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. 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.

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After a few weeks, Elevator Pitch Friday is back with a vengeance. This week’s featured video comes to us from a self-funded, young male-oriented, yet-to-launch startup called BeTheBetterMan.com, with the pitch delivered by founder Eric Mayville.

The video’s a bit dark, but it’s enthusiastically delivered and straight-forward. Here’s the pitch:

As Eric describes further in the comments of the pitch:

…the options for challenges are endless as they can be user created or supplied by someone like the staff at Be The Better Man, some examples would include who can do the best Christopher Walken impression? Do you have the most bad ass beerpong table? What is the best song for the summer?

Now a Christopher Walken impersonator contest — that’s something I’d like the internet to do right. When they launch this fall, BeTheBetterMan.com faces some tough competition in their space, including the star-backed iBeatYou and video-focused Strutta.

Let us know what you think of this pitch in the comments.

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Six weeks ago we launched an API for our technology database, CrunchBase. The idea was to give away lots of clean, structured data about the companies we cover, data that could be used to build new services and improve upon existing ones.

Since then we’ve seen a number of impressive things built on top of the API. And the traffic has started to add up: between July 15th and August 15th we fulfilled nearly 800,000 API requests, compared to ~1.3m page views for the website itself.

We now have over 15 projects hooked up to CrunchBase with many others on the way. Developers interested in using CrunchBase data for their own projects should check out the API documentation.

Today we wanted to highlight a few of the more sophisticated product integrations to date.

Apture

Apture is a startup trying to bring “depth to the web” with contextual popups that require no browser plugin. The product’s blog integration provides a very visual and intuitive way of navigating CrunchBase entries. Here are some examples (click on the little book icons to the left of the links): YouTube, FriendFeed and Evan Williams. Also, check out this video they compiled:

Zemanta

Zemanta, a blogging enhancement tool that launched back in March, recently integrated CrunchBase so that publishers can easily slurp in extra information like company logos into their posts.

Zemanta’s product integrates closely into blogging platforms such as WordPress, and it helps to semantically link up parts of your post with sites from around the web (CrunchBase now included). These guys have been on our case (and rightly so) to release an API for a couple of months now, so it’s great to see their implementation go live. They even offer their own API which takes plain text as input (say, a blog post), and spits out correctly disambiguated CrunchBase entities.

You can check out a demo of their product here.

Flash CrunchBase

Nicolás Parziale has created a very cool flash app inspired by They Rule that visualizes the graph of connections throughout CrunchBase. You can start with a company (such as Digg, shown below) and then flesh out different parts of the graph with your mouse. You can even input any two companies, causing the app to crawl the web and visually display all of the connections between the two.

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Apple’s App Store is quickly becoming a hotbed for elite developers looking to capitalize on the store’s easy distribution model and huge exposure opportunities. Since the store’s launch less than two months ago, we’ve seen reports of apps reaching massive user bases and and collecting millions of dollars. But while the store has seen its share of its successes, it also has its flaws - most notably in the way it exposes users to apps in the first place.

The most glaring exception on the store is the lack of an all-time most popular applications list. While there are a pair of lists for current “Top Apps” (one for paid apps, the other for free), the list changes on a daily or even hourly basis. In turn, the most recently released applications dominate the list, with over half of the current list constituted by apps that have been released in the last ten days. This is great for Apple - most people turn to the Top Apps first when they open iTunes, and it’s in Apple’s best interest to always give them something new to play with.

But what about the apps that everyone should have? The ones that have seen hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of downloads, but no longer reach the top app lists because most people already have them? Shazam, the app that lets you hold up your iPhone to a speaker to figure out what song is playing, is currently ranked 16th, so it won’t appear on the home page. Tap Tap Revenge, one of the platform’s most popular games, has fallen to 20th. And Twitterific - a Twitter client that seemed cemented in the top 10 soon after the store’s launch, seems to have dropped off the list entirely.

If the current situation persists, even the very best apps will always lose out to the up-and-comers - a situation that only encourages developers to pump out applications as quickly as possible, rather than creating something really useful. Apple devotees are known for valuing polish and functionality - it would be a shame for the store to fall prey to the spammyness seen on other platforms.

