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At Frigidaire, it’s pastel. . . .Westinghouse terms it frosting. But top men agree: “A little color brightens a whole line’s sales.”
—Sales Management, 1956
In 1954, Frigidaire (the Dayton-based appliance division of General Motors) became the first manufacturer of kitchen equipment to offer a “full line” of color appliances. This meant that, like GM cars, Frigidaire color appliances came in several price brackets — Standard, Master, De Luxe, and Imperial — and were designed in Detroit by Harley Earl’s styling section. At Frigidaire, color did fit into a broader plan for style obsolescence — but not in the way Vance Packard described. In advising dealers to exploit color, Frigidaire headquarters explained how colored appliances fit into GM’s “ladder of consumption” strategy. The goal was not, as Packard wrote, to treat appliances like millinery, convincing “Americans they should replace refrigerators, ranges, and washing machines every year or so.” It was to encourage consumers to replace their older white appliances with the new colorized models bit by bit over the years, until the ensemble was complete.
Frigidaire’s well-developed national distribution network encouraged franchisees to push color. One dealer put the burden on the store managers — “the first essential to selling Frigidaire appliances in color is to have the guts to buy . . . color” — but regional tastes played a role. Consumers in warmer climates and in more recently developed regions of the country (the Southwest, the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Coast) liked color; those in the industrial Northeast, the Midwest, and the Southeast did not.
Down-market stores shied away from color appliances, which had higher sticker prices than white ones. But in a middle-class or upper-middle-class market that could bear higher prices, a Frigidaire dealer could pocket 20% more from a color order. The co-owner of an appliance store in Salinas, Calif., spotted a “God-sent opportunity” that would allow his store to compete with a neighboring Montgomery Ward store. “We felt that our big competitors couldn’t get into colored appliances quickly enough because their buying procedures and merchandising techniques are not as flexible as the smaller dealer,” Paul Kane told a trade journal. “We decided to get so well established as ‘color headquarters’ that it would be difficult for these stores to overtake us.” The “crusade for color” gave the partners the chance to apply their “selling ability,” chatting up style and beauty to an “army of do-it-yourselfers who’ve been redecorating and have just got to the kitchen.” They also sold customers on the idea that tinted appliances would have higher value at trade-in time.
In Texas, the Good Housekeeping Shop in Odessa had success with Frigidaire colors. The Good Housekeeping Shop, opened in the autumn of 1957, was the brainchild of an entrepreneurial appliance salesman familiar with the Houston and Odessa markets. Refusing to stock any brand of appliances other than Frigidaire, the Odessa store and a Midland branch “sold color aggressively.” Operating on the principle that “you can sell white over color but you can’t sell color over white,” the owner kept “complete displays of all colors in both stores.”
Ensembles of matching appliances — a refrigerator, a range, a washer, and a dryer — were displayed in color groups, creating a rainbow effect that attracted customers into the showroom and held their attention. Salesmen were trained to “sell kitchen beauty and kitchen decoration as well as to sell the product.” One explained: “It is our habit to sell the item first, and then ask the customer which color will fit their color scheme the best, ‘What color do you want to buy?’” Three out of four shoppers who bought color returned within six months to purchase another major appliance. In 1958, nearly half of the shop’s orders were for color appliances.
Despite these successes, appliance dealers still saw white as “a safe bet” and worried about their ability to stock matching appliances down the road. In 1959, the Home Appliance Company in Texarkana, Texas, complained about the lack of colorized stock available in the Standard and De Luxe price ranges. In 1955 and 1956, the store had displayed color models and consumers had responded positively, particularly to mid-price ($300–$400) refrigerators. Forty-nine percent of the refrigerators and 37% of the ranges sold that year were colorized.
But since then, the dealer had had trouble getting colorized models in low and middle price ranges from the distributor, much to the chagrin of customers. “In the appliance business, we do not sell a complete kitchen every time.” When a customer who had bought a Standard refrigerator returned for a matching stove, she found that her only option, if she wanted to match the color, was a top-of-the-line Imperial priced at nearly $450. As a result, sales of colored appliances had fallen by nearly 10%. “I don’t think it is right to start a customer with color . . . when she could not complete the color due to the high price.”
In appliances, as in autos, the color revolution encountered unforeseen contingencies. Production hurdles, inadequate inventories, marketing challenges, and public perceptions made it tough for even the most sophisticated companies to convince consumers to embrace the concept of the color ensemble. Even as consumers warmed up to color appliances, the production and distribution system was ill-equipped to cope. Regional tastes, lingering biases, and socio-economic differences all contributed to the weakening of sales. In the meantime, cultural critics skewered the manufacturers. “The stylists’ fascination with pastels exhausted itself before the 1950s ended, and the trend went right back to white,” Vance Packard wrote. “Left in the backwash of the change were several hundred thousand home-owners who had believed pastel to be the wave of the future.”
