This week we present stories from people who navigated our changing relationship to technology.
Part 1: As a kid, Samy Kamkar discovers his superpower -- hacking.
Samy Kamkar is a cofounder of Openpath, security researcher, and huge nerd. His open source hardware and software highlight the insecurities in everyday technologies, such as weaponizing a children's toy to unlock cars, designing clandestine wireless keyboard sniffers hidden into mobile phone chargers, and building drones that wirelessly hijack and control swarms of other drones. His work has been cited by the NSA, triggered hearings on Capitol Hill, and has been the basis for security advancements across vehicles, smartphones, and other technologies.
Part 2: When Jordan Bush's father-in-law-to-be is diagnosed with cancer shortly before her wedding, she finds a creative way to help him attend.
Jordan is finishing up her dissertation in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Her research focuses on when and where lizards fight over territories. She asks that you not confuse her obsession with lizards as a general interest in all reptiles - she does not like snakes, keep your snakes to yourself. After graduating, she has a real goal of becoming a professor at a liberal arts college, and a secret goal of becoming a science journalist and children's book author. She currently lives in Knoxville, TN with her wonderful husband, two babies, and two dogs.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Samy Kamkar
It’s 1995. I am nine years old. I’m sitting on the carpet floor of my mom’s apartment and this is the best day of my life. My mom just spent everything she had juggling multiple jobs to buy me a computer so I'd be less alone. I'll have something to do during the summer.
Immediately, I dial up and I find IRC, Internet Relay Chat. And I jump in the channel and I say, “Hey, who wants to chat about the X-Files?”
And immediately somebody responds, “Get out.”
I said, “We can chat about something else. We could chat about the Wonder Years or Sliders.”
And he says, “You have 10 seconds to get out.”
I’m like, “No.”
Samy Kamkar shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles, CA in August 2019. Photo by Mari Provencher.
Ten seconds later, the brand new computer that my mom spent everything on crashed with a blue screen and I freaked out. I pulled the power from behind the computer and I waited for about 20 minutes for all the bad stuff to get out of the computer. I plugged it back in and everything was fine.
But as the adrenaline was pumping through my veins, I thought that was the coolest thing ever. How do I do that?
I quickly found that the person on the other side was using a tool called the WinNuke 95 and used that to crash my machine. And all of a sudden I now had that superpower.
Now, I’m not a malicious person. I had no intention of using it but there really is something super intoxicating about being able to use science and technology to reach out and manipulate a system in a way it was not intended. It really is.
Pretty soon after, a couple of weeks later, Microsoft released a patch that prevented WinNuke 95 from working, and all of a sudden, my superpower was gone. I thought, “Okay. Well, could I make the next version? Could I learn what that person did and then make WinNuke 96?”
I then spent the next rest of my life learning how to reverse engineer, to design, to build, to fabricate exploitation tools.
I continued this onto my teens. Now, I’m about 15 and I’m writing open source cheat software for the videogame Counter-Strike. And it’s fun for a little bit but once you pretty much have god-mode, it’s not fun anymore. Until they come out with a software called PunkBuster that stops cheat software like mine from working. All of a sudden the game is fun again because, now, it’s cat and mouse. They come out with a version that stops my software from working and I now have to create a new version that evades their software. I decided that this is a lot more interesting than high school so I stopped going.
I continue building this cat and mouse until a few weeks later my mom loses her primary job and says, “Samy, you have to get a job. We have to pay rent.”
I said, “Okay,” so I started filling out applications.
I get an email from a random company and they say, “Hey, we saw your open source software. Can we hire you to write some software for us?”
They'll pay you to write code? It blew my mind. So I begin consulting for this company remotely and, after a few months, they're like, “Would you come down to San Diego and work for us full time?” I learned I'll make enough to pay for support both my mom and myself.
I jumped into my mom’s car, no license, drove down to San Diego at 15, I showed up there like, “Wait. You're 15?”
I said, “Don’t worry about it. Here’s a work permit from my school,” just something I’d forged to a school I wasn’t going to. And I rented an apartment with an emancipation document showing I was an adult, something I fabricated. No one’s ever seen an emancipation document in their life. And started my new life.
