Wau Holland

Who was Wau Holland?

Herwart Holland-Moritz, known as Wau Holland, cofounded the Chaos Computer Club 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" 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 following day.

Holland 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 phone company of Germany's Deutsche Bundespost had to approve modems and sold expensive, slow modems of their own. The telecommunications branch of Deutsche Bundespost was privatized and is now Deutsche Telekom.

Because of Holland'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. Holland fought against copy protection 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 protection 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, with unique style and intelligent humor.