I've been following "the scene" for nearly 20 years now. It's not smaller or less influential, it's just different. It feels A LOT more dangerous now to be out there doing anything that might be construed as hacking. All of the crazy prosecutions, the "war on terror", and the NSA? Are you kidding? The stakes are way higher now. Sure there have always been dangers but not like now. It's no wonder that people are hiding from the surveillance state. I know this post has a tin foil hat feel but it just seems a lot harder to trust that other end of the wire now. Anon has had every bit as much influence on the wider world as any group I can remember.
I think if anything it's more like the 80s, but with more cash. You have to watch your ass more now, but there's more monetary incentive on top of the thrill of scoring some ingenious root. Of course anonymous has had a big influence; they're the biggest cyber-griefing collective in history. But to me it seems like you can still do whatever you want and not worry as long as you don't hit any .govs or extort/embarrass big corporations.
Remember that historically almost all of the people who get caught get ratted out by their friends. If you work by yourself, or at least just don't tell your friends too many details and don't be an arrogant loud-mouth to strangers, there's very little the feds can do. The sheer waterfall of data they have to sift through just to find your weird custom backdoor makes it impossible to investigate every attack. As long as it doesn't effect their bottom line, who cares?
(Also, seriously, the NSA? They have nothing to do with domestic hackers. They'd maybe use you as a pawn to draw out foreign islamic hackers or something, but then throw you to the FBI to get Mitnick'd in prison)
It's not "tin foil hat", it is circumspection based on public reports about what the NSA, etc., does. But I am with you. There is shit we used to do in the 80's that I would never even dream about doing today.
Other than something like blue box, what would be one such thing? If anything things are away too tame now. I think of is something like CarShark that isn't publicly released.
Most states have local ordinances against dumpster diving and cops have been known to arrest and fine people since they assume people are trying to get information for identity theft.
Back in the day, hacking university systems was generally frowned upon, but never really punished. Today, it's a federal offense to tamper with university systems. See Aaron Schwartz case.
Back when analog cell phones were out, you could program your Motorola cell phone to be a scanner and pick up conversations people were having in your area. Safe harmless fun. You could also clone your analog phone as well because of a loop hole in FCC laws. Now, it's still possible to do on GSM systems, but you run the risk of getting caught and cloning GSM devices is federal offense with hefty jail sentences attached.
Back in the day, you could hack your cable box so you could get all the premium channels for free. Cable companies half heartedly tried to track down people who used them, but it was pretty low on their radar. Try that today and within hours, the feds will most likely be on your doorstep asking why you were tampering with private property and the cable company will most likely file a lawsuit against you.
Times have changed man. The 80's and 90's were like the last frontier, until the feds jumped in and started creating laws to really hamper people from pushing the boundaries. Hacking went from really fun, and having inside knowledge to everything you considered doing you had to think about the possibility of doing hard time and dealing with prosecutors with a hard on to convict hackers and send them to jail for long periods of time.
I guess I'll play devils advocate. All of the things you mention should have been (or were) illegal at the time, but the technology was ahead of the law.
>you could program your Motorola cell phone to be a scanner and pick up conversations people were having in your area. Safe harmless fun.
Maybe for some people it was harmless fun, but what about the people who did this as a form of espionage? Or any criminal?
>Back in the day, you could hack your cable box so you could get all the premium channels for free.
Illegal then, but now the technology and laws have caught up so that finding the people that do this is trivial.
>The 80's and 90's were like the last frontier, until the feds jumped in and started creating laws to really hamper people from pushing the boundaries.
Curious why you think this is. Do you think people really aren't pushing the boundaries today like they did back then?
>>>> Curious why you think this is. Do you think people really aren't pushing the boundaries today like they did back then?
Not at all. The law hasn't just caught up, it's like a boot on the throat of the people trying to push existing technologies to new places and uses.
Just take GeoHot. Guy jailbreaks the PS3 and all hell breaks loose. Sony says they're going to patch the way he broke into the system. Then GeoHot says he's writing firmware to go around that. Then Sony sues him, then Sony wanted all the users who watched his videos on YouTube. Then Sony finally settled out of court after he agreed not to hack any more Sony products.