The trend did not entirely revert back to white as Packard had predicted. Frigidaire statistics for 1964 showed that color appliances constituted 28.5% of national sales. Yet consumers declined to rush out and replace their Sunshine Yellow refrigerator with a new model in a new fashion color such as Avocado Green. Frigidaire designers may have wanted to engineer style obsolescence, but that wasn’t in the cards.
The color explosion of the postwar years was evidence of the extravagances of a growth economy and the maturation of American consumer society. In his focus on the big picture, Vance Packard had offered incisive observations about that consumer culture. But in his critique of design, he had simplified the complexity and overlooked the many cultural and technical contingencies that had led the Bell System, General Motors, and Frigidaire down the color road. Colorists tried to read the popular mood, which was always changing. The best practitioners knew that taste was difficult to pin down and that a shade became passé as soon as it became popular.
Obsolescence was part and parcel of the fashion system, which in the course of the twentieth century had migrated from clothing to cars to kitchens. New technologies such as Lucite had introduced better performance and better looks, which the cultural critics read as planned obsolescence. Ultimately the color outburst of the 1950s was contained by an updated version of the simplification project advanced by efficiency advocates such as Herbert Hoover and Margaret Hayden Rorke. A new generation of art directors cut back on the palette in the interest of controlling costs. By the last quarter of the 20th century, more Americans than ever before had dishwashers, phones, and cars, but they were available in fewer colors.
Better than the **** yellow offwhite that was popular for a long time.
Some people pay money to have other people urinate on them. Life is weird that way.
But I feel X_25. I really loved the kitchen at my great aunt's house in Indian Hill, an upscale northern suburb of Cincinnati. It was obviously designed by a Frank Lloyd Wright fanboy. Bright and open and airy, as is common today but virtually unheard of in the 1940s. And also colorful, bordering on Googie. The countertops were a sparkly green laminate with brushed-aluminum edging. The cabinets were white, but with an interesting abstract design in the door faces. Chromed pendant lamps hung from the ceiling. And, of course, the appliances were pink.
It was groovy.
It was, interestingly, also the total opposite of the kitchen at grampa Beadle's place about 80 miles east in the former coal & steel town of Chillicothe. That kitchen was a fully enclosed square room with one window. Dark wallpaper, bright white appliances. I was probably five or six years old the last time I was there, but I still remember how mundane and dull it felt.
The German auto maker’s “part no. 199 398 500 A” is a pack of sausages.
Wurst news ever: Volkswagen sells more sausages than Beetles, and in 2015 and 2017, it sold more sausages than cars overall. (This should come as no surprise, since sausages have both a lower overhead cost and a lower purchase price than the average car.) But the remarkable popularity of the Volkswagen Originalteil (German for “original part”) has landed the auto maker a space in the tubular meats hall of fame.
In 1973, the company started making the currywurst sausages, known as “item no. 199 398 500 A” in the Volkswagen factory, at the company headquarters in Wolfsburg. Meant as a breakfast or lunch item in the company’s cafeteria, the sausages were served whole or chopped up and tossed with Volkswagen’s own factory-made curry-flavored ketchup. These days, 30 kitchen staffers, most of them trained butchers, are put solely on weiner duty, making 18,000 sausages every day. The pork is sourced from local farms, and the recipe, which includes curry powder, pepper, and ginger, is a company secret. The sausages come in two lengths, and are dried, smoked over beechwood, and then steamed at 350°F for 100 minutes. The finished product is shipped in packs of five to VW dealerships all over the country, who then gift it to customers after a successful sale.
In 2017, Volkswagen sold nearly 7 million sausages, more than the number of VW-brand cars sold worldwide that year. While the iconic Beetle flits in and out of existence (VW has stopped or threatened to stop production several times in the bug’s life), the Originalteil, which the company recognizes as its “most popular non-vehicle part,” curries on.
(Presumably, we will soon learn of a scandal in which VW deliberately mis-stated the fat and sodium content of the sausages in order to comply with EU nutritional standards.)
Carpet in the bathroom used to be a thing. We had it when I was a kid. In more than one home. In one of them, it was ****. Teal-blue ****. With sparkly wallpaper, and a slot in the wall with a chrome plate around it into which one's father dropped used double-edged razor blades. There was no provision for ever removing them; the homebuilder simply assumed that the house would be knocked down before the space inside the wall between the studs into which the used razor blades fell ever filled up.
Hell, carpet on the toilet seat used to be a thing. Google it. I am not making this up.
The 70s were weird. And smelled like ****, to a certain degree. It was a different time. One full of beer & soda cans upon which the tab lifted off rather than being pressed inwards, and in which 100% of new cars were pure **** in one way or another.
On the bright side, we did have Aerosmith and Journey, and we knew who The Enemy was.
The 1939 cookbook of Soviet cuisine, The Book About Delicious and Healthy Food, opens with a Stalinesque slogan: “Towards abundance!” Earlier that decade, famines had devastated the Soviet countryside, and the memory of food shortages was not far off. But these realities appeared nowhere in the Communist Party-issued cookbook. Instead, it served up a utopian future.
