"I’ll tune in the Raspberry Pi to the airplane’s network … and then I’ll have a little five-dollar Raspberry Pi Zero, I’ll have it put on a second Wi-Fi of its own and name the network ‘spanky’ with no password. Everyone on the plane can log in… eleven people connected. So I started using it as a honeypot.

This is vastly underselling Woz’s pranks. He made up a fake ID for himself from the “Department of Defiance,” and he would get himself on airplanes with it. He said in his mind it wasn’t fake, because it wasn’t an ID for anything in particular, just kind of an official-looking thing he would show to people. He said that whenever he would use it, people would get really deferential to him and wave him right on through. He used to print out perforated sheets of 2-dollar bills, like a huge post-it note, and try to pay for stuff with them, because it was perfect legal tender but as far, as he could figure out a way to get, away from something that looked real. A lot of times people wouldn’t take them.

He loved phone pranks. As far as I know, to this day if you dial 888-888-8888 you’ll get Woz, or at least an answering machine controlled by him. He snatched it up the instant they made the 888 toll free area code available, because before that all he could get was 800-888-8888 and that wasn’t really satisfying.

It’s kind of hard to explain. Maybe all of this just sounds jumbled and odd.

None of any of what he did was malicious in any way. I can guarantee he didn’t try to steal any private information from anyone who used his fake airport hotspot. He might have run a little squid proxy that did a MITM attack to turn 1% of their images upside-down, something like that.

When Steve Jobs cheated a bunch of employees out of some money he’d said they would get, Woz found out about it and gave them all the money they were supposed to get, out of his personal money. He didn’t have a shortage, at that point, but still, he didn’t have to do it, and such a thing is basically un heard of in silicon valley.

He’s a pretty unique person, but also, there are others like him. People just found out about him and he got famous (Not really. Steve Jobs is famous, and gets the credit for Apple, because he fits what TV likes people to be, i.e. awful.) But there used to be thousands of these guys running around, behind the scenes. They all operate in a certain way. They made the microcomputer revolution happen, and the video game industry, and the web. A generation before that, they had a lot to do with winning World War 2.

I don’t know what they are doing now. The ecosystem is very hostile to them, now, both in and out of the computer.