All this because he wanted to run some custom software on his PS3.
There are definitely people out there seriously pushing the hacking boundaries, but my point was the consequences have gotten way out of hand. When I hacked the university email system in 97', I got my network privileges revoked for a year. What do you think the punishment would be nowadays?
You're just not able to hack for fun anymore since anything you do could be construed as a crime, and a serious one at that. Even a guy using his neighbors wireless service is now a federal crime.
Another factor is that if you do get into illegal hacking, you're jumping in a pool that now contains a lot less kids who are learning and explorers and a lot more real criminals. Hacking (sense 2, the illegal-stuff sense) is a lot darker and more money-driven these days.
In my opinion it's too much "american" media and societys individualistic culture that has spread like a disease on the internet and kind of destroyed much of the original 90s internet culture. And thereby also the safehaven for the hacker people. The one place where many people felt at home has been stripped from them though this "capitalization" of the internet in my opinion. I loved playing around with the net before it got big. Remembering the times I played age of empires with random Chinese ppl and build websites with html where i uploaded my favorite games for people to download (had almost 1000 downloads at one of my sites!) or when I "hacked" games by alternating attributes in their config files and posted results on various forums... This was when the net was free and interesting today most of the landscape is dominated by commercials and Hollywood/media brainwashing.
I think that you are absolutely right that the web has changed, but I think that it's pretty easy and cliche to blame 'Murican media on it. It's inevitable that things like the internet are going change for a multitude of different reasons - to blame any one seems shortsighted. People were making the same claims about Endless September and the AOL invasions; but the internet adapted and became something else. In one case, it turned into the internet you remember as the "original".
The internet has changed, but to try to make a claim that there ever was an "original internet culture" is to miss what the internet is and always has been, an amorphous mass of people, constantly changing and evolving into something else based on the technologies available to it.
I loved the net of the 90's and even the early 2000's as well, and I miss it and remember it fondly. But to try to say that it was the original internet; you might as well just be yelling "Get off my lawn". And even then, the BBS folks might want a word with you.
Well yes I realize that you cannot blame america for capitalism, capitalism didn't even originate in america. It has been around for several centuries.
However the output of the american media in the 2000s and 2010s, a media that is heavily influenced by capitalism has definitely shaped the internet and the worldly culture into its current form.
The internet is an amorphous mass of people, yes. But in the earlier days not everyone participated like you are "programmed" to do in our current society. Comparisons could be made with the early aviators or sailors, it is true that these things existed and were new in their relative eras and that everybody knew about them. But that doesn't mean everybody felt the need to explore these technologies. So, as the type of people changes that usually uses the internet, (from students, software people and mostly male teenagers that have an urge to explore it, to more corporate people and just about anybody) the content also naturally changed and the mental/emotinal rewards those original people once got when they visited 'teh intehrnetz' are not the same as they once were.
Look at a game like Utopia for example (you know the old browser based strategy game that was created by mehul). It was all about calculations and working in synergy with other people from all over the world (also somewhat about backstabbing, abusing and hacking of course). It was one of the bigger online browser games there was back then. If you compare to current online games like farmville and candycrush it's nothing the same and the types of people are nothing the same, why? Because it was different sorts of people that usually browsed the web back then. So yes, there was and has always been an original culture online that has gradually been merged with the mainstream people which has evolved internet into its' present form, and I don't disagree or agree with that, I just state it as a fact.
> Look at a game like Utopia for example (you know the old browser based strategy game that was created by mehul). It was all about calculations and working in synergy with other people from all over the world (also somewhat about backstabbing, abusing and hacking of course). It was one of the bigger online browser games there was back then. If you compare to current online games like farmville and candycrush it's nothing the same and the types of people are nothing the same, why? Because it was different sorts of people that usually browsed the web back then. So yes, there was and has always been an original culture online that has gradually been merged with the mainstream people which has evolved internet into its' present form, and I don't disagree or agree with that, I just state it as a fact.