The Book was intended to both feed and propagandize. After the 1917 revolution, which ended the Russian Empire and established the Soviet Union, the most well-known cookbook around was still decidedly un-Bolshevik: The Imperial Russian manual by Elena Molokhovets, A Gift to Young Housewives (1861), was replete with elaborate European dishes and household advice on aristocratic concerns such as servants and salons. But Soviet industrialization and ideology couldn’t stomach this bourgeois classic. In the 1930s, the Soviet Party developed a “rational” cuisine promoting what scholar Jukka Gronow calls “plebeian luxury.” Prepared by culinary experts from the Institute of Nutrition of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and published by the USSR Ministry of Food in 1939, The Book delivered a pragmatic and proletarian alternative. Several editions followed, and the expanded, glossy 1952 edition turned the cookbook into a bestseller. Since then, millions of copies have been sold.
Nearly 80 years after The Book’s first release, millennial Muscovite Anna Kharzeeva (along with her grandmother Elena*) put The Book’s culinary vision to the test. Kharzeeva’s new cookbook,
, chronicles her skeptical but warm-hearted journey through the 400-page Socialist Realist behemoth. From 2014 to 2019, she tried 80 of its recipes, from a flurry of porridges to the pickle-brine soup solyanka.
Amid the Soviet Union’s lean years, the images in The Book About Delicious and Healthy Food suggested the possibility of socialist plenty. Working through The Book, Kharzeeva points out internal inconsistencies. Despite a stated rejection of external, religious, or bourgeois influence, its recipes include versions of the Russian take on Easter hot cross buns (kulichi), the French-inspired Sharlotka apple cake, and a “historical recipes” section featuring foreign favorites with neutralized Russian names. While the ingredient lists in The Book assume plentiful products, Kharzeeva writes that many were available only as special-occasion rations (like caviar) or were rarely accessible (like melons). She also describes a category of rare ingredients used in the book, which include pineapples and real crab meat, as a “Soviet dream.” The cookbook contains no prep times, but Kharzeeva demonstrates that many recipes, such as the five-layer pastry puff kulebyaka, fell far short of liberating Soviet women from kitchen labor.
Grandmother Elena’s comments, meanwhile, reveal how Russians handled the contradictions of the Soviet Union and its promises of abundant, modern food. She shares that post-Revolution kids called a lie a “banana,” because finding a banana in the Soviet Union seemed as improbable as the lies told by Soviet politicians. Decades later, Kharzeeva’s mom still converts the price of clothing into bananas because they were so rare and expensive.
Food could also serve as code: One would pass on a samizdat (an illegally published book) by saying “I ate the buckwheat and am now ready to give it to you.” Being “closer to the sausage (kolbasa),” on the other hand, meant you were a Party higher-up. Elena’s adaptations of recipes, meanwhile, illustrate the creative methods of Soviet subjects cooking in communal kitchens (a situation the Book never accounts for). For example, the circular chudo (literally, “wonder”) pot could be used to bake cakes or yeast rolls on top of a kerosene burner (before gas ovens were installed) or on a crowded, shared stove. Ingredients could be cleverly served, like caviar atop cooked egg halves instead of bread slices (to reduce the amount consumed), or repurposed, like orange peels hung on laundry lines to refresh clothes.
Vatrushki are cheese-filled pastries.While the Soviet Diet Cookbook exposes the myths of the USSR, Kharzeeva also observes the politics of food in modern Russia. Despite Putin’s claims of Russian self-sufficiency, Kharzeeva, like Elena before her, faces high prices and scarcity. When making her recipes, a decently priced bell pepper or a piece of good lamb is nowhere to be found in Moscow. Contemporary regional tensions in the Eastern bloc, meanwhile, crawl into the presentation of “national” foods. While reviewing the Book’s borscht, Kharzeeva remembers seeing a menu flyer with both Ukrainian and Russian flags. A Ukrainian restaurant, trying to attract customers in the wake of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea (when popular sentiment trended anti-Ukrainian), designed this awkward, seemingly chummy graphic of the former allies.
One of the most interesting and widely relatable dishes in The Book is “Toast with Vegetables” or what Elena calls “Soviet Pizza,” a concoction of dough, sour cream, and stewed vegetables that Kharzeeva judges “odd, but healthy and edible.” Pizza as a dish would have been hard to recreate in the Soviet Union. “Real” pizza became available as a fast food only in the 1970s, and it was fancy and expensive, consumed by many first-time patrons with a fork and knife. Forget Parmesan: Elena remembers that only three types of cheese, all locally made, were available to her in stores. Melted, processed cheese was such a rarity outside of the city that Elena’s friend in the village once mistook the silky stuff for face cream.
