Wau Holland

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Wau Holland, ca. 2000, in Löhrbach, Germany

Herwart Holland-Moritz, known as Wau Holland, (December 12, 1951 - July 29, 2001) co-founded the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in 1981, one of the world's oldest hacking clubs. The CCC became world famous when its members exposed security flaws in Germany's "Bildschirmtext" (Btx) online television service by getting a bank to send them DM 134,000 for accessing its Btx page many times. They returned the money the next day.

Wau also co-founded the CCC's hacker magazine Datenschleuder in 1984, which praised the possibilities of global information networks and powerful computers, and included detailed wiring diagrams for building your own modems cheaply. The then-monopolist and phone company Deutsche Bundespost - whose telecommunications branch is now Deutsche Telekom - had to approve modems and sold expensive, slow modems of their own. Nearly everyone bought cheaper, unapproved modems instead.

Excerpts from the magazines and related documents were collected in "hacker bibles". The problems were often similar to today, but everything was so much smaller, except for the technology itself.

Because of Wau's continuing participation in the club, the CCC gained popularity and credibility. He gave speeches on information control for the government and the private sector. Wau fought against copy prevention and all forms of censorship and for an open information infrastructure. He compared the censorship demands by some governments to those of the Christian church in the Middle Ages and regarded copy prevention as a product defect. In his last years, he spent a lot of his time in a youth center teaching children both the ethics and the science of hacking, in its truest form, with unique style and intelligent humor.

Holland died in Bielefeld on July 29, 2001 of complications caused by a brain stem stroke from which he suffered in May.