Have you never seen Eve Online? There's as much calculation and cooperation and backstabbing as in anything I've seen, it's just prettier now. And if subscribing to a game isn't your thing, there are a lot of deep web-based strategy games out there. Picking shit like candycrush is disingenuous; I could just as easily say that the early Web was useless because it had so many shitty Pokemon fan pages.
Well sure but it the net was definitely more oriented to ppl that was into hacking / coding back then compared to now. Mainstream wasn't the net back then.
I think that the "hacker" ideal permeated American media, rather than the other way around, with everything from books to movies (Matrix, Hackers, etc). It became something that was not limited to the intellectual elite anymore.
Oddly enough, this is exactly how a 1940's Superman radio program is attributed for being a major player in bringing down the Klu Klux Klan. They would air the KKK secret codes as part of the kids program, and it took away part of the "exclusiveness" of the KKK community.
Sadly this latest Phrack post reads as lucid as the methamphetamine inspired posts lately on cpunks.org. Phrack what happened man, you used to be cool.
The real reason that there is no more "hacking scene" is simply availability.
Back in the baud days, most BBS hacking was to get into well connected boards and from there get connected to the internet. As most people now virtually have always-on Internet, the value of stealing a connection has vanished.
Another example of availability killing a scene (well, almost dead) is the once-thriving phreaking scene. Groups were dedicated to discovering and sharing the latest info on how to get free phone calls. As the cost of a phone call got cheaper and cheaper, the value of free phone calls also vanished. Who likes jail time anyway? Take Skype for instance... Instant and virtually free international calls. Why would I bother diving into a pit in the cold when it's totally legal AND free!
I would compare the various scenes to ham radio. It's still a thing even though technology has replaced it multiple times over, but the hard cores will still be enthusiastic as ever.
Edit: The Phrack paper being "released" via the Full Disclosure list earlier today was a nice touch.
> Back in the baud days, most BBS hacking was to get into well connected boards and from there get connected to the internet.
I'm not sure what you mean. Free dialup internet access used to be trivial. You could put fake bank account or credit card numbers into services like AOL and get free accounts that lasted days or weeks. Many local dialup ISPs just mailed you a monthly bill. All you had to do was put in someone else's contact info and bam, instant free account.
Not where I was from. Even when Australia only had a hand full of dialup ISPs, they cracked down pretty fast on generated cards. At one point, a close friend got a knock at the door and a suspended sentence.
I think this kind of attitude is exactly what the OP denounces. Community are not driven by a need to acquire something (information, or whatever you consider to be "available") but by kindred minds coming together and working on fun stuff.
It depends on motivation. I know that the local demo scene is very alive and kicking... but to bring it back to my "availability" reasoning, they are mostly "int 10h" guys or C64 hackers even though we have the availability of OpenGL/WebGL. Like I said, the hard cores will always be there despite generational technology improvements.
I was involved in this "scene" in the late 80s/early 90s. If I were the same age I was then today, I doubt very much I'd have gone down the same route because of how much the world has changed.
Back then I was using a Commodore 64 hooked up to a tv with a modem (starting at 300 baud and moving up from there); hacking (in the phrack sense) and "phreaking" allowed me to access a much wider world of information and computer resources than I otherwise would have had. Access to "real" computers that can run C compilers! Access to instant communications with people around the world!
These days this sort of thing is no big deal; you can buy a veritable super computer for less than a hundred bucks and run a free OS on it with a full developer ecosystem, worldwide calling is essentially free, the modern Internet gives you access to more free information than anyone could possible consume. But back then, as a 12-18 year old (without parents who worked in CompSci academia or such) all of that was unattainable by legal means, thus the hacking.
The "groups" for me were a secondary thing and a means to share knowledge (again, prior to the web and easy access to ridiculous amounts of information) and they aren't really needed anymore for my personal use case (though I'm not suggesting mine is the only use case, I know a lot of people who were certainly more into it for the social aspects, which still exist today).