It’s now 2005. I’m 19 and I’m now living in LA. I have a tech company and I’m sitting in my apartment late at night. And a couple of my co-workers are on this website, Myspace.com. I check it out. I’m like, “This is kind of cool. You can have friends on here, you can share your interests.”
So I make a profile and I wonder, “What if I can make my profile cooler than other people’s?”
So I look into it and I find, yeah, I can actually add some code and modify some things and actually bypass some of their filters and I can do some interesting things. I can actually make you add me as a friend just by visiting my profile. That’s kind of funny.
What else can I do? Actually, because I kind of have full control of your browser at this point, I can make you modify your own profile without knowing it and add to the very end, but most of all, “Samy is my hero”. That’s kind of funny.
So I launched this and, a few days later, I only have one new friend. I’m like, “Uh, that’s lame. What would make this spread a little faster so I can just show off to my co-workers?” So I think about it. I’m like, “Well, if I can make you add me as a friend and add me as a hero, can I just copy the code to your profile?”
So if she visits your profile, she’ll add me as a friend and add me as a hero and copy the code to her profile and in a month I should have dozens of friends. It would be so cool. Show off to my friends.
So I launch it late one night and I go to sleep. I wake up in the morning, I’m hoping I have at least a few new friends. And I wake up to 10,000 new friends. I freak out. This time, I can’t pull the power from the back of my computer. I don't know what to do.
I email Myspace. You know it’s a virus so even though I removed it from my profile it’s still spreading.
And I say, “I’m a random user on Myspace. I don't know what happened. There’s this weird obfuscated code on my profile. I’m not sure what it does but I think it does...” detailed explanation exactly what this code.
“And if you were to stop this virus, whatever it is...” detailed explanation exactly how to stop this worm.
“Good luck.” And I hit Send and there is nothing more to do, so I drove to work.
It’s now 50,000 new friends. It’s lunch time. I’m not hungry. I just try to work. I can’t really do anything. And I go home and I come home, I have a million new friends on Myspace and I can’t do anything.
I’m just really curious how fast is it actually increasing because these are all unique individual users who are logged in. And I refresh and I refresh. It’s about 3,000 people per second that were getting added. And I refresh and finally, finally my profile has been taken down. Like okay, that’s great.
I wonder if the code is still on the other profiles. And I go to somebody else’s profile and this profile is taken down. And I go to Myspace.com and it says, “Myspace is down but the whole team here is here working on it,” and I feel awful. I never meant to crash Myspace. I don't know what to do.
Samy Kamkar shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles, CA in August 2019. Photo by Mari Provencher.
I wait a couple of hours and finally it comes back. My profile is still gone. A million other profiles still say ‘Samy is my hero’ at the bottom.
I go to sleep. I wake up waiting for a knock at the door from the internet police. A week goes by. A month goes by. Three months go by and I’m like I’m super fortunate that that didn’t end any worse and I’m never doing that again. So that chapter is done.
Six months later, I’m walking out of my car and I see two guys standing next to it and two more guys come up behind me. I’m like, “Oh, no. I’m getting carjacked.”
They say, “Samy?”
I’m like, “Oh, no. Carjackers don’t know your name.”
They say, “Samy, we have a search warrant.” And they all show me badges. Secret Service: Electronic Crimes Task Force LADA.
I don't know a lot about search warrants but on 24 there was like, “Show me the search warrant.”
I say, “Show me the search warrant, please.”
And they show me a search warrant. I was like, “Oh, okay.”
So we go up to my apartment and there's another dozen agents with guns going through everything and they're taking anything with data. They take my laptop. They take my phone. They take my 4GB iPod mini and then they leave. They're just walking away with my life.
And I’m like, “Are you guys arresting me?”
They're like, “Not yet.”
So I call an attorney and he says, “Okay, yeah, the DA wants to put you behind bars and take away your computer use for the rest of your life.”
I’m like, “I can’t do that. I’m 19. I support my mom. I don’t have a high school diploma. I don’t have any other skills.”
They're like, “Okay. We’ll see what happens.”
So we go to court and they take away computers for the rest of my life. And they take away the ability to touch the internet for the rest of my life. And I’m not allowed to visit Myspace.com, under one caveat. That if I’m on good behavior after several years, if I did all my restitution and probation, community service and blah, blah, blah, I can then go back to the court and, hopefully, request from the judge that I can get most of that removed.