A bowl of bozbash, a meat stew popular in the Caucasus (left), and the author and her grandmother, Elena (right).At the end of the day, as Elena says, “the shop is empty, but the fridge is full.” The Soviet Diet Cookbook tells the story of propagandist failures, poorly stocked shelves, and warm, resourceful homemakers, then and now. By Kharzeeva’s own admission, some recipes (deep-fried donuts or cornflake cookies) were a flop. But the Book could also delight with its far-away pictures and tasty, tried-and-true staples. The Book, as Kharzeeva writes, was “a whole world in itself, with its own idiosyncrasies, fairy tales, and flowers,” and The Soviet Diet Cookbook brings those Party illusions, and their inevitable folk adaptations, to the kitchen table.
“Soviet Pizza” Recipe from The Book About Delicious and Healthy Food
Cut bread into two pieces. Soak in 50 grams of milk mixed with egg and sugar. Bake slightly. Separately, simmer cabbage, sliced zucchini, and carrots in 25 grams milk and 10 grams butter. When cooked, lay cabbage, zucchini, and carrot slices on top of the bread. Lay apple slices, lettuce, and dill on that. Drizzle with butter and bake. Serve with sour cream.
Kharzeeva’s Adaptation of Soviet Pizza
Bread Base: 1 baguette
Or, if making the base Soviet style: 2-3 cups dried up baguette ½ cup milk 1 egg
Vegetable Topping: ½ teaspoon salt Cumin to taste 2 medium or small eggplants 2 bell peppers 150 grams cherry tomatoes 3-4 walnuts ½ teaspoon dry ajika
If making a Soviet-style base, soak the bread in a mixture of egg and milk, then combine in a blender and form circles, about 4 inches in diameter. Bake on oiled foil for about 15 minutes on 350F.
Roast the vegetables. Line tray with foil, make cuts in eggplants and peppers. Bake tomatoes for about 15 minutes, until skin comes off easily. Bake peppers for about 45 minutes, and eggplants for 60-70 minutes.
Cool the vegetables and take skins off. Cut them up coarsely, mix together, and place on top of the baguette or bread base. Sprinkle with crushed walnuts and ajika (if you don’t have ajika, a mix of coriander, chili, and dried garlic will do). Serve warm or cold.
The adventures of lab ED011—“Nobody would be able to duplicate what happened there”
One Romanian campus computer lab both pentested the world and eventually helped protect it.
ANDRADA FISCUTEAN - 8/27/2018, 8:00 AM
The University Politehnica building that hosts the Automatic Control and Computer Science(ACCS)program.
BUCHAREST, Romania—At the edge of Europe, Romania’s University Politehnica of Bucharest has long been the most prestigious engineering school in the region. Here, a terracotta-tiled building looms large over the campus, hosting the faculty of the Automatic Control and Computer Science (ACCS) program. On the ground floor, close to the entrance, is a humble computer lab. The label reads ED011.
Back in the early 1990s, after Romania escaped the grip of communism, this room was one of the few places offering an Internet connection free of charge. So every night, when no one was watching, students descended upon the lab to connect to the rest of the world. Eager to learn about life in Western Europe and the US, these students already had the look of their counterparts there—long hair, blue jeans, and Metallica shirts.
“Computers gave us the possibility to communicate with people around the world, which was extraordinary,” a former student named Lari tells me today. The ED011 computer lab did more than that, of course. It gave these students total freedom—to not only chat on the early Web but to explore all the odd nooks and crannies of computer science.
And if you ask former ED011 students, many of them did just that. They built programs to find dates (and watched as things took off far beyond the computer lab). They found the gnarliest malware on the early Web (and built applications to combat it). Some even tried to flex amateur pentesting skills on some of the biggest organizations online at the time (much to the school administration's chagrin).
Within this seemingly nondescript university room, Romania's first truly digital generation was born. And some of today's best technical minds anywhere developed the necessary skills to become industry leaders in everything from app development to security research.
Campus at the University Politehnica.
It may not be much to look at from the outside, but the inside of computer lab ED011 is remarkable.
In the beginning there was Lari
In the early 1990s, Dean Theodor Danila’s desk seemed constantly in disarray. It would pile up with faxes saying that one of his students had hacked someone’s servers again. Who’s furious now? A neighboring university? Some foreign organization? Maybe a military base?
From 1993 through 1996, whenever this happened, the dean knew who to blame: Lari—a thin, long-haired metalhead who spent all his nights in the ED011 computer lab at the University Politehnica of Bucharest.
“If I were to do today what I did back in the early 1990s, I would be facing thousands of years in jail,” Lari tells me in Romanian. The hacker lives in Western Europe now, and he’s still hesitant to use his real name when discussing his past due to the high-profile targets he and his fellow former students claim they attempted to hack two and a half decades ago.
On paper, it’s hard to determine if the following stories represent tall tales, rosy revisionist history, tech-savvy bravado… or a proper recollection of the truth. But Ars talked to a dozen former students, sysadmins at the university, and professors, all who largely corroborate each others’ stories. Some of these individuals still work in technology in capacities like security research, and their skills are also praised by their current communities. To be safe we also approached the organizations apparently targeted from within ED011, but many of these technology departments have changed several times over within the last 25 years. Most said they couldn’t verify or deny the information for us.