I think this is one of the more important points. Most of what we were doing back then is now easily done by everyone.
We dropped trunks to get free conference lines so we could all be on the phone together. We scammed the phone companies for free long distance to talk to each other. We had private BBSs. All of that has been suplanted with every day tech and done better.
We cracked programs because we were young and couldn't afford software. You had to know someone, be in the scene, to get access to that stuff. Now there are thousands of websites.
All the really postive stuff is out there for everyone. It's the dark hacking that is thriving and I am not surprised it is not out in the open. But I am certain it is there... they just don't want the publicity. We used to do it for the thrill... they do it for the cash.
Although hacktivism is new. We were to busy trying to figure out how it worked to make any real statements.
> The "groups" for me were a secondary thing and a means to share knowledge
I think this is the key point. For those that grew up with computers before modems became popular in early 90's, your best option to have access to information was to meet folks with similar interests and find your nearest computer club.
I remember Phrack from those early days, with the editions being passed in 5 1/4 diskettes. Nice to see that it is still alive.
This article is a perfect example of how Phrack died years ago. I'm pretty sure this was penned by a 16 year old as a homework assignment for english class. The rank wind of my farts produces more inspired thought than this ridiculously short, purposeless, rambling piece of pseudo-anarchistic crap.
+1 for trolling/flaming (simply not enough of it left on the internet) but I dont agree. it's propoganda but I welcome this and all forms of ranting and propoganda. agitation can lead to discussion.
I don't agree with the thesis here. As somebody whose day job involves tracking "hacker groups" in the adversarial sense and whose hobbies largely involve belonging to "hacker groups" in the doing-cool-shit sense, I feel like there's an assertion with precisely no evidence to support it.
Also, statements like "We live in days of limited creativity" strike me as extreme nostalgia and conservatism. We live in days of INCREDIBLE creativity, in my view.
I think the point is that these days we live in an era of abstractions over abstractions which are all very well documented and ever-changing. There are not hundreds of them, but thousands. There's no way to actually push the boundaries here, and even if it is, nobody cares to do so. There's no "scene". You get a few +1's or Likes in social media and that's all. Fuck that. That's no collective.
If somebody's view of how to communicate and work with others is restricted to Google+ and FB and Twitter, then that's their own lack of creativity showing, I think.
What else have you got, really? Hackerspaces and Github don't count. IRC is dead for the most part. Some ezines seem to struggle along with a few mailing lists, but that's it. Most active members in these "underground" cultures(e.g. demoscene and vx scene) are old ones from the dawn of time, some newbies come and go but hardly any stick. These communities have been shrinking for the past 15 years or so.
Or am I really missing something? I really think there was so much more low-hanging fruit to grab back in late 80's and early 90's and the computing culture back then thrived around doing just that. Now the whole "computing culture" seems to be about node.js and MongoDB or what have you. That's a fucking disgrace.
Hm, what does it say about the Hacker News community that the topic of a replacement for "Comic Sans" attracts way more discussion than the issues rised in this quite interesting paper?
Seems to be a case of Parkinson's law of triviality going on here.
Agreed, never the less the topic is interesting, and the development of groups, organisations and their history is surly an issue that is worth discussing even for readers of hacker news.
Also I am quite sure that there is some overlap going on between "these" hacker communities and the hacker news community.
Also I am quite sure that there is some overlap going on between "these" hacker communities and the hacker news community.
Not significantly, I think. The old-school hacker communities arose as a reaction to the large-scale centralization of technology in the form of the phone companies, IBM, and so on; corporate and government infrastructure was a playground for phone phreaks and hackers who passed around, in grimy photocopied 'zines and text files, skeleton keys to get access to a forbidden realm that was otherwise completely inaccessible. Going back to the '70s, hacking was a way -- at least as the hackers themselves saw it -- to empower people to enter a world that was otherwise reserved for giant bureaucracies.
