Hagbard

Hagbard (Old Norse Hagbarðr), the brother of Haki and son of Hamund, was a famous Scandinavian sea-king in Norse mythology. He is mentioned in Skáldskaparmál, Ynglinga saga, Nafnaþulur, Völsunga saga and Gesta Danorum. The heroes' connections with other legendary characters place the events in the 5th century AD.

Hagbard remained well-known until recent times in the legend of Hagbard and Signy. This famous legend tells that Hagbard fell in love with Signy, the daughter of king Sigar, the nephew of king Siggeir (of the Völsunga saga), a love affair which ended in their deaths, when Sigar wanted to have Hagbard hanged. This legend is told most fully in Gesta Danorum (book 7).

However, most legends surrounding Hagbard are probably lost. In the Völsunga saga, Gudrun and Brynhild have a discussion on the "greatest of men" referring to a legend now lost, where Hagbard is mentioned together with Haki's sons, who have not yet avenged their sisters by killing the evil Sigar (the feud with Sigar is still going on and Hagbard not yet hanged):

Karl Koch (hacker)

Karl Werner Lothar Koch (July 22, 1965 – ca. May 23, 1989) was a German hacker in the 1980s, who called himself "hagbard", after Hagbard Celine. He was involved in a Cold War computer espionage incident.

Biography

Koch was born in Hanover. As his moniker would suggest, he was heavily influenced by The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Besides adopting his pseudonym from a character in the book, he also named his computer "FUCKUP" ("First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic Ultra-Micro Programmer"), after a computer designed and built by that character.

Koch was loosely affiliated with the Chaos Computer Club. He worked with the hackers known as DOB (Dirk-Otto Brezinski), Pengo (Hans Heinrich Hübner), and Urmel (Markus Hess), and was involved in selling hacked information from United States military computers to the KGB. Clifford Stoll's book The Cuckoo's Egg gives a first-person account of the hunt and eventual identification of Hess. Pengo and Koch subsequently came forward and confessed to the authorities under the espionage amnesty, which protected them from being prosecuted.