, and actually would lead class many days. I often wonder what happened to him …
Your friend went on to receive his undergraduate degree from The University of Michigan (Go Blue!) and a graduate degree from Stanford, owns homes in Danville, Ca., Aspen, Co. and Cannes, France; sails a 50′ Jeanneau International; is an avid antique auto collector; has a lovely wife and two children; his daughter is enrolled in Julliard; his son owns a small Caribbean nation. Your friend was awarded the Order of the Red Stapler; hangs out in the #joiito channel on Freenode, under the nickname “nothingtoseeherepleasemovealong” and has been spotted recently wandering the streets of Mountain View, Ca. muttering “wow, all those hundredths of a cent really added up”.
Go Tom!! Hack facebook!
I dunno if you all caught this so I will highlight it.
http://freemyspace.com/?q=node/2
“According to developers close to Tom Anderson at the time, they noted he did not appear to know HTML for he did not contribute any code to the development of MySpace.”
Tom isn’t a coder. Hackers merely break into things. They do not know how computers generally work. They just pick up premade tools and cobble them together. Such tools today are things like nmap, brute force dictionaries and so forth. They are not as computer savvy as you would like to think they are.
Crackers, mostly from Eastern Europe, those who disassemble code, then patch it and reassemble are another story. Tom is definitely not a cracker.
I think that your definitions and concepts are all ass-backwards. People in the early-80s had poorly documented machines, no media to help educate them, few books, some rare computer clubs, so they plunged bravely through the thick jungle and cleared a path for themselves. That’s where the term hacker comes from. Someone who hacks through thick vegetation with a machete is also a hacker. No matter what poorly-educated sensationalistic reporters wanted people to believe in the early 90s, using the word hacker to describe people who break into systems is just the wrong use of the word. The curious, experimental, and foregoing folks who really wanted to figure out computers were hackers in every sense of the word.
Crackers were those who broke through security. Some did it to learn, most did it for ego gratification. Those who did it to learn had a tendency to write their own tools and means to go deeper; the ego-gratification ones, those using the script of others, were merely script kiddies.
I see you are on a rampage here; it would lend your rants more credibility if they were well-informed.
“People in the early-80s had poorly documented machines, no media to help educate them, few books, some rare computer clubs, so they plunged bravely through the thick jungle and cleared a path for themselves.”
That’s wrong. Computers were documented very well. C64, Apple ect… had programming reference manuals that not only documented different functionality in basic but also that detailed the built in functions on the RAM/ROM chips, the functions that are in the BIOS of today’s IBM compatible computers.
Back then you had to share the memory with the OS in the same space, so it was critical to have much better documentation than today.
Today everything is done with super high level APIs.
You weren’t there. I wrote software for 80s computers as a kid. Granted it was mostly dumb games, but still.
The machines of the 80s like C64, Atari, and Apple were anything but poorly documented. Even MSDOS was very well documented. Of course you had to buy a book at the book store for $20 but that’s the extent of it.
All of these systems were covered in books available to the general public.
You have to remember there was no multitasking. Once the OS started running your code, that was it. There was no return of control. So that’s part of why it was documented in such detail as we don’t see today with common tools and programming languages.
Today if you mess up the OS or browser will handle your short comings.
“Crackers were those who broke through security”
Crackers modify programs to circumvent restrictions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_cracker
often through disassembly tools like Win32DASM
mmmmkay…
Hackers, in the GNU sense just improve code. In the security sense hackers circumvent network protection to gain access to computer networks.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(computer_security)
A little trip to Wikipedia could save you some face.
Louis-Eric, let me guess, Fronch Canadia?
Bull. I was there, collected every scrap of documentation I could find, and had access — like everybody else — to everything my club members had, as we were all sharing our knowledge and documentation openly. It was scarce. A few rare books, a few magazines, a few club newsletters shared amongs clubs. The Commodores came with almost no documentation. Sure the Apple at the AppleSoft basic manual and 80-column card ROM code in book form, but none of these things would teach you how to program the serial interface or the keyboard or the add-on clock, alter the color table frequencies or anything else of significance. I still have it all. All the docs, including what was for sale, shared, or found at the library, for all the PCs that I owned prior to the PC all fit in two or three banker boxes; the magazines that I could save take three more (Nibble, Compute!, AppleInsider, Byte, etc.). Nowadays, I send to recycling more books every year than I could collect in the first 5 years on the 80s; and books aren’t even close to my primary reference, as everything of significance (from the microprocessor logic, to OS disassemblies and discussions, to full-fledged treaties on languages, algorithms, their use, extensive community discussions and shared projects, collaborations not between two guys who met in a club but between hundreds of developers working on subsets of code and bringing their expertise with them, full libraries of detailed code — not just the magazine type-ups of old) is online anyway. To compare the level and accessibility of documentation that is available now with what was available then and declaring the latter the winner is just absolute pure unadulterated lunacy. You just can’t say that with a straight face and expect to be believed.