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A rumor is circulating that the iPhone may be finally making its way to China. The original source of the rumor is China Communications, which has cited a China Mobile insider as its source. According to the source, China Mobile will be offering the iPhone at a heavily subsidized discount in order to court the massive Chinese population, many of whom would have trouble affording an unsubsidized phone.

An article from It.hexun.com (translated here), says that the source is a member of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), and offers further details:

China Mobile will procure the handsets for their full price, and then on-sell subsidized handsets to consumers. The source explained that China Mobile could buy a 3G iPhone from Apple for USD 299 – an example price – and then sell the handset to users for USD 199, treating the additional USD 100 as compensation to Apple.

Past talks between China Mobile and Apple have failed, largely because of Apple’s past insistence on taking a portion (believed to be between 20-30 percent) of the carrier’s monthly fees from iPhone customers.

With the release of the iPhone 3G, Apple stopped insisting on a rev-share agreement with carriers. An earlier report on a possible deal explained that the largest hurdle had been removed, but there were still “practical issues” that had to be taken care of.

Thanks to The China Perspective for the tip.

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A couple of days ago I posted an email that I received from Google letting me know that I wouldn’t be able to attend a Google/Vanity Fair party at the Democratic National Convention that I never knew about and didn’t ask to go to. Other people who also didn’t know about the party received the same email.

Today I get another email, also from Google, inviting me to attend the mirror party at the Republican Convention in Minneapolis next Thursday. is this for real or are they just going to cancel on me again? Get out of my head, Google. I will not be fooled into RSVPing only to have you kick me out later. Email is below:

Google and Vanity Fair invite you to celebrate the closing night of the Republican Convention!

Thursday, September 4th
9:00 pm > onward
Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Avenue
Minneapolis, Minnesota

RSVP: www.google.com/[removed]. Please do not respond to this email.

By Invitation Only and non-transferable - please do not forward this message.

An admission card is required for entrance. You will receive a confirmation email before the convention with instructions on where to pick up your admission card in Minneapolis.

You are receiving this email based upon a personal recommendation by someone at Google or affiliated with Google. If you are not interested in attending, we apologize for sending you this email.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Blogger has announced a new “following” feature that enables members to list themselves as fans of other members’ blogs.

By following a set of blogs, your username and avatar will not only show up among other followers in a MyBlogLog-like gadget that can be placed in the sidebars of these blogs. You can also view the latest posts from the blogs you follow in a special feed reader on the Blogger dashboard.

Since Blogger is owned and run by Google, the posts from the blogs you follow on Blogger can also be accessed with Google Reader in a special “Blogs I’m Following” section.

While the new following feature will be useful for staying on top of your favorite content, the main benefit to Blogger will come from introducing a better sense of community, one that can be built out gradually into a more functional social network. The Blogger team has already announced its intention to implement Google Friend Connect throughout the blog network, so it’s definitely heading further in this direction.

On the one hand, this new feature roll out can be seen as just an attempt to stay competitive with Moveable Type and WordPress, both of which have already developed social features of their own (and the former of which has run into the arms of Google’s social networking nemesis, Facebook).

But Google also conspicuously lacks a social network with any significant amount of popularity in the United States (Orkut hasn’t made much headway here). So perhaps it has decided to pin much of its social networking hopes on Blogger, which could be leveraged to bolster the usage of Google Friend Connect and eventually OpenSocial as well.

If you’re a Blogger user and don’t see the new following feature yet, you may have to wait a few weeks - they are rolling it out gradually.

[News via The Social]

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Microsoft has agreed to acquire a Connecticut-based research company called Greenfield Online, which runs both a website called Ciao for European comparison shoppers and an online survey system that helps businesses conduct market research.

The cash tender offer to buy out all of Greenfield’s outstanding shares amounts to roughly $486 million, about $60 million more than public equity firm Quadrangle recently offered to pay for Greenfield. Microsoft has already found an unnamed party to buy Greenfield’s surveys division from it, leaving the Redmond, WA-based company with the remaining Ciao subsidiary.