Lari remembers first going to ED011 in 1993 as a freshman at the Faculty of Automatic Control. The room was dark at night, only a neon tube flickering. Computers lined the walls, and the center of the lab stayed empty.
The most sought after machines were the 286 and 386 IBM PCs running Linux and DOS, often used by senior students for their homework. The lab had about a dozen of those, and the scarcity led to a hierarchy of seniority. The freshmen had one IBM PC to share, the sophomores had two, and the remaining computers had been assigned to senior students.
There were also six DEC VT320 terminals with black-and-green screens and time-stained cases, and these were typically less crowded. Freshmen like Lari could get a seat at a DEC if they were quick enough. The terminals were attached to a VAX computer that had 4MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive.
Generally, students spent hours in the lab browsing the Internet, sending emails, and talking to people. They used the Lynx text browser and, later, AltaVista or Lycos for Web searching. The university was connected to the Internet by two 56kb lines, which were used by up to a hundred students at the same time during rush hours. Download speeds of 1KBps were seen as pretty good, but sometimes students had less than 200bps.
Lari remembers his fame as a hacker rose early in his freshman year, starting one night before Christmas in 1993. He was chatting with a girl from Illinois, but he lost the connection. He was also in a hurry, as he had to catch a train to visit his parents. Lari tried repeatedly but couldn’t connect back to the chat. He feared he would soon disappoint the girl. “I didn’t know whether she was still waiting for me or not,” he recalls. “So in that frenzy, I hacked her university’s server to see if she was still active.”
The server had a standard vulnerability, Lari tells me. Easy. However, there was an issue: Lari didn’t have the time to delete the logs. “After the winter break when I returned to the university, there was a huge scandal,” he recalls. “And that escalated until it reached the dean.”
Lari understood he had made a mistake. But instead of convincing him to give up, the incident made him want to become better. Next time, he’ll definitely delete the logs, he thought. Next, he’ll be a better hacker.
“I wanted to see how far hacking could take me.”
Lari remembers coming to Politehnica late at night, carrying his coffee in a bottle.
The legend of Lari
Looking back, Lari sees himself as an early version of a bug bounty hunter or pentester; he felt like a white hat rather than a black hat. To start, he says Romania didn’t have legislation banning computer hacking at the time. And beyond that, he believed his ultimate hacking goal served the greater good. Even if he chose to target “organizations that sounded cool, such as NASA or [the U.S. Department of Defense’s] army.mil,” Lari says all he wanted was to show that the Internet of the early '90s was imminently hackable.
“If I, some ordinary Joe from god-knows-where could hack them, imagine what espionage agencies could do. They rely on thousands of experts, and it was just a matter of time until they would seize the opportunity,” Lari says. “I wanted to create a proof of concept for a global penetration system.”
A 20-something in some tiny university computer lab talking about hacking such big, bleeding-edge tech organization sounds crazy in retrospect. But Lari’s track record seems to vindicate the brashness of his youth. From his monochrome VT terminal, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) sat near the top of his wish list. Located near Geneva, Switzerland, this was the very place where the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee had created the World Wide Web a few years back in 1989. “I hacked into CERN on multiple occasions,” Lari says plainly. They had Cray supercomputers, graphics workstations, and plenty of servers that captivated the young hacker.
His ultimate goal was pretty mundane: Lari wanted to hack the www.cern.ch webpage by adding a “+” character at the end of a line. “Back then, on a text webpage, paragraphs were separated by something that looked like this: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++,” he notes. “I didn’t want to do anything intrusive.”
The CERN sysadmins, however, noticed the additional ‘+’ and eventually figured out it was inserted by someone from the University Politehnica of Bucharest. But rather than demanding the dean take Lari to task, “CERN said that it’s great that Politehnica has people interested in security,” he recalls. “[They said] that the university should have a safe environment for testing different attack scenarios.” (Ars talked to several retired CERN staff but none could remember this incident.)
As part of his mission to find how hackable the Web was, Lari says he developed an arsenal of tools from scratch. For one tool he recalls fondly, Lari once engineered a computer worm and improved its functionalities over two years. Unlike the better known Morris worm, which spread beyond control and shut down the Internet in 1988, Lari claims his malware was carefully written and went completely unnoticed to this day. It simply tested servers using a database of vulnerabilities Lari created. “Once installed on a server, my worm didn’t do harm. It only spread to other servers, reaching new departments [within the organization] or independent contractors,” he says.
As the hacker explains it, the malware worked on several Unix operating systems. When it propagated into a network, it first monitored the network to learn its patterns. The worm then tried to mimic those patterns to avoid detection. “The worm’s code was obfuscated, and it would change after every replication. The database the worm used was encrypted and randomized,” Lari says. When the job was done and a server became irrelevant, the worm would fully erase itself, as Lari tells it. And as the student read the logs, he was shocked to learn that the online world was a Web of weak links and vulnerabilities.
