ytcracker

http://www.newsweek.com/id/42852

Bryce Case Jr. sounds like your stereotypical street-tough rapper. In 1999 he was convicted of vandalism, put on probation and slapped with a hefty restitution (between $50,000 and $60,000). He dropped out of high school to focus on, among other things, his rapping. He dabbled in drugs and porn production, made spare change DJ'ing at parties and even got to rhyme with hip-hop icons Xzibit, Ice Cube and Too $hort at the annual Player's Ball concert in Las Vegas for pimps and prostitutes. But unlike some of the rappers he's shared the stage with, Case refrains from invoking his street cred because, well, he doesn't have any. What he vandalized were government Web pages, which he hacked and then tagged. Today he performs under the handle ytcracker, alluding to the fact that he's a code cracker--and that he's white.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Case, now 25, is an entrepreneur, a self-described "computer nerd" and one of the more prominent practitioners of a bustling little underground hip-hop scene called "nerdcore," a subgenre created by geeks for geeks. His 2005 album "NerdRap Entertainment System," with music sampled exclusively from Nintendo videogames, is a classic of the style. (Typical lyric: "I hated gym 'cuz I never was athletic/I played a couple sports just to keep it copacetic/But I found more in computers than I ever could in hooping/Every time I wrote a goto, bitch, I had that baby looping.") Of course, ever since Vanilla Ice's 1991 flameout, the rare white rapper has been derided, forced underground--or both--with the exceptions of Eminem and the Beastie Boys. But all of a sudden white rappers are enjoying a mainstream renaissance: VH1 has a hit on its hands with "The (White) Rapper Show," an "American Idol" for would-be Eminems, and in February Bloomsbury will publish "Other People's Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America," by Jason Tanz, an editor at Fortune Small Business. There are two indie documentaries about nerdcore in production, and their online trailers have each netted more than a half-million views. The concept of being a white rapper is no longer a joke. - newsweek magazine

http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/673282/YTCracker_Famous_On_The_Internets.html

Nerdcore rapper and hacker supreme YTCracker is well known for his skills on the mic and the mouse. He’s also a fan of TheFeed and was kind enough to record and perform an awesome theme song for us, which we featured here awhile back.

In fact, we loved it so much we set up a webcam interview with the mighty YT so we could chat with him about his burgeoning style of hip hop and hacking the NASA site (which he did, by the way). We also got him to film a lil’ music video for the Feed theme song, which appears here at the end of this clip. The video even features appearances by some of your favorite Attack of the Show hosts and TheFeed web writers. Pretty neat, eh? - g4tv

http://youtube.com/watch?v=yDnx2e9zwyE - mtv

http://youtube.com/watch?v=c_971FYdn-4 - spiketv

http://www.playmagazine.com/index.php?fuseaction=SiteMain.showMediaPage&Media_ID=73

YTCracker
NerdRap Entertainment System
A young lad named Bryce Case Jr., calling himself "YTCracker," doing "nerdcore" rap over music loops taken from games that were released for the NES. If you aren't already familiar with YTCracker and this album, you now either think that sounds like the best idea ever, or you are seriously questioning my mental stability for including such an album on my list.

If you come into this album with serious expectations, you'll end up hating it, no question. If you listen to it with an open mind, and want some music that will put a smile on your face as it's getting stuck in your head, this is for you. I mean, come on... how can you not love a guy who drops references to things like the movie The Wizard, the Power Pad, and Abobo from Double Dragon while rapping over the (godly) Bubbleman music from Megaman 2? You just can't hate something like that, no matter how cold your heart may be. Plus, the guy's performed with the likes of Xzibit, Cypress Hill, Digital Underground, George Clinton, and Too Short, so hey, he's got street cred. Best of all, YTCracker offers the album for free on his site, so it won't even cost you a dime. - play magazine

http://www.xlr8r.com/features/2007/10/what-it-nerdcore

Not so long ago, hackers listened to Skinny Puppy and could barely get a date through the S&M BBS. But these days, a dude like YT Cracker is just as likely to be famous for his lyrical prowess as he is for digitally invading NASA’s data systems.

