I was actually (digitally) in touch with kimble and his BBS in my own BBS-days and feel a need to set straight that, to my knowledge, he was never very tech-savvy, and never a "hacker" by any standard. Instead he quickly made a name for himself for being a full-on fraudster of the sociopath kind.
Here's a (german) article that sheds some light on his earliest endeavours:
Kimble started out by running a warez-bbs and dealing calling cards (which was quite common back in that day). Things turned nasty when his BBS got busted. He did not only cooperate with the cops but there-after partnered with an infamous german lawyer to set up traps for other BBS operators and sell them (literally) to the authorities. This went on for years in an organized fashion. From all accounts that I've heard he was not strong-armed into it but rather made money that way and even bragged about it.
From there I think the ars article is mostly correct. But I wouldn't like to see him get away with his self-proclaimed "hacker"-image.
In the german BBS-scene of the 90s the hate for him was unrivaled. There were quite a few graphic kimble-related ascii-banners on some post-login screens.
I can confirm this. I was part of a few groups back in the 90s and was there when Kimble first showed up. He shot up in notoriety rapidly, but we figured him out as not having any skills pretty quickly.
He would take 'hacks' from others and then claim them in the media for himself. The first time he did this with one of the groups was when he went to the media with the NASA hack. What happen was somebody on the channel had dumped shell accounts on a few jpl.nasa.gov boxes, and a day later the story was in the media that Kimble had done it.
I then watched him get kicked from other groups when he would do the same thing - either claiming hacks as his own or taking exploits, ripping out the attribution and putting his own name in.
He became a subject of derision with these groups so he then setup his own group and bought in some fans - claiming he was going to 'hack' all of us. Nothing ended up happening.
There is truth to most of his claims - for eg. the 'military secrets' claim comes from a hack where some Indian and Iraqi military networks where hacked and documents leaked. Around 20 people on IRC had access to them, and Kimble claimed that one as well (one of the other guys ended up getting arrested for it because he tried to sell the documents to an undercover agent).
Funnily the media attention that Kimble bought to himself bought a lot of attention to Undernet and the groups that were on there at the time. It ended up driving us to private SIRC servers and renaming most of the groups as a large number of newbies (and probably federal agents) flooded onto the servers and tried to gain access to the group channels.
A couple of years later he re-appeared with his security company and then racing videos. We would be in conflict with him continuously - he would email us with taunts and we would return them. The website of his security company was defaced numerous times and his home directory dumped. He then tried to call a 'truce' and to hire a few of us, I was on a few conference calls that Kimble was on.
I then bumped into him again a little later on, after he started MegaUpload. I wasn't surprised at all that he was behind the site. What we did back then and with him was a bit childish and we grew out of it - but Kimble definitely isn't a hacker in that old regard. He does have skills in promoting himself and getting people to believe in his ideas.
Kimble was also a notorious quake 2 botter (cheater), back in the day. He ruined online quake play for many Germans and was as much of a selfish cunt as this article suggests.
A sad reminder that the "online persona" will often say more about you than one is willing to admit.
I was actually (digitally) in touch with kimble and his BBS in my own BBS-days and feel a need to set straight that, to my knowledge, he was never very tech-savvy, and never a "hacker" by any standard. Instead he quickly made a name for himself for being a full-on fraudster of the sociopath kind.
Here's a (german) article that sheds some light on his earliest endeavours:
http://www.gulli.com/news/12565-nachruf-guenter-freiherr-von...
The gist is:
Kimble started out by running a warez-bbs and dealing calling cards (which was quite common back in that day). Things turned nasty when his BBS got busted. He did not only cooperate with the cops but there-after partnered with an infamous german lawyer to set up traps for other BBS operators and sell them (literally) to the authorities. This went on for years in an organized fashion. From all accounts that I've heard he was not strong-armed into it but rather made money that way and even bragged about it.
From there I think the ars article is mostly correct. But I wouldn't like to see him get away with his self-proclaimed "hacker"-image.
In the german BBS-scene of the 90s the hate for him was unrivaled. There were quite a few graphic kimble-related ascii-banners on some post-login screens.