But again, Lari’s actions didn’t go unnoticed. His other purported exploits included US institutions like UCLA, where a pwned university IT person eventually became his pen pal. “A professor once told me that the University received a call from the US Embassy in Romania,” he says. “Another one claimed that the scandal escalated, and Romania’s president at that time, Ion Iliescu, found out about me.” (When reached for comment, the US Embassy told me it has little information on this, as the event occurred long ago. It could neither confirm nor deny Lari’s claim. Former President Ion Iliescu, currently on trial for crimes against humanity, no longer gives interviews and, thus, could not be reached. Nor could his wife, the former first lady Nina Iliescu.)
Luckily for Lari, whenever things escalated, he had a prominent university professor again and again on his side. “[Students like Lari] only wanted to learn, and they were brilliant,” the professor, who asked to remain anonymous, told Ars. His reason for allowing students like Lari to hack the world? “If you don’t break things, you won’t understand how they are made.”
However, this professor couldn’t save Lari forever, and the student’s biggest alleged target would end up being his last: the Pentagon.
One day, as Lari tells it, his worm discovered a common vulnerability on one of the Pentagon’s servers. “It intrigued me, and I wanted to find out what kind of hardware they had, how many CPUs, how much RAM.” He remembers managing to get inside by exploiting the vulnerability, but someone soon noticed his presence. “They cut my access in two or three minutes, and the server became invisible to me,” Lari says. He remembers the server could only be accessed from a few selected military bases in the US, and, after this hack, it looked like security experts working for the Army restricted access to it even further. Lari tells me he needed a week to find the server again.
(Pentagon spokesman Army Lt. Col. Jamie Davis told Ars he can neither confirm nor deny the student’s claim: “Anybody that was in uniform at that time has long since retired.”)
Any mild victory was short-lived, however—the dean heard about this incident, too. Outraged, the dean and the professors decided to ban Lari entirely from using the university’s computers. His time in ED011 had come to an end. And with his pentesting dreams achieved, Lari swore off hacking to boot. It would be up to other long-haired hackers in Metallica shirts to carry on the ED011 reputation.
"The ED011 students were geniuses,” Ender tells me today. “People like them are not easy to find.”
The continuation of ED011
Communist-era apartment buildings tower over an American-looking shopping mall on the outskirts of Bucharest. It’s a blizzardy morning in February 2018, and computer engineer Daniel Mihalcea meets me in a cafe. But back in his ED011 days, this man was known as Ender. He took the nickname after Orson Scott Card’s hero, a gifted but shy kid who trained to save the world.
Ender says he built his first virus when he was a sophomore, in 1996, just three years after Lari kickstarted the lab’s reputation. Ender recalls putting a lot of time into making it stealthier and more compact. He tested his baby using two popular bits of malware detection software at that time, F-Prot and ThunderByte Antivirus (TBAV), and he was thrilled to discover that they couldn’t catch it. Much like his fictional counterpart, Ender came to master cyberspace war games.
“My virus was also difficult to reverse engineer,” he says. “It encrypted itself, and it was memory-resident [it hid in the RAM, not leaving traces on the hard drive].”
Ender says his malware didn’t do anything spectacular in retrospect—it simply rebooted the computer after four minutes and 25 seconds, because his birthday is on April 25. When he became something of an unofficial sysadmin for the lab, he’d even use it to help shyer students get computer time if other students were hogging space for something like playing games. So like his peers, Ender tells me he always acted as a white hat hacker (unlike Lari, though, he did not become a frequent visitor to the dean’s office). Romanian tech-savvy crooks elsewhere may have resorted to stealing money from American and Canadian credit cards to deal with life post-communism, but in ED011, such practices weren’t welcome.
“[My malware] was just a proof of concept, and it has never been released in the wild. I only wanted to hone my skills,” he says, looking back on it. “Most students wrote computer viruses to prove to themselves and the others how well they understood the machine… The ED011 students were geniuses. People like them are not easy to find.”
Before the collapse of communism within Romania in 1989, dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had previously kept the country’s borders closed, isolating the people and telling them little about what was going on in the democratic world; the regime stifled almost every freedom. Lari, Ender, and these other early ED011 hackers, were part of a generation pushing back against this, the result of a poverty-fueled rebel culture boiling up in the last years of communism and bursting forth into the early 1990s. When outdated factories collapsed and inflation approached 300 percent a year, these students still couldn’t travel abroad, but talking to people from the West made them feel like rebels.
From L to R: former ED011 students Vampi, Lil Guy, and Ender.
The continuation of ED011
“ED011 was our only connection to Western Europe and the US,” Stefanita “Vampi” Vilcu tells me. (He got the nickname in high school, because of his pointy vampire-like canines.) Once, he spent 36 hours in a row in the lab, but he can’t brag about it. Other students would hang out for two or three straight days. In ED011, there was simply always someone you could ask questions or learn from. The hackers were good people, he says. “They had common sense, and it stopped them from causing damage to the systems they gained control over.”