In a world of iPhones and $5 Digital Ocean droplets, the thrill comes from creation, not access. These days, black-hat hackers are professional criminals running electronic short-cons, and "hacker communities" are usually developing-world mafias; they're not (at the risk of romanticizing the way the world used to be) the harmless dialup daytrippers of legend. The lineal descendants of hackers like Cap'n Crunch or the Mentor aren't running botnets; they're building new technologies that are going to keep empowering us.
Exactly. There's so much work for people with those kinds of skills in the US and Europe that the "dialup daytrippers" end up in the corporate world right out of college. Even people who participate in illegal activities often have day jobs where they do white hat things.
Completely misses the point. Hacker groups died because the information they had got distributed to the web.
Wind back the clock to 1984. How do you learn to program a Macintosh? Some small circulation magazines (books were rare--there is a reason O'Reilly became such a phenomenon), a local users group (if you were amazingly lucky and lived in SF, LA or San Diego), or a hacker group.
How would your learn it now? The web. You don't need a hacker group. Or books. Or magazines.
It's gotta be one of the best things I've ever read.
>Instead of reaching for the fellow man, we want to set ourselves apart, andthus, remarkable.
So true.
>Modern life nearly conspires against the collective. We are tormented by a relentless flow of information as well as the daily worries of an eternally insecure, unwarranted life.
Hackers in the west, of any hat-shade, are jaded and cynical now, having been through 20+ years of watching (especially in the US) the responses change exponentially.
In the east, from Sudan, through the middle east, to India, you see a lot of the same behavior as was here in the 90s, which the older crowd in the USA or Europe have moved past, everything from being super psyched about being on Microsoft/Googles security help lists, to having names with more numbers in than my model datasets.
The environment here has moved on, in some ways, become more business oriented, and "professional" whereas in the those countries, it is still all fresh and exciting and new, without the governmental and corporate behavior we have all come to know and love in the USA and to a lesser extent, Europe.
isn't if funny how PG bridges the gap between true hackerdom and pure commercialism/capitalism? I too want to be a ruling VC /ruling hacker when I grow up
Thanks for sharing the youtube link. This is the most (only?) interesting interview of PG I ever watched. It feels way more closer to the PG who wrote the Lisp- and hackers-related essays (or those in Hackers and Painters) than the PG who is responsible for YC Startups. As you say, it's funny how it is the same person :).
I myself feel ashamed that I have stopped reading phrack at all. Sure enough, I've forgotten about it in the race to "keep up" as described in the article. It is, in essence, the original Hacker News. Time to re-evaluate...
First, I found that there are some true gems in the article and feel it is worth reading. But here is my contribution to discussion through some criticism.
In effect, hacking has arguably grown. Hacker communities,
definitely not. So what went wrong?
I assume an American wrote this and I am wondering if the above is not a mostly US American problem. Of course what is a problem for the US becomes a problem for everyone else eventually in one way or another but at the moment... EU hacker communities are more fluid and inclusive of youth and counter-political cultures. And more often than not the Tenured hackers stick around to work with and collaborate with the new and younger. Though they have plenty of problems I don't think lack of growth is one of them. There are some more inclusive hacker spaces in the US but most of the tenured and serious US hackers went commercial and stayed that way.
In the US context I agree with all the statements. Much also applies to the entire community as a whole. But what is missing is this: the community is just getting old. It is now coming into contact with what happens to any new field of discovery or thought: tenure and structure. It's a problem with memory in general. As it is created there becomes an assumption that one should reference it. This field has history now and those that come along will be forced to consider it just as someone who studies photography has to think about Atget. This requirement adds latency that naturally changes the makeup of the field.
It is important to note that our capitalist worries are
more deeply rooted in us than might seem at first, even
in the most politically diverse people. Supporting oneself
is not easy, it does not come for free. Getting some
education, finding a job, staying up-to-date... regardless
of what your aspirations are, whatever you feel obliged to
do is probably a lot, already. And it likely involves a
prevalence of "minding your own business".
