Psifertex

username is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported

Easy, just follow this basic how to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lvweMBCqAs

I'm someone who likes playing with computers and making them do things they weren't supposed to do. People like me are called hackers and while some are bad people who try to steal things and break things, most are good people who like doing this sort of thing to help people.

For the rest, United Airlines wants to make their web sites secure so bad hackers can't attack it to steal things or break things. To do that, they offer good hackers miles (which can be used to fly places for free) as a reward for finding those problems and telling United about them. I found two problems, one was the most serious and could have allowed a bad guy to take over one of United's computers and do bad things to it. The other problem let me see more on the website than I was supposed to see.

To be fair, I scoped that as an explanation for my six-year old, so hopefully it's close enough to an Eli5. :-)

No. :-)

+1 for the Ferris Beuller reference.

I did start pretty young on computers but I got tech jobs too so I could afford a car.