And then I leave the court and I can no longer touch a computer.
Now, as a lifelong introvert, I’m forced to do things I’m really uncomfortable with. I started to read books, I go outside. I’m like, “What’s that bright light?” And I’m forced to talk to people and socialize and actually start to bond with people.
I continue this for the next few years and three or four years later I go back to court and I say, “Hey, Judge, my probation officer says I’m her favorite client. And I'd like to see what I can do.”
Judge says, “Okay. All restrictions are gone. You can touch computers again.” And this feels like the best day of my life.
I leave the courthouse. I drive to the computer store. I buy a 15-inch MacBook Pro with aluminum unibody. I go to the coffee shop, I open it up, I connect to WiFi. And I realize at that moment I don't need this at all. That time away from computers gave me the thing I was seeking most, which was connection with other people.
After a few minutes on the internet, I shut the laptop and I went to visit my true friends. Thank you.
Part 2: Jordan Bush
On an unseasonably sunny day in March of 2016, in a garden that hadn’t quite woken up yet, Alfredo proposed. I had two simultaneous reactions. The first was everything that you’re supposed to think when the love of your life asks you to marry them. “This is so great. I am so lucky. This is the beginning of the rest of our lives together,” yada, yada, yada.
My second thought was, “It’s go-time.” I have been watching Say Yes to the Dress and reading wedding magazines for 10 years. I am ready for this. Within an hour I had a Pinterest board up. It was filled with daydreams about how to make my rustic lakeside dream wedding a reality.
So we got to wedding planning. Very quickly, reality started to impose some compromises, as with all things in life. It turns out it does not matter how cute she looks in a flower crown. The Catholic Church will not let your dog be in your bridal party. Yes.
Similarly, serving dinner to your guests in artfully arranged picnic baskets is not a real thing and it is not something that our venue was willing to accommodate.
So these details aside, our wedding very quickly shaped itself into exactly what we wanted it to be. And one of our favorite parts of the whole endeavor, which is seeing how excited our parents got about every single little detail and how much Alfredo’s family and mine really started to blend into one.
Jordan Bush shares her story with the Story Collider audience at the Highland Inn and Ballroom in Atlanta, GA in October 2019. Photo by Rob Felt.
So six months before the wedding, all the big stuff was done. The venue was chosen, the dinner menu was picked, the guest list was finalized. The hard part was over. We thought we were in for smooth sailing.
And it turned out we were wrong because then we got a call where we found out that my father-in-law Jose had cancer, a call that changed just about everything.
So multiple myeloma is a nasty unusual type of cancer. Unlike most cancers where body cells reproduce uncontrollably to form tumors, in multiple myeloma, blood cells reproduce a bunch of unneeded proteins. These proteins clog up your system just generally slowing down your body. And, in the worst case scenario, they aggregate in your organs and cause your organs to fail.
In Jose’s case, his kidneys began to fail within weeks, followed by his liver and, eventually, his heart. He began a series of increasingly serious hospital stays, ones in which his prognosis were pretty specifically not discussed.
Jose had actually first been diagnosed with multiple myeloma almost 15 years before when these certain type of proteins first started appearing in his blood. But the protein levels remained stable over time and the doctors made a plan to monitor him closely over the years. Alfredo and I both knew this so we assumed that the doctors were well prepared to handle his updated diagnosis.
What we didn’t know and what the doctors didn’t tell us at least is that this was not the type of cancer that you recover from. The damage being done to his organs was irreversible. If the cancer didn’t kill him, if the chemo didn’t kill him, his failing organs eventually would. His expected life, even in the best case scenario, had gone from decades to months.
So a month before the wedding, we flew across the country to visit Jose in the hospital. He was in his sixth week in the intensive care unit at the University of Washington Hospital in Seattle. His room was small and dim and loud. It was filled with beeping sensors and flickering monitors. There was this small window and a bouquet of balloons in the corner but neither one of them did anything to brighten the room.
Jose himself was on this giant transforming hospital bed that completely dwarfed him. His face had aged 30 years since Christmas and he had lost nearly 100 pounds. Over the course of the weekend, we talked quietly about books and movies and current events. We prayed and ate ice cream and did slow laps around the hospital wing twice a day.
