PortraitComputer hacker with a busy past, this 50-year-old man from Avignon has been tracked down for years by the FBI, which accuses him in particular of having developed techniques for hacking game consoles. The hacking veteran does not see himself as a criminal, but as a rebel.
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The apartment door opens to a comic book library. A passion that the master of the place, Max Louarn, 50, has been cultivating for thirty years, since the time when, as an engineer, he spent his nights on his computer. He needed this “airlock” of reading before going to bed. After traveling around the planet, this Avignonnais is now preparing the bedroom for his second child in this loft, located in the heart of the city of the Popes. On the wall, a large format photo of his couple: he, maintained by boxing sessions; she, a former Russian model, in an electric blue dress. The snapshot dates from January 2020, in Saint-Barthélemy, the island where they met.
The comic strip wall and the blue dress were also the first things two American police officers came across on November 10, 2020. That day, accompanied by their counterparts from the Montpellier SRPJ, they pounded on the door at 6:30 a.m. “I see myself pinned to the ground”, remembers Max Louarn. FBI agents have been interested in him for almost thirty years. They know his reputation as a pioneer in the world of hackers. Today’s forties, who spent their teenage years on game consoles, have stars in their eyes when they hear his name. At the turn of the 1990s, “Maximilian” was the leader of Paradox, a group of geeks who were flooding the market with pirated games.
His life of « hack »as he tells it, is that of a computer rebel. “Not hackers, armed arms of rogue states or criminal gangs equipped with ransomwarehe says. If today, we have the freedom of YouTube, if we have MP3s and WeTransfer, if the jailbreak [débridage d’un appareil pour lever les restrictions imposées par le fabricant] is authorized, it is thanks to us, the hackers. We’ve always been proliberté, that’s our state of mind: do what we want with the machines so that everyone can have access to them. »
Its history begins in the mid-1980s, in other words in the prehistory of computing. Max was then 14 years old and top of the class, gifted in math. When his parents want to reward him, he does not ask them for a Solex, but a Commodore C64, the computer thanks to which he will discover the stammering scene of the hack. With his correspondents, a Dane, an American and an Englishman, they address letters before exchanging files on BBS (Bulletin Board System), the distant ancestor of the Internet. Their first challenge? Hack into phone systems. At the time, international communications cost a crazy price. “My first big hacking activity is to call for free via the system of bluebox. We want to have fun, we build a global network of friends,” explains Max Louarn. There he will meet Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs. This is the golden age of piracy. The police are not interested in these young people who set themselves challenges, such as breaking into Hewlett-Packard, or the Grail, NASA’s computer system.
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