Wau Holland

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During a visit to Werner Pieper (Verlag Grüne Kraft ) in Löhrbach , approx. 2000

Wau Holland (actually Herwart Holland-Moritz ; * December 20, 1951 in Kassel , † July 29, 2001 in Bielefeld ) was a German journalist and computer activist .

Life

Holland was born in Kassel and moved with his family to Marburg at the age of ten , where he graduated from the Philippinum grammar school and began but did not graduate from Philipps University . In 1981, Holland was one of the founders of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), one of the oldest hacker clubs . From 1983 he worked as a columnist for the Berliner Tageszeitung (taz) , where he reported regularly on the emerging German computer underground and the mailbox scene .

From 1979, Holland supported the film historian Hans-Michael Bock with the development of the filmographic database Cinebase for CineGraph - a lexicon for German-language films , which appeared as a loose-leaf collection from 1984. In 1983 Holland supervised the phototypesetting of one of the early books created entirely on a computer ( Osborne 1 ) (Roland Jaeger, Cornelius Steckner : Zinnober - Kunstszene Hamburg 1919–1933 . Hamburg 1983, ISBN 3-924225-00-1 ).

Holland in Hamburg, 1984

Holland was a co-founder of the CCC's hacker magazine , Die Datenschleuder , which dealt with the possibilities of global information networks and fast computers and in the early years often contained circuit diagrams for self-made modems ( data toilet ). The Telecommunications Systems Act of that time required modems to be approved by the German Federal Post Office ; in case of doubt, this was only granted to modems that the Bundespost rented or sold itself. Cheaper high-speed modems, such as those that could be bought in the US, were banned. " Connecting a do-it -yourself modem was punished more severely than negligent triggering of a nuclear explosion, " as Wau Holland put it in retrospect.

In 1984 there was also the so-called BTX hack . In front of an invited audience and the trade press, Wau Holland and Steffen Wernéry demonstrated on the night of November 16-17 how they repeatedly called up a chargeable page in the screen text (BTX) with a password from the Hamburger Sparkasse (Haspa) . This was done automatically via a program, each page view cost 9.97 DM. Within 13 hours, the two generated a turnover of 134,694.70 DM, which was at the expense of the Stadtsparkasse. The hack was intended as a proof of concept , the money was then paid back to Haspa. To this day it is controversial how the CCC got the password. Wernéry said that by overflowing characters, you could get pages to show seemingly tangled data on the screen. That was correct, but the controversial claim that a user ID and password were found in this data chaos. Since the user data was encrypted and sent separately from each other, this seems technically impossible. Holland and Wernéry were accused of stealing the password two months earlier when they visited a savings bank branch. Ultimately, the matter remained unresolved, but the issue of data security at BTX came into the limelight.

Wau Holland was a radio amateur and used the amateur radio call sign DB4FA.

Not least because of Holland's work, the CCC gained notoriety and recognition. Holland gave lectures on information control in the government and in the private sector, he fought against copy protection and all forms of censorship as well as for a free information infrastructure . He compared the censorship regulations of some governments with the behavior of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages ; he regarded copy protection mechanisms as product defects. In his last years he spent a lot of time in a youth center in Jena , where he taught children both the technical and the ethical side of hacking.

After the political change in 1989, Holland lived in Ilmenau and gave lectures on ethics in computer science at the Technical University of Ilmenau with Gabriele Schade (which is why he ironically referred to himself as an honorary professor ). He was close friends with Bernd Fix and Wolfgang Rudolph .

“It's about having certain remnants of informational self-determination at all. In the Netherlands there is Professor Barkin, and he wrote a book: 2008 End of Privacy. His idea is that if the data machinery and the control of the individual by the fact that files are created over them evolve as it is now foreseeable, then Orwell's vision of 1984 was only wrong in terms of date, but not of structure . Around 2008 such amounts of data can be managed that ultimately there is no longer any privacy. At this point, the right to privacy can be regained by encrypting your messages. "

- 2000, in a lecture on the right to privacy, from : Walter van Rossum , deutschlandfunk.de: Crypto wars or Die Freiheit im Netz . Deutschlandfunk , dossier , January 2, 2015. Manuscript , p. 4

Wau Holland died in 2001 at the age of 49 in Bielefeld from complications from a stroke .

With the Wau Holland Foundation (WHS), which was recognized as a non-profit in January 2004 , the life's work of the namesake is to be made available to the public and opportunities are created to continue Holland's projects.

literature

Movie

Multimedia

Web links

Commons : Wau Holland  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Wau Holland  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/btx-hack-1984-angriff-der-ccc-hacker-gegen-die-bundespost-a-1002443.html BTX Hack 1984 attack by CCC hackers against the Bundespost
  2. ↑ https://www.op-marburg.de/Marburg/Marburger-hackte-die-Sparkasse Marburger hacks the Sparkasse
  3. ↑ The Chaos Wave. Funk fun. DARC local association D23, accessed on January 7, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Interview with CCC and Wau Holland, including a contribution about his life in Ilmenau
  5. ↑ CC2tv summer special broadcast 06/2018. Retrieved August 20, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Holland, woof
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Holland-Moritz, Herwart (real name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION German journalist and computer activist
BIRTH DATE December 20, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH kassel
DATE OF DEATH July 29, 2001
PLACE OF DEATH Bielefeld