Much of the article has to do with productivity issues. This is not unique to our field except that once upon a time the median age of the field was a teenager with lots of energy and time and now median age is older. It is true that the grind of day to day in societies like the US that hold capitalism as God makes it harder for one to have time for much else than survival. But 1. this isn't the case everywhere yet. Just see some of the newer capitalistic societies in the EU that have not yet shed every part of socialist history just yet. (ahem, Berlin!). 2. One should also consider that we are just getting old. Want to solve these problems, be less freaking proud, more inclusive and bring in youth. It's the same for every field. The article perhaps says the same thing but better:
If our thoughts on creating hacker groups were to be
summarised, this is how they would look: No one ever
feels like we do. They are not to be trusted and we do
not have the time for them. The only attitude consonant
to our search for a comfortable, safe life is to constrain
ourselves to our own limitations, ignore the intelligent
life out there, and surrender to the mediocracy that our
society has condemned our leisure time to.
Side note: these problems might relate to the fields chauvinism problem. from my experience women are twice as likely to be inclusive in this field. there could be many reasons for this but it's worth considering that the inclusive problem and lack of trust actually may be related to the male chauvinism issue.
Finally, that Anonymous and these types of communities will not have as much impact as l0pht, mod, lod, others... is seriously debatable!
This article discusses why recently we do not see many
hacker groups anymore, and why the ones we do, such as
Anonymous and its satellite efforts, do not succeed in
having the same cultural impact as their forefathers.
Most of the older groups such as l0pht spent their time saying XYZ company sucks because their developers missed a bug in a product. Whereas anonymous spends its time saying XYZ Gov/Inc/Policy sucks and we should riot. Which one do you think should have more impact?
Well said. It is always interesting to watch hackers age. When I read the article I felt that much of the angst was pining for the "old days" when things were better. But reminiscing always gets it wrong :-).
That said, I've been wondering of late about hacker spaces. I've been a member of Hacker Dojo now (Mountain View CA) for about 6 months and by and large when I am there it has a lot of people hanging out on the free WiFi and perhaps hacking but not a lot of interacting except with perhaps 1 or 2 close associates nearby. But in part it seems to have no purpose as hacking has had in the past. I'm trying to come up with ideas to change that.
I know that sounds like a tautology, but bear with me. Without a project to rally behind, no one is going to automatically form little collectives and bang out cool stuff.
Things are either driven by one person or they are driven by multiple people after one person convinces them to participate and cajoles them into action. Someone, somewhere, has to provide the projects and the purpose. They then have to relentlessly follow through.
Hacker spaces have definitely changed. In the 90s the one here was a crazy 24hr party, it's entire membership was anarchists with zero regard for laws which they considered only existed to control information. Somehow I managed amazing productivity yet was largely high out of my gourd with Skinny Puppy blasting in the background almost constantly. Everything was surprisingly well organized, we would all decide on something like we need 60 handsets to try to clone and we'd accomplish that by the end of the day. We need to code our own STS-like dialup chat board because we're not paying for a license. 25 of us would work on that until 6:00am the next morning and it'd be done even with the craziest of distractions going on, such as around 11pm a steady stream of local misfits would come in as we'd converted it into an all ages boozecan and defacto nightclub with a stupid amount of lights rigged up that were in hindsight absolutely frightening considering the terribad wiring job we hacked together. It looked like the video from Front242 - Operating Tracks but with more eye searing strobe lights.
Now the hacker space I go to is largely populated with professional developers and students so gone is the raging music, the drugs, the anarchy/activism, the close-knit community, the epic amount of crime and nobody knows each other. There's less women too, in the 90s I would say it was half and half with many girls actively participating. I can count on one hand the amount of female hackers I've seen at the new space. Even though our old space was drug fueled insanity more work seemed to get done. No group projects going on anymore, there's a few but it's usually something like making your bike glow in the dark and not hacking software just for the sake of hacking. Doesn't help that none of us have any spare time either, we are all too busy in careers/school to afford an all nighter hack session like back in the day. Barely any of us can even manage to coordinate a time when everybody can be in the same room for 5 mins for a meeting let alone work on any projects.