We listened to doctors give those infuriating non-updates and watched as Jose painfully swallowed each of his 30 chemo pills. As we would talk, his hand would twitch toward the IV line that was always in his wrist that still hurt even weeks after they had put it in. His smile was there but always guarded. His eyes were hollow. I think that he knew he was dying but the rest of us, me and Alfredo in particular, just sank deeper and deeper into denial.
When we went to leave that weekend trip, Jose sat us down for a reality check. “I’m not going to be able to make it to the wedding,” he told us. His voice broke a little bit. We didn’t have a good response to that so we sat in sad silence for a little while and then we hugged him and kissed him goodbye. And we left.
When we got home, we knew that a wedding in just a day and a party and that, clearly, our family had much bigger things to worry about but we were just devastated. This was supposed to be the celebration of our families and, now, one of the most important members of our family wasn’t going to be there.
Alfredo mourned the little moments that he had always looked forward to with his dad, walking down the aisle at the end of the ceremony, checking each other’s ties. We cried a lot in those weeks for Jose and for us and for this dream celebration that we thought we had lost.
So two weeks before the wedding, while we were sitting watching TV after dinner one night, Alfredo casually mentions that his parents were looking into buying a robot.
“A robot? What?” I asked, and he was like, “Yeah, a robot for the wedding.” Like I knew what that was going on.
“Like, what? What robot?” I was completely confused. I was picturing Rosie the maid from The Jetsons serving appetizers to my grandparents. “Like, what?”
And Alfredo explains that they have these little robots that you can remotely control and you can Facetime from the head. So with something like that, Jose could interact with our guests and our events in real time from his hospital bed with this little mechanical avatar. I was still skeptical because I did not have a good visual for what this is going to look like but we were obviously going to give anything a chance to include Jose in our day, so my in-laws bought the robot.
And so on the day of our wedding, at exactly 10:00 in the morning, there was a knock at Alfredo’s hotel room door. When he opened it, there was a family friend and behind Daniel was this robot. It was about three feet tall, had a little low egg-shaped body with arms sticking out of it and an iPad head on top. It motored into the room really clumsily and lifted up its head to reveal Jose’s beaming face.
He greeted Alfredo heartily and then kind of bumped into the room more awkwardly and greeted every groomsman by name. Jose controlled this robot from a private party that was put together by the ICU nursing staff in Seattle where they decorated an empty room with streamers in our wedding colors and they served appetizers and cake and they helped him into tuxedos between tests.
Jordan Bush shares her story with the Story Collider audience at the Highland Inn and Ballroom in Atlanta, GA in October 2019. Photo by Rob Felt.
And throughout the day it just really felt like Jose was there with us. He chatted with my dad while the groom and the groomsmen got ready. He watched as Alfredo put on the special cuff links that he bought them.
Over the course of the day, the nurses would try and distract him with tests and whatever hospital staff does, but he'd always wave them away and say, “No, no, no. This is an important moment for me.”
At the ceremony, he sat in the front row with my mother-in-law. They watched us exchange vows. After the ceremony, he gave the two of us a private blessing about love and faith and family.
When we went to the reception, he moved around the reception with his robot and greeted all of our guests. He laughed a lot when he invariably face-planted on the rug. This happened several times.
And our wedding just was so much more beautiful than I could have possibly imagined. And it wasn’t because of the dress or the flowers or anything on my Pinterest board, but it was because of the love that everybody showed to that little robot. We worry that people would thing that that idea was kind of weird or entitled but our guests really embraced the robot and Jose wholeheartedly.
Our youngest guest, my little cousin, just delighted and awkward little thing and Jose had a great time showing off his movements for them. Our older guests vied for Jose’s attention and always had just these wonderful, kind things to say to him.
Jose passed away three months later living just long enough to see the ultrasound of the grandchild that bears his name.
In his eulogy, Alfredo wrote, “My father was a well-rounded man. Many of you will have known his many sides: engineer, academic, athlete, artist, holy man. But, to me, he was my father and I loved him. And we loved him and we miss him. But up until the last moments of his life, Jose loved to tell the story of our wedding and how, thanks to some clever technology, he was there.”
Thank you.