Often, students like Ender or Vampi tell me, the most brilliant ED011 students even outsmarted their professors and taught them some advanced Unix or Linux techniques. Such happenings created a dynamic where the teachers didn’t always feel like they were in a position to comment about the students' hacking activities. “It was weird to have that professor come and say: thanks for teaching me things, but maybe you should stop hacking,” Vampi recalls.
Another former student, Claudiu “Zombie” Petcut, characterized the work of ED011’s post-Lari hackers as savvy but small in stakes. They only mocked the sysadmins and did small, local hacks, targeting things like the university’s servers. He recalls doing things like fork bombs—commands that kept overloading the servers with processes until they became inoperable. “We were the good guys,” Zombie says. “We only did innocent hacking.”
Zombie and a trio of former ED011 students—Radu “Micutzu’” (Lil’ Guy) Petean, Bogdan “Therion” Busuioc, and Daniel “Dave” Matei—even have occasional reunions to this day as a result of one of ED011’s most productive tech endeavors: the telnet-based chat system, Meet. Created by lab regular Bogdan “Phil” Velcea, the program grew out of experiments in ED011. It launched in 1997, soon spread across all of Romania, and eventually found adoption in places like Finland and the US. (Of course, Zombie and his Meet pals now use Facebook groups instead.)
“Being social and meeting people was an important part of the late 1990s,” Phil tells me, noting that some of the couples who met online through Meet even got married. “I’ve tried to hook-up with one or two girls on Meet, but I couldn’t,” Phil says. “[Even online,] I was too shy.”
So from pranks to products, malware to marriages, the legacy of ED011 lives on for the students it helped shape. “ED011 and other such computer labs are the reason why Romanians are good in technology,” Therion tells me. “We had the curiosity to learn the ins and outs.”
In fact, as perhaps one of the lab’s final acts some 25 years later, ED011 even played a role in solving one of the most mysterious cases of malware in recent history.
Vampi meets a hero, Linus Torvalds (left), circa 1995.
Just like in ED011, the lights stay dim for this particular gathering of hackers. But the year is 2017, and there are hundreds of security researchers filling a massive room. It’s the Kaspersky Lab’s Security Analyst Summit, a conference that’s sort of like a hacker’s version of America’s Got Talent.
An ED011 alumnus wearing a leather jacket has taken the stage: Costin Raiu, the current lead of Kaspersky Lab’s squad that investigates cyber espionage campaigns. A photo of the University Politehnica of Bucharest even appears during his opening speech.
Raiu has been working to unravel the latest findings on one of the most mysterious cyber espionage operation in history: the Moonlight Maze, an initiative that targeted the Pentagon and NASA in the late 1990s. Its tools are now two decades old, but the new evidence these researchers found suggests it’s connected to the Russian-speaking group Turla, which conducted massive spy campaigns up until recently in Western Europe (largely targeting governments and militaries).
Moonlight Maze is one of the first widely known cyber espionage operations, yet researchers had little information about it until recently—most of the evidence was previously destroyed. But in 2016, a former sysadmin in the UK named David Hedges gave security experts a server he used back in the 1990s to track the gang’s every move. Raiu took the new evidence and ran with it, analyzing attack vectors and looking at computer code written for SPARC machines. He worked for a year together with his then-colleague Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade and with researchers Thomas Rid and Daniel Moore of King’s College London.
And if you ask Raiu, his journey to this stage to announce these prolific findings started in a familiar yet unassuming place.
“[ED011] was the home of some of the best hackers in the world,” Raiu tells the audience of the conference. “I’ve watched all these people in amazement.”
Speaking to Ars after the conference, Raiu says he started going to ED011 as a freshman in 1996. He would wake up each morning at 5:30am, grab a quick bite, and take the subway to Politehnica. He would stand in line, in front of the door, and burst inside when it opened, running to be one of the first to grab a seat at one of the computers. At that time, he was working on RAV, an antivirus software he started developing while in high school. It reached 10 million users worldwide and was acquired by Microsoft in 2003.
While in the ED011 computer lab, Raiu would spend hours learning on the notorious ilf.net (The International Liberation Front), where malware authors published their work. “It had links to hundreds of archives of malware samples, from boring ones to really interesting and rare ones,” Raiu tells me. “I’d make sure that my antivirus program was always able to detect all the malware samples, which made it pretty known in Romania and later, outside the country.”
The lab itself, however, had plenty to teach. Raiu says Lari and the other students who hung out in ED011 showcased remarkable skills. “They were hacking into army.mil, they were hacking into nasa.gov simply to challenge each other and to see who has the most root shells [becoming superusers and executing commands] on army.mil,” Raiu explains. “Some said they had root shells on NASA computers. Others said they had access to supercomputers from all around the world, from the US to Japan.”
