Day -43 -- 12/22/2024 -- Washington, DC
I grew up in the 90s during the rise of the Internet, while having largely unsupervised access to it.
Instead of doing (any) homework, I spent my free time exploring. Some niche/fringe areas have since undergone great evolution and become part of the mainstream.
MUDs (like Ancient Anguish where I burned many dozens of hours) would get graphical interfaces and become World of Warcraft. ICQ mutated and iterated many times to become Messenger / WhatsApp. IRC has been replaced by centralized players like Discord.
What disappeared from the scene with all the smoothing of the edges is the ethos of the Hacker.
Hacking is of course more than just breaking computers systems.
Hacking is about curiosity, freedom and learning. It's finding the limits of what's possible and then exceeding it. Ultimately, hacking is creating.
Breaking things is frowned upon -- hackers called those people crackers.
There was only one quote on the wall of my teenage bedroom: "What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank?"
Setting information free was a cornerstone of hacker culture: phreaking sites described all the things one could do with a phone line, sites like astalavista.box.sk had guides for reverse engineering common security patterns and even hosted the Anarchist's Cookbook that detailed lots of dangerous recipes including making a bomb at home.
Instead of doing homework, I read tutorials from people with weird nicknames and before I knew I was running a kernel debugger and modifying assembly code at runtime. Sure, WinZip and mIRC were free to use, but mine were licensed to me, no credit cards or virus-laden keygen required.
Of course in the process, I broke many computers. The family computer became unusable at one point, which my mom handled more patiently than I ever would have. My own computer had to be completely reformatted and reset every couple of months...
And not all of the hacking energy was as pure as I'd like to remember -- here is the hacking manifesto, a very popular document of the time: https://phrack.org/issues/7/3
I just did some research on hacker culture and sites like this pop up: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/introduction.html. Unformatted, dense and hard to process. The opposite of user friendly. The lack of brand is the brand...
Where's hacker culture today? I can tell that much of the stuff produced by SF/SV has been influenced by it, but that's all several steps removed.
Where the source right now?
PS: Every post must have a song, this one is no different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewtewrjIPxU
I grew up in the 90s during the rise of the Internet, while having largely unsupervised access to it.
Instead of doing (any) homework, I spent my free time exploring. Some niche/fringe areas have since undergone great evolution and become part of the mainstream.
MUDs (like Ancient Anguish where I burned many dozens of hours) would get graphical interfaces and become World of Warcraft. ICQ mutated and iterated many times to become Messenger / WhatsApp. IRC has been replaced by centralized players like Discord.
What disappeared from the scene with all the smoothing of the edges is the ethos of the Hacker.
Hacking is of course more than just breaking computers systems.
Hacking is about curiosity, freedom and learning. It's finding the limits of what's possible and then exceeding it. Ultimately, hacking is creating.
Breaking things is frowned upon -- hackers called those people crackers.
There was only one quote on the wall of my teenage bedroom: "What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank?"
Setting information free was a cornerstone of hacker culture: phreaking sites described all the things one could do with a phone line, sites like astalavista.box.sk had guides for reverse engineering common security patterns and even hosted the Anarchist's Cookbook that detailed lots of dangerous recipes including making a bomb at home.
Instead of doing homework, I read tutorials from people with weird nicknames and before I knew I was running a kernel debugger and modifying assembly code at runtime. Sure, WinZip and mIRC were free to use, but mine were licensed to me, no credit cards or virus-laden keygen required.
Of course in the process, I broke many computers. The family computer became unusable at one point, which my mom handled more patiently than I ever would have. My own computer had to be completely reformatted and reset every couple of months...
And not all of the hacking energy was as pure as I'd like to remember -- here is the hacking manifesto, a very popular document of the time: https://phrack.org/issues/7/3
I just did some research on hacker culture and sites like this pop up: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/introduction.html. Unformatted, dense and hard to process. The opposite of user friendly. The lack of brand is the brand...
Where's hacker culture today? I can tell that much of the stuff produced by SF/SV has been influenced by it, but that's all several steps removed.
Where the source right now?
PS: Every post must have a song, this one is no different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewtewrjIPxU