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The Fall of Hacking

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Re: The Fall of Hacking

#61

Post by philwelch »

spc476 wrote: post #54
pj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually have a lot more respect for people who come here and type their heart out in the open for no other reason than bringing in content and sharing their ideas. Getting a blog is lame compared to that. You get a blog to get ads and attention and a following. On the contrary, noname123, came here, created an account, and wrote his/her heart out for nothing. Expecting nothing, wanting nothing except to be honest…

Kids today, no sense of history. The hacking scene was dead by September 1981. Oddly enough, it was marked as dead, again, in February of 1990. The last time the hacking scene was declared dead was April of 2000. We probably have a few months before this hacker scene is also declared dead.

Some more details would make this post informative rather than simply an arcane inside reference.

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#62

Post by quizzical »

Fonzie jumped the shark because the show was running out of ideas. We won't ever be out of ideas for software.

Sure, at work I dig around lots of legacy stuff and stitch it together. But it never feels assembly line to me even when I'm not thrilled about a specific task. I'm always solving the most important problem of the moment and trying to think about the best way to do it (in terms of balancing time, knowledge, clarity, efficiency, etc...).

Only in the last few years I've seen some of the best software I've ever encountered. Ableton Live is unbelievably insanely great. Max/Msp/Jitter is an inspiring playground I could stay in forever. There is some great hacking out there and plenty of culture to support it.

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#63

Post by mkyc »

kragen wrote: post #44

People who got their internet access by credit card fraud were never hackers in the first place. They were just cheats and wannabe hackers. Drama and marginal status doesn't make you a hacker. It just makes you a social outcast. It's true that there are lots of wannabes today, too — more than ever before, now that the richest man in the world got that way by writing a BASIC interpreter, now that Sergey and Larry get…

It's not about the effects, it's about the drive and the feel. A new place, alien and exciting, and you knew, you suspected, you had no idea what could happen there. The things you did, the community you found, all very pure, like thinking code for three days straight. You'd cut your identity down to six characters or so. You could earn your stay, picking off a national company, with the cheapest of your tools. It's not about the effects, yet now you look back and see a petty thief.

Now, the land is settled, everyone and their grandchildren are here, skyscrapers everywhere. You talk to everyone here, you talk business. You use your name - why wouldn't you? Once almost everywhere had the feel. Now, we look for its analogue in dead musicians, business, pleasure - dressed in not-suits, slurping whole-grain ramen, in our exclusive club, HN, no memes allowed.

Like noname123, I'm not sure if I'm doing justice. I think my point is that it's not about what people accomplish. Great and not-so-great people have been doing amazing things for a while now. Once, though, there was a place that seemed to force you to drop that extra crap - your name, your latest grab for cash, your ego. Usenet before the Eternal September, programming before dot-com, the internet before social networking. Now everyone's here, no effort, no stigma, business as usual.

It's not our fault, we didn't mess this up. It's just what happens, after a while. That frontier feel isn't dead though - it's just waiting for us to start going up into space, filtering reality through wearables, hooking circuits into our heads.

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#64

Post by fauigerzigerk »

noname123 wrote: post #48
BrentRitterbeck wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this line hundreds of times before. Hacking is not dead. Something can't be killed if you have the ability to turn on your computer and start doing right away. If you are concerned about whether hacking is alive or dead, perhaps you should fire up your computer and bring it back to life. It's that simple.

I agree with you completely and my writing was (intentionally) too liberal artsy; so let me put on my technical hat and level with you why hacking is no longer subversive. 1) Growing Complexity of Software Projects : in some sense, it's not about computer programmers "selling out." Because in both FOSS and enterprise software, the code-base has usually third-party dozens if not more dependencies. Writing software is…

I disagree with your points 1 and 2.

Complexity of enterprise software engineering has grown, but you're making the wrong comparison as the hackers of the 1990s or 80s didn't work on anything remotely enterprisy. The effect you can have today as an individual hacker is greater than in the 80s or 90s, not smaller, simply because there are more programmable things in the world.

You're complaining about commercialization and you're making the assumption that artists and other people driven only by intrinsic values never wasted a thought on how to sell things. Historically, I think, that's not true, but I do get your point that commercial interests were certainly not the primary motivator. I think that still holds for most hackers today. Just look at all those "my 10 biggest startup mistakes" lists. Many of those mistakes stem from following technical interests instead of commercial logic.

I agree with your third point. There is a huge stinking excuse for hackers working on trivial boring things like Facebook or Twitter. That excuse is scalability. Yes scalability causes complex problems and solving them is difficult. BUT solving interesting problems comes with even greater scalability issues. Solving a difficult problem AND making it scale is worth much more in a technical as well as in a commercial sense.

I'm not saying Facebook or Twitter are useless. Apparently many people have fun using them. But making something like that is not hacking. Just look at the technologies and approaches they used in the beginning and you know that solving interesting technology problems surely was not the original motivation.

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#66

Post by loup-vaillant »

vaksel wrote: post #58
kragen wrote: post #44

People who got their internet access by credit card fraud were never hackers in the first place. They were just cheats and wannabe hackers. Drama and marginal status doesn't make you a hacker. It just makes you a social outcast. It's true that there are lots of wannabes today, too — more than ever before, now that the richest man in the world got that way by writing a BASIC interpreter, now that Sergey and Larry get…

Yeah real hacking is still around, just take a look at any torrent tracker to find pretty much any app/game hacked. Or better yet how about all those security breaches at Pentagon and NASA. The reason you don't see "real" hackers hacking, is because they aren't eager to have public identities, since they don't feel like getting arrested/sued into oblivion.

Err, isn't there a little confusion between hacker and cracker here?

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#67

Post by erikb85 »

Yeah, yeah... In the past everything was better. The trees where more green, the summers where more sunny. Even the women looked better in the 90s. I am sure you had more hair in the 90s (or from personally guessing your age, maybe you have more hair now. Congratulations!)

What I want to say? Every generation wants a "new thing". And if the "new thing" from 20 years ago would be the "new thing" from today, it would not be the ->new<- thing, right? Be assured, that the new generations can have the same happy time you had, but with their own "new thing" and because it is theirs.

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#68

Post by spc476 »

philwelch wrote: post #61
spc476 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids today, no sense of history. The hacking scene was dead by September 1981. Oddly enough, it was marked as dead, again, in February of 1990. The last time the hacking scene was declared dead was April of 2000. We probably have a few months before this hacker scene is also declared dead.

Some more details would make this post informative rather than simply an arcane inside reference.

August, 1981---IBM releases the first IBM PC, legitimizing home computers and killing of a ton of quirky home computers over the next few years. The Homebrew Computer Club was pretty much over at this point in time anyway.

January, 1990---Operation Sun Devil goes down, where the Secret Service arrest a bunch of teenagers who have illegally accessed computers and charged with disseminating internal AT&T documents describing how 911 works. The era of the 80s "hackers" ended.

March 2000---the tech stock market crases. The Internet craze pretty much tanked at this point.

None of this is anything I consider "arcane inside references" but hey, I'm into computer history.

Re: The Fall of Hacking

#70

Post by shykes »

I wouldn't worry too much about the future of hacking. As an example, HAR 2009 is going on right now. Take a look at the program:

https://har2009.org/program/events.en.html

I've been to the previous edition and let me tell you, there's plenty of tinkering and subverting going on in there.

Here's a selection: "Eyeborg project", "Protheses for $50 instead of $250.000", "Electrical enginering with free/libre open source software", "DNS Security In The Broadest Sense", "A workshop on the ethics of piracy"

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