Interesting observation. I was a member of Hacker Dojo but let my membership lapse because I simply wasn't going there often enough; I still do pop in a couple times a month to use it as a coworking space (paying for the $10/day wifi access, not the free one) but I can't quite tell what I get out of it.
Then again, I'm not sure what I expect to get out of it, nor what I really should be putting into it. There don't seem to be many opportunities to strike up conversations but it's possible (probable) I'm being too passive in seeking them out.
If I had a few million to spare, I'd support individual hackers and collectives as well. Because we need people that aren't under the pressure to deliver something for profit.
Does the thesis hold? It seems to me there are more hackers labs than before. Also they don't convey exactly the same spirit they are still from the same vein, no?
I think people are still learning, exploring together, and sharing code. But I think the arena has changed. It used to be local + irc, now it is (I guess) local + something not irc. It really doesn't matter for a small group how you communicate -- it could be sms, email, some-web-app-chat-thingy ... I of course have a moral issue with anything that isn't open, like email, usenet and irc -- but that doesn't matter, because I'm not 14 and part of whatever is emerging next.
While I'd hope the coming generation read some of the old phrack articles -- why would they bother to keep up with the new phrack? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see vibrant phrack magazine -- but we can't really expect the coming generation (as a whole) to use what is now some ancient 'zine.
I think hacking has always been by nature a secret art. It started in a grey area, and as legislation caught up became ever more black. Now, you could presumably find yourself held forever in a dark hole accursed of "cyber terrorism" because some twat admin didn't disable telnet or dialup acces on your local nuclear plant.
To me it seems pretty obvious that hoping for any progress of the art in the open is a vain hope at this point. We've made it impossible. More power to the criminal organizations that have enough foresight to value talent when they come across it -- no matter if they pay in dope, girls[or: boys -- I guess I'm more caught up in old stereotypes than I'd like (even if they might've been wrong forever)], alcohol or cash.
I loved the early internet, IRC, newsgroups etc. The really old school phreakers even before that was also a different time. Back then you could do stuff like that and go on to start companies like Apple (Woz). Now, you'll end up in a solitary confined cell or have to join the FBI/NSA if you are caught.
Hacker groups aren't as tied to freedom as it used to feel.
Why the elite hacker scene has pretty much disappeared is something I have thought about over the past decade as well. I know many people from the groups he mentioned in the beginning - mostly the American ones, but also some European, Australian etc. ones as well.
Ultimately success is what killed it off I'd say. I recognize some HN names as people who were actively, or at least peripherally involved in the scene, hanging out on EFnet's +hack and then #hack etc. Many of these people went into dot-coms and startups from the mid-1990s on. Some sold their companies for billions of dollars, many got tens of millions of VC dollars, or stock options, or buyout dollars, or whatnot. As someone mentioned in the thread for this post, Mudge became a program manager at DARPA - some people went into the security field, and thrived.
Aside from the financial/career success of the dot-com boom, the growth of the Internet helped kill it off as well. Prior to the Internet, a very technical working class kid would take his Commodore 64 hooked up to the family TV, plug it into his POTS phone line with his 300 (then 1200, then 2400...) baud modem, and call a Bulletin Board Service, which inevitably was a Commodore 64 or Apple ][ belonging to another technical teenager, whose class background might be slightly tonier as he often had a dedicated phone line in his room.
So what kind of social structures evolve when the kind of kids who gather on 4chan today get together on this network of Commodore 64's that are fairly independent of everyone else? One thing is for sure, to take a page from this fellow's essay, all of the rules and structures that make up American society with its class structures and relations, large international military and police force and so forth go out the window. If the kids want access to a Cray, they're going to get access to a Cray. They don't care if it's used for some secret DoD research project, or some Goldman Sachs number crunching. These were the days when your local Bell switch might be on a dialup, when a tone-generating blue box could seize hold of the telephone company's in-band signalling.