Ciao is a consumer-oriented website for (mainly European) shoppers who want to find reviews, ratings, and price comparisons for goods they can buy elsewhere online. To get an idea of the service, check out this listing for a Canon Powershot camera where you’ll see prices aggregated from several online retailers and reviews posted directly to Ciao itself. According to ComScore, Ciao receives over 26.4 million unique visitors per month from seven countries.

Microsoft’s decision to acquire Ciao is reminiscent of Yahoo’s decision to purchase Paris-based Kelkoo in 2004 for about $670 million - one that Yahoo has since reconsidered.

As with its purchase of discount shopping site Jellyfish last Fall, Microsoft plans to integrate Ciao into its Live Search offering, this time as a means to beef up its offering for European users.

Ciao was founded in Munich in 1999 and purchased by Greenfield Online in 2005.

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Update: McCain has chosen someone from outside Silicon Valley: Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

As John McCain prepares to unveil his selection for a running mate today, Mitt Romney seems to be a favorite. But two former Silicon Valley CEOs are also on the short list, and they are both women: Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Picking Romney would help McCain solidify his position with the Republican base, but it would also be predictable and boring. Picking a woman with executive experience would show that McCain is as open to change as Barack Obama.

Other women also have a shot at the VP slot, including Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. But if it came down to Fiorina and Whitman, who would make the better Vice President? Both are whip-smart and have managed large organizations. Fiorina, of course, was the CEO of Hewlett-Packard and Whitman was the CEO of eBay.

Both, however, left their CEO posts during troubled times for each company (although Fiorina was forced out, while Whitman stepped down voluntarily after a decade at the helm). Looking at each one’s performance at each company, you’d have to give Whitman the upper hand. The vast majority of her years at Bay were spent overseeing its meteoric rise. (She is also co-chair of McCain’s campaign). But Fiorina (who is the “Victory Chairman” of the RNC) is perhaps more adept at the political arts, and has proven she feels comfortable on the world stage. (Listen to our recent interview with Fiorina—she certainly has a good grasp of the issues that matter to Silicon Valley).

Who would make the best VP—Whitman, Fiorina, or someone else? Who would give McCain the biggest boost at the polls?

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Comcast’s decision to cap monthy broadband usage at 250GB is being decried as the end of the Internet as we know it. Maybe so, but it can also be seen as the dawn of the Streaming Era. As the Olympics drew to a close with big numbers - 75.5 million streams (NBCOlympics.com), 40 million (BBC), another 130 million from the European Broadcasting Union, and 100 million Chinese viewers - the networks were already moving on by serving the Democratic National Convention in HD. CBS offered an after-convention netcast with Katie Couric, and CNN promoted “full and complete” streaming coverage of all speeches.

The Comcast move seems more focused on the politics of the FCC decision to rule out Comcast’s filtering of P2P traffic. But BitTorrent and other such traffic is all about downloading, not streaming, and the advent of new look-ahead streaming capabilities in Silverlight suggest that streaming can accommodate DVR-like functionality that makes the value proposition of “owning” the data on a local drive much less important.

It used to be that having physical control of entertainment and other software was critical to the user experience. Record and film companies kept accelerating the quality levels of their products to stay ahead of the pirates and the growing ability of consumers to capture and archive content off the radio and television networks. But as broadband became more available as competition between telcos, cable, and satellite increased, sharing of MP3s and DVR time-shifting had an oddly counter-intuitive impact.

First, the Netflix strategy made renting movies a less onerous process, with no late fees and a large catalogue to choose from. When Blockbuster and Hollywood Video adopted similar MVP programs, the cable and satellite companies were forced to counter-attack with on-demand offerings that were even easier to acquire and in fact were spooled from servers rather than downloaded to home machines.

This, of course, is the same shift software has undergone from shrinkwrap to service, from Outlook to Gmail, Office to Google Apps, and from the hard drive to the cloud. In effect, productivity apps are now streamed to and the data from the user. With the data stored redundantly in the cloud, we are more comfortable with a streaming situation than with the former illusion that we “owned” our data locally.

Read the rest of this entry at TechCrunchIT.

(Photo by Quinn Dombrowski).

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