CNet has a series of interviews with former hackers who ran afoul of the law in their youth, but later turned their skills toward a profession in security consulting. Adrian Lamo discusses taking "normal every day information resources and [arranging] them in improbable ways," describing a time when he broke into Excite@Home's system and ended up answering help desk questions from their users. Kevin Mitnick, famous for gaining access to many high-profile systems, warns today's young hackers not to follow in his footsteps, saying, "A lot of pen testers today have done unethical things in their past during their learning process, especially the older ones because there was no opportunity to learn about security. Back in the '70s and '80s, it was all self-taught. So a lot of the old-school hackers really learned on other people's systems. And at the time, I couldn't even afford my own computer." Mark Abene explains how he got interested in phone phreaking, and how it led to a prison term and a career in computer security. Like Mitnick, he says that easy access to powerful modern computers removes part of the motivation for breaking into other systems.

Incarnate-VO writes "Multi-platform space MMO Vendetta Online is now allowing users to create missions and submit other content for use in the game via their new 'Player Contribution Corps' system. Any game subscriber can join the PCC and gain access to a web-based mission editor, permitting them to build and test new missions on Vendetta's test-server. Once the player believes the mission is ready for prime-time, they submit it to the greater PCC community for testing and feedback. The community may then sign off on the mission and push it up to the developer staff for final oversight and propagation into the game."

gbjbaanb writes "Ever thought it was difficult to write software for Linux? For multiple distros? InternetNews reports that the LSB is making a push for their next release (due out later this year) that should help make all that much easier. Although the LSB has not lived up to expectations, this time around Linux has a higher profile and ISVs are more interested. This is to help persuade them to develop applications that will run on any LSB-compliant Linux distribution. If it gets adopted, LSB 4 could bring a new wave of multidistribution Linux application development. 'It is critically important for Linux to have an easy way for software developers to write to distro "N," whether it's Red Hat, Ubuntu or Novell,' [said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.] 'The reason you need that is because we don't want what happened to Unix to happen to Linux in terms of fragmentation.' The LSB defines a core set of APIs and libraries, so ISVs can develop and port applications that will work on LSB-certified Linux distributions."