I started developing on a programmable HP calculator, played with an Altair, moved up to Timex-Sinclair, Vic-20, TI-99, the Apple ][s and ///, and the very first PC; saw every micro of significance and programmed on most of them. I started coding in the late 70s. I’m guessing that you were there, but either too young to really remember or have replaced the romanticized story telling for actual memories.
So anyhoo, what’s your true beef with that Tom guy ?
“The Commodores came with almost no documentation.”
This book was like $20, I bought it at the same time as my C64
amazon.com/Commodore-64-Programmers-Reference-Guide/dp/0672220563
# Paperback: 486 pages
# Publisher: H.W. Sams (December 1982)
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb.....0&y=19
There were tons of books for the C64 which described the machine in detail.
There were also tons of books on the Apple II
amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Apple+IIc&x=0&y=0
And on VAX. Check the publication dates of these books, they were on or before the Tom Anderson hack. Plus there was lots of info on city BBS systems.
Granted not much of it was translated into French and thus your apparent view. But not many books are translated into French today either. Solution, stop using the French language.
I had a mall book store about a mile away from home that had most of these books, it later turned into a Waldens book store.
I dunno where you grew up, but I grew up in NYS, so I had access to these materials and a city BBS full of other materials. Tom probably had way more living in California. Though again he wasn’t interested in programming apparently, just compromising systems.
Your general argument is that there is less material coming now than then, I won’t even waste time debating the obvious. You can’t read in a year the amount of documentation that is posted in a day online: the amount of public code, discussion surrounding that code, specs, system docs, technical analysis, blogs, etc. You could read in a few months what was written and make publicly available in a whole decade then. To claim otherwise is just lunacy.
As for the use of spoken languages (brilliant argument, btw): well, at least I mastered a few of them; keep working on the first.
“Your general argument is that there is less material coming now than then,”
Nope sorry, that’s something you just made up.
I was refuting the following statement.
“I think that your definitions and concepts are all ass-backwards. People in the early-80s had poorly documented machines, no media to help educate them, few books, some rare computer clubs,”
There was actually a lot of good books, BBSs for those with phone bay modems, like myself, and materials. I doubt there was in Finland, or Russia, or places like that, or even in French though. That probably explains your views.
Tom was in Southern California though, that’s another story. So what you experienced in the frozen Fronchia North isn’t necessarily going to apply to him or even my experience in NYS.
He probably picked up a tutorial off of a BBS and ran with it. That’s usually what the case was.
Tom is the President of the company. He has never claimed to be involved in the coding of MySpace. But then again, the CTO of MySpace Abre Witcomb was never involved in the coding either. Does that mean MySpace’s CTO has on tech chops? No. It’s the way business works. He built a team. Generally people with tech backgrounds start tech businesss. Amazing isn’t it? You hire people to code.
Brad Greenspan was the president. Why would he explicitly have to mention that Tom didn’t code any of the site?
Unless Tom told people he did. Check the link.
http://freemyspace.com/?q=node/2
“Does that mean MySpace’s CTO has on tech chops?”
Aber Witcomb showed how bad of a CTO he was when he decided to base the structure on cold fusion and MSSQL.
The main coder of MySpace Duc Chau who now leads the RubiconProject instantly turned around and used LAMP with Perl with his own site Flukiest.com as soon as he was free to make his own tech decisions.
MySpace was full of SQL data connection errors for years between 2004 and 2008 even when they switched to BlueDragon servers.
Bottom line, I too have seen and heard some of Tom’s interviews, and he has claimed a lot.
Show me an interview where Tom claims he coded MySpace. Brad Greenspan was not the President. He was the CEO of Intermix, the company that partially owned MySpace (a separate company), of which Chris DeWolfe is the CEO, and Tom Anderson is President. (And, to make it clear, Intermix did not even fully own MySpace - MySpace had other investors.) To answer why Brad would say such thing, just read his absurd blogs and websites. He has everything to gain by claiming as much credit for MySpace, because nothing Intermix was involved with has been as successful, and because he’s tried to stir up several failed lawsuits about what he considers the unfair sale of MySpace. In any case, your whole line of reasoning is ridiculous. Tom is not the President (which is demonstrable fact) because he didn’t “code” the website. But you believe Brad Greenspan was the President of MySpace because Greenspan wrote a blog saying Tom didn’t code it? Did Brad Greenspan code it? lol. No. Of course none of the executives involved coded anything because they are executives, not $100k a year programmers! And whether Tom is a talented hacker or was when he was 13 is also irrelevant. All your posts whining about who has the best tech chops is irrelevant.
Tom W,
First, let’s get the ownership issue clear.
MySpace was owned wholey by Brad’s company eUniverse.
eUniverse first sold Chris DeWolfe and Tom the company for $50,000 with the domain name in 2003 for 1/3 of MySpace
http://contracts.onecle.com/in.....2.17.shtml
“Section 2. PURCHASE PRICE. In consideration for EUNI’s sale, transfer and assignment of a one–third (1/3) interest in the Assets, Purchaser shall pay to EUNI the sum of Fifty Thousand Dollars ($50,000.00) (the “Purchase Price”).”
