This brings back memories. I remember first reading phrack on a BBS, dialing over and over again against the busy signal, trying to be the next lucky one to connect. Years later people would hand them out in cd-rom format at 2600 meetings.
The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
81–90 of 141 posts
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#82Hackers...the movie. "their only crime was curiosity". I suspect that line was lifted from this. As for the Manifesto itself, for the most part, looking back, this rings true. I was there... in the 80's...with colourful boxes, acoustic couplers, and pages and pages of phone numbers. I never had the sense of community this document describes...it seemed like a much more solitary pursuit, but you picked up things if yo…
> I was there... in the 80's...with colourful boxes, acoustic couplers, and pages and pages of phone numbers.
Good times. I still have my red box (modified radio shack tone dialer), although COCOTs have long-since gone the way of the dodo.
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#83> We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.
Anyone in the telecommunications industry care to speak to this? Because this guy sounds like a spoiled brat who doesn't realize that good things cost money.
He is talking about the pre-internet landline network, an international communications system that reached virtually everyone in both the biggest cities and the smallest towns, and was so reliable I was nearly twenty before I realized that dial tone wasn't always on if the bill was paid. That wasn't cheap; you needed thousands and thousands of line workers and engineers and administrators and customer service workers to make it all work. And you needed to raise billions of dollars to build the damn thing in the first place.
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe modern underground hackers are embracing racism and extremism. But think about the disconnect between the media's reporting of hackers and what hackers actually were even twenty years ago. A hacker is, according to the news, whatever makes society hate them more. I doubt anybody smart enough to break something miles away with just a keyboard is stupid enough to believe one race is more or less than another. Dis…
> I doubt anybody smart enough to break something miles away with just a keyboard is stupid enough to believe one race is more or less than another. Unfortunately there's a lot of evidence showing the contrary.
Since I'm not understanding the down votes, just to be clear: I'm talking that unfortunately, there seems to be people that are smart and yet still believe one race is more or less than another.
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#85And then decades later, those hackers built the infrastructure for systems of surveillance and control that would have just been a wet dream for those "1950's technobrains," and modern hackers embrace racism and extremism rather than transcending them, and complain that the internet liberating humanity from the shackles of corporate information and communication control has just caused the normies to ruin its quirky…
There are only two endgames for a subculture. Either it goes mainstream and loses everything that ever made it special, or it walls itself off from the mainstream and goes mad, like how the Students for a Democratic Society turned into the Weather Underground.
Hacker culture, and the internet in general, fragmented into two pieces, one that went each way. The distributed panopticon finds all signs of life and stifles it into generic corporatized beigeness. The only places outside its reach are full of fascists and other subhuman vermin.
I just feel like we've lost something we can never get back.
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#86And then decades later, those hackers built the infrastructure for systems of surveillance and control that would have just been a wet dream for those "1950's technobrains," and modern hackers embrace racism and extremism rather than transcending them, and complain that the internet liberating humanity from the shackles of corporate information and communication control has just caused the normies to ruin its quirky…
I'd agree that the hacker counter-culture that saw technology as a door to Freedom has largely fizzled out and been replaced by hackers who see technology as a path to money. But I cant think of any of the people who were pushing it and are still around today who sold out. Stallman is still a firebrand. I've been reading 2600 again and Emanuel Goldstein hasn't sold out. Who are you thinking of?
Stallman is a perfect example. He's one of the most obnoxious and disrespectful people on earth, not to mention a rape apologist, of course he should be expelled from society! And yet the very personality flaws that make him so utterly despicable were the same things that allowed him to accomplish what he did in the first place.
I'm glad that scum like him aren't allowed to have power anymore. And yet...and yet.
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
and a time where it meant a digital vandal over POTS lines; Well, those were "phreakers." In the 70's, "hacker" was a person who "hacked" out the credits from public domain software and put their own name in it for resale. And you bought it anyway because software was so hard to come by.
This is not something I have ever heard of; in the US in the early 1980s we shared software at user group meetings and in BBSes.
This was mostly before BBSing was a thing, but continued into the early 80's because not everyone could afford a modem and phone bill.
The real problem was access. There really were very few computer stores. I remember driving nearly an hour to get to one of the very few computer stores in northern New Jersey (Wayne Software).
The other option was to buy software from those tiny ads in the back of the computer magazines. Those were where you really got the "hacked" stuff. Sometimes you'd see an ad for the same program on multiple pages. And even though it was hacked, you still had to pay $99 for a very basic text editor.
Even blank floppy disks were hard to come by. I remember having to get floppy disks at the famous FAO Schwartz toy store in Manhattan because it was one of the few non-office supply houses that had them. I think they cost something like $5/piece ($15 in today's money).
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#88Related: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence Written by John Perry Barlow (of Grateful Dead fame and more)
We were more innocent at that time. I miss that.
They were good times. All the much better because we were convinced they would last.
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
and a time where it meant a digital vandal over POTS lines; Well, those were "phreakers." In the 70's, "hacker" was a person who "hacked" out the credits from public domain software and put their own name in it for resale. And you bought it anyway because software was so hard to come by.
This is not something I have ever heard of; in the US in the early 1980s we shared software at user group meetings and in BBSes.
Nostalgia for a simple time, but also a deep appreciation for how people managed to create software/OS with primitive hardware we had in the 80s. Respect.
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd agree that the hacker counter-culture that saw technology as a door to Freedom has largely fizzled out and been replaced by hackers who see technology as a path to money. But I cant think of any of the people who were pushing it and are still around today who sold out. Stallman is still a firebrand. I've been reading 2600 again and Emanuel Goldstein hasn't sold out. Who are you thinking of?
Stallman is a perfect example. He's one of the most obnoxious and disrespectful people on earth, not to mention a rape apologist, of course he should be expelled from society! And yet the very personality flaws that make him so utterly despicable were the same things that allowed him to accomplish what he did in the first place. I'm glad that scum like him aren't allowed to have power anymore. And yet...and yet.
>And yet the very personality flaws that make him so utterly despicable were the same things that allowed him to accomplish what he did in the first place.
And yet those personality flaws wound up being the reason he is no longer president of the FSF or on the MIT board of directors.
Being obnoxious, disrespectful and a rape apologist didn't help him accomplish anything in regards to free software. He succeeded despite those personality flaws, because the community around him enabled him, and many would (and have) argued that he has held the progress of the movement back.
>I'm glad that scum like him aren't allowed to have power anymore. And yet...and yet.
Being an asshole doesn't make you a good leader or effective communicator. I feel like this is some weird cargo-cult belief that's entered the community because of people like Stallman, Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs. We don't have to give scum like him power, we choose to, because for some reason we consider giving in to empathy and tolerance to be a form of weakness.