So some of this fits into what the essay writer says. We had our own communication network, a kind of 4chan'ish network of Commodores and Apple ]['s in teenage boys bedrooms across America. We controlled it. When the Internet came, we shifted to that, but our communication network became controlled by DARPA, then the NSF, then a variety of corporations, which were then whittled down to a handful - AT&T, Verizon, Centurylink, Sprint, Comcast, Time-Warner and several more. The network became corporatized, firewalled, censored, monitored, spammed and spam-resisted etc. Under the threat of spam, attorney generals and corporate control tightening, Usenet effectively disappeared. The disappearance of Usenet is tied to the disappearance of the hacker scene. The same forces which killed Usenet are the forces which killed the scene. Understand why Usenet died and you understand why the scene died.
The carrot is what killed it, not the stick. In 1990 Operation Sundevil happened, the MoD guys were arrested etc. Repression didn't really kill things, it just made people a little more careful. Maybe the arrested guys would quit, but everyone else just started buying early cell phones and such to hack outside their house.
The Internet killed it. It swallowed up the need for a network of BBS's in boy's bedrooms. It swallowed its own Usenet via monopolization, shady corporations doing spam, attorney generals and such. It also started a dot-com boom and then social boom and now mobile/cloud boom. A teenage boy can publish a traction-getting app or website for next to nothing in a way that could never have happened back then. Some of the scene people from the 1980s and 1990s are very, very wealthy Tesla-owning retired founder dudes nowadays.
Success and the Internet.. that sounds about right. I knew people from the early AOL days that used to write VB apps to "hack" AOL. Various hacker groups would steal OH/Internal accounts, etc. and create private portals in Master AOL showing off their car or whatever. AoLaZy, AoHeLL, Island55, etc. and then broadband happened and everyone grew up and got a programming job.
I want to say that hacker groups haven’t declined, it’s just that now they don’t call themselves hacker groups, they call themselves startup companies.
I don't think this quite hits the nail on the head. Perhaps hacker communities haven't grown, but I think the reasons given are a bit too abstract. In my opinion, there are two main factors at play here. One is that many of the late 90's early 2000's hackers went corporate for the $$, or worse, went government. I'll never forget calling Mudge up and asking him how DARPA was treating him, and he was loving it simply because of all the cool things he was seeing.
For quite a while I think the hacker community was much more about hobby and IT professionals who were curious (sysadmins breaking out of the box), whereas now people just want to break into stuff and get paid big bucks (banks seem to be the centerpiece of the pen-testing economy to me). I interviewed at a local security company, and when I started talking about evil-maid attacks, I got blank stares back. So what really ended up happening is that guys starting realizing they could just run scans and produce fancy reports and get paid lots of money, and they got lazy and stopped contributing to the community as much.
Secondly though, is the chilling effect. I have been ranting about NSA for at least a decade, but we didn't have much proof beyond the Echelon/Tempest leaks. Now we know how pervasive it really is and that it's still probably even worse than we thought, and people are starting to realize that we only temporarily won the 90's crypto wars.
Eben Moglen said about the cryptowars: "in 95 at Harvard, Stuart Baker (former NSA General Counsel), after a debate about the right to encrypt, said, "...public key encryption will become available. We fought a long losing battle against it, but it was just a delaying tactic..."
I spent some time at unallocated space, which is the closest big hacker lab to NSA headquarters, and it was sorta hush-hush that we just don't talk about NSA stuff while there. Great guys, all around, but I feel like too many hackers got mired in the technical and forgot about the political side of things.
We have to realize that what is going on is a massive control power play being put into action. Surveillance of the level that is happening isn't about security at all. It's about control. I'm willing to bet that in the next few months we are about to see some COINTELPRO level releases from Greenwald and team. Hack all you want, and maybe even get hired by some contractor to make lots of money... but if you dare start applying those skills to politics... you better watch out because you just went to the top of a list somewhere.
I have put it like this, if data = information, and information = power, then secret data = secret information = secret power. Hackers are a threat to those who wield secret data, and their communities are heavily targeted for infiltration and worse. This to me, is much more influential on the hacker community than some imaged lack of creativity. I think the creativity is there, but people are having to hide it away.