Brad was in fact the CEO and founder of eUniverse, so my bad on that.
Then Chris DeWolf resold it to Intermix in 2005 before the sale to NewsCorp
http://contracts.corporate.fin.....02.11.html
“WHEREAS, as of the date hereof, Intermix is the sole shareholder of and owns 100% of the outstanding limited liability company interests in Social Labs;
WHEREAS, as of the date hereof, Social Labs and MSV hold an interest in certain assets used in the operation of the business known as myspace.com and the associated website located at http://www.myspace.com (collectively, the “Business”); “
“(And, to make it clear, Intermix did not even fully own MySpace - MySpace had other investors.)”
according to the contract between Richard Rosenblatt and Chris DeWolfe, yes they did own 100% of the outstanding shares.
eUniverse owned a good portion of those as they only sold 1/3 to MySpace LLC which was run by DeWolfe, who also ran Responsebase LLC, which was accused of the spamming with the XDrive email addresses
Did Brad or DeWolfe code anything? I talked to Duc Chau about it in an email and I believe he told me that he in fact lead the team that coded everything.
This email conversation took place a couple years ago shortly after he joined our site.
“To answer why Brad would say such thing, just read his absurd blogs and websites. He has everything to gain by claiming as much credit for MySpace, because nothing Intermix was involved with has been as successful, and because he’s tried to stir up several failed lawsuits about what he considers the unfair sale of MySpace.”
OK, fair enough, but he did state other things Tom has lied about publicly.
What does the unfair sale of MySpace shares through Intermix to Newscorp have to do with it?
Why would you stick that in?
Since you went there, DeWolfe and Tom Anderson were on hot trails from the Intermix spyware investigations by NYS, and MySpace was starting to be noticed by parents as a dangerous tool for minors because there were no private profiles ect… It was coined “MySpace, danger place”.
So with that said, they wanted legal refuge from the storm, and reportedly sold shares at a lower price in exchange for protection by NewsCorp. That was the reason Brad and other investors had issues. To me that seems justified.
T3ch, you really need to get out more… lol
Dude, the French comment is just plain moronic. The fact that I knew back then two languages means that I have access to more, not less, material. Only with a select few people is having access to multiple cultures considered a handicap. As for teh rest of your sliding arguments, none of it holds.
One reason I hate going to the comment section of TechCrunch is the large amount of self whoring link spammers.
I present exhibit A. Everything above my comment.
A real hacker would not even have a myspace account. In fact, there would be no social site interaction.
Poser.
The Vax 11/780 has a DEC admin and password which was usually NEVER changed, I am pretty sure this is what he used to get it. It gave him superuser rights. Finding the right phone number was probably harder than using the DEC u/p.
Amazing article. Though I would say he was more of a Dade Murphy
j/k
this article surprises me the rumor always was that tom wasnt a developer but just a figure head.
Mark Zuckerberg i know he was a hacker and use to hack aol crap
Cool stuff. I thought I’d change my name and start dialing some numbers. Who knows, the FBI might show up and there might be a good story to tell in a few years from now
Also amazing how little security there was back then.
Lord Smibshead aka Peter Urban
Way to go Tom!!
No wonder he’s always trying to be someones friend. LMAO
All the Best,
Shawn
why are these people investigating him anyways? sounds like this person knows Tom and is super jealous of him
nice juicy article, Mike!
Mr. Thomas Anderson, hacker. He is the ONE.
Damn, that’s badass.
And i’m fucking drowned in a sea of comments.
all social network celebrities are hackers…thats how they could spam shit load of emails to get initial traction
make my word all of social network founders are hackers….i know from inside sources
I believe Duc also did that for them.
en.wikinews.org/wiki/Bloggers_investigate_social_networking_websites
“ResponseBase also used a list of 8 million e-mail addresses purchased from Xdrive for their newsletters. In 2002, ResponseBase was booted from their ISP as an illicit spam organization– with Tom Anderson himself listed as their billing contact.”
http://rubiconproject.com/about-us/meet-our-team
click on Duc
“Duc was the lead developer at Responsebase where he redesigned and engineered the company’s next generation internal mailing system that was responsible for 90% of the company’s revenue. Duc was the lead developer of the initial MySpace community”
So if that’s right he, not Tom, actually built that email system that so famously launched the first few thousand members.
I don’t understand why this blog pages like it does. Repasting comment.
Just for good measure, here’s some MySpace C# debug code from 2006, including their ADO DSN. Again this was shown because Aber and the other MS devs had not turned off IIS debugging via the config file on their servers.
http://pastebin.com/f35912fe2
The cake has been iced.
“He was never arrested because he was a minor…”
Mike, what country do you live in?