He recalls many had their computer screens dimmed, so that sysadmins wouldn’t see what they were doing. But ultimately these students were doing it just for the lulz, Raiu says. “99 percent of all the high-profile hacks [back then] were just enthusiasts, kids challenging each other to see who can access the most data. And only 1 percent of all the high-profile hacks were government-sponsored.”
Today, he says, it’s the exact opposite: 99 percent of all the high-profile hacks are governments spying on each other.
The welcome screen for Meet, a telnet-based chat application
For its last act, saving the world
While working on the Moonlight Maze case, Costin Raiu remembered how brilliant Lari was and how much he learned by watching him (Lari gave up hacking in 1996—the year Raiu first arrived at ED011). The first notable ED011 hacker now writes code and works as a system administrator somewhere in Western Europe, and he’s praised for his intelligence and creativity.
Most of the other hackers have moved on to other things, too. Ender has traveled the world and has worked for various technology companies from both hemispheres. Vampi dreams of robots while doing his support job. (He’s wearing braces to correct his pointy teeth, and by autumn he says he won’t be Vampi anymore.)
Stefan Puscasu is still a sysadmin of the University Politehnica of Bucharest, yet students don’t write unorthodox words on his door anymore. He often bumps into Lil’ Guy on campus. By a twist of fate, Lil’ Guy ended up teaching computer networks in ED011. He would often tell his students to do hands-on projects and not only stick to theory.
But in the early 2000s, soon after Lil’ Guy, Zombie, Therion, and Dave graduated, ED011 lost its traditional purpose. Romania got warp speed Internet connections, meaning curious students could work elsewhere. The country also addressed computer hacking issues by pushing through harsh legislation, meaning the days of rogue pentesting were through.
Worldwide, the security industry changed as well. Companies started to run extensive background checks when they hired an expert, and black hats weren’t welcomed in the legitimate industry. Today, kids like the young Lari can only hack the Pentagon through bug bounty programs without risking jail.
Lari is grateful, though, that he was a student in the 1990s in Romania, witnessing the early age of the world-wide Web and enjoying the rebel culture that flared up after the collapse of communism. If he were the dean of computer science today, he would set up computer labs for AI, robotics, and security with unlimited coffee, opened 24/7, he tells me. “Students are bold and full of energy. Universities need to sharpen their creativity.”
What made ED011 unique was the total freedom it granted, he says, the freedom to explore new ideas and approaches and to learn computer science thoroughly. “Nobody would be able to duplicate what happened there.”
See Technicolor Food Photos from Original Soviet Cookbooks
BY ANIKA BURGESS OCTOBER 16, 2015
Kefir, a fermented milk drink from the Caucasus Mountains and one of the staples of a Soviet diet. The accompanying recipe in the CCCP Cookbook is for Dovga Soup, an Azerbaijani yogurt soup.IN 1939, THE INSTITUTE OF Nutrition of the Academy of Medical Scientists in the USSR published The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. It was filled with praise for the domestic food industry, and had lush color photographs accompanying recipes gathered from all corners of the vast Soviet realm.
The reality of Soviet cuisine was a different story. Individual and artisanal production of food was banned in the mid-1930s as collective farming began. Ingredients were limited and the quality of food varied wildly. But families of government workers had access to goods that were otherwise nearly impossible to buy, such as caviar, cigarettes and sugar.
A new book by Olga and Pavel Syutkin, called the CCCP Cookbook: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine, offers an illuminating glimpse of food during this era, and includes recipes and photographs from original Soviet cookbooks. Atlas Obscura has photographs from the book.
Anastas Mikoyan helped bring mass production of ice cream to the USSR in the 1930s after visiting the United States. His interest was noted by Stalin, who said, “You, Anastas, care more about ice cream, than about communism.” Still, the cone above is embellished with the letters CCCP.
Fish sprats, for a Mimosa Salad, of potatoes, eggs, carrots, mayonnaise and of course, fish.
Shashlik, a form of skewered meat cooked over an open fire, and associated with the Caucasus region.
An elaborately garnished pike perch set in aspic.
Steak and onions, accompanied in the CCCP Cookbook with a recipe for the same.
Caviar. Those that worked for the State could access luxury goods like caviar; ordinary citizens would need to make an application to access it on national holidays or special occasions, such as weddings.
Pelmeni, or dumplings, usually served with butter or as in this photo, sour cream.
Suckling Pig with Buckwheat. Suckling pig was a traditional Russian dish that was featured as part of a meal in Chekhov’s 1892 novel The Wife.
Soviet mayonnaise, for the Stolichny Salad recipe. Mayonnaise became popular in the USSR as it was easy to mass produce.
A table set for a dinner of Chicken Kiev. Communal apartments were standard in Soviet cities, where families had one room for themselves and shared the common areas with between two and seven families.
The cover of the CCCP Cookbook, available from Fuel Publishing.
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