Hacker-turned-rapper YT (born Bryce Case) is not bummed about being called a nerd–actually, he revels in it, like nearly all his contemporaries in the niche genre known as nerdcore. A subset of hip-hop created almost entirely by white, middle-class rappers, nerdcore’s chief attribute is that it celebrates geek culture, exploring topics once reserved for solely for listservs, ComicCon, and dorm rooms. And the seemingly endless minutiae of geekdom–from obscure Star Wars characters to anime, computer coding slang to the Dungeons & Dragons rulebook–makes for good rhymes in Instant Messenger rap battles. - xlr8r magazine

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/11/04/refrain_of_the_nerds/?page=2

Another similarity bolsters nerdcore's cred: Some artists have rap sheets. Bryce Case Jr., who performs as YTCracker, is a 25-year-old high school dropout from Colorado Springs who was investigated by multiple federal agencies for hacking into a NASA website - at age 17.

"I was a 17-year-old kid with some spare time," Case says on the phone from Colorado Springs, where he runs an independent record label, Nerdy South Records. "The legitimacy of the genre is determined by the people in it." - boston globe

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/11/32729

Cracker Launches Attack on NASA
Leander Kahney Email 11.23.99 | 4:00 PM

The Web pages of three US Government agencies, including NASA's Goddard Flight Center, have been defaced by a cracker who is worried that US government security systems are vulnerable to cyberattack.

The front pages of the sites for NASA's Goddard Flight Center international page, the Bureau of Land Management's National Training Center, and the Defense Contracts Audit Agency, on Wednesday were replaced with a page showing a cartoon of a hooded hacker wearing a peace symbol necklace and a message warning of Web site security holes.

"To the US government and military -- I have warned you about these security flaws," wrote ytcracker on the Flight Center's front page. "Please secure our military systems to protect us from cyber attack.

Identifying himself as a 17-year-old high school student from Colorado Springs, Colorado, ytcracker (for whitey-cracker) said he defaced the sites as a warning to the US government.

"I'm not about being malicious," he said. "A lot of other countries are planning cyberwarfare on the US government. If other countries have malicious intent, how can we as US citizens feel safe? I did this to let them know they really have to prepare for these things."

Ytcracker said he chose the sites after scanning numerous government agencies for those most vulnerable.

The three sites were penetrated using a well-known trick that should have been known to the administrators and plugged, ytcracker said.

Furthermore, he said, the administrators had been recently notified of the security hole but had ignored the warnings.

"It seems the only way to get their attention is to show them," he said.

The DCAA was cracked early Wednesday, followed by BLM and then NASA early Wednesday afternoon, ytcracker said.

Speaking only minutes after cracking the NASA site, ytcracker declined to give his real name but said he has done very little to cover his tracks.

As well as being able to follow the sites' server logs, which track visitors to the site, a link on the cracked NASA page leads more-or-less straight to his home page.

"If they want to find me, it won't be very hard," he said. "I don't want them to misinterpret my actions. I didn't do it to offend them or show them up. It's basically to alert them. All I can do is pray to God and hope they do."

NASA spokeswoman Janet Ruff said the organization took security "very seriously... when things like this happen they require a fast response." Ruff said NASA was continuing to investigate the breach, but that she could not comment further.

However, B.K. DeLong, curator of Attrition.org's Web site defacement archive, which has mirrored the cracks, said the US government doesn't take the defacement of its Web sites kindly.

DeLong noted that another cracker, known as Zyklon, was sentenced to 15 months in jail and a $36,000 fine last week for defacing the White House's Web page.

DeLong said the cracks were significant security breaches.

"Any government, military, or high-profile corporation is a significant hack," he said. "It shows once again that they're lacking in security."

DeLong said the crack exploited the remote administration capabilities of Windows NT systems and isn't particularly difficult to perform.

Before hanging up, ytcracker said: "I'm very much a patriot. I promote the same democratic ideals as the government endorses. I believe strongly in peace and harmony." - wired

http://www.news.com/2100-1023-242034.html

Although AOL declined to elaborate on the effects of the account takeovers, a member of Inside AOL who goes by the name of "ytcracker" said the account crackers' intentions seemed "harmless." They mainly wanted to take over AOL screen names that were already being used, the member said.

AOL members who have discovered their screen names are no longer working can call AOL to fix the problem.

"All they need to do is call AOL and get their account back again," ytcracker said in an interview. "It's probably more of a hassle than anything." - cnet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YTCracker

http://www.google.com/search?q=ytcracker - wikipedia and google