Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
leroy-is-here
ecliptik
It's an excerpt from the book Space Rogue: https://books2read.com/spacerogue
leroy-is-here
Thanks, I missed that somehow. I went back and checked the article and, sure enough, I just have banner-blindness. If it doesn't look like text in a <p> tag I just ignore it.
ilamont
I'm also a BU grad from that era. Loved reading this. Don't know the author, but I did know many of the places mentioned. Not sure where the loft was located, but it sounds like the area around Fort Point channel which used to be an artists colony (and also near the site of the infamous Channel nightclub) which is now one of the most expensive pieces of luxury real estate in Boston, the "Seaport" district.
One observation about 80s and '90s tech communities: it's fascinating how groups of people would coalesce around interests, schools, small businesses, or whatever.
In Taiwan, my landlord's eldest son eagerly showed me "Yamnet" which was a local BBS and hacker group he belonged to, I think through his college. I was listening to "How I Built This" podcast interview with one of the founders of Alienware, and his group in Miami was included a lot of second-generation Cuban Americans who got into 90s LAN games and building custom PCs. Even my hometown had a little group of teens who gravitated to the local indie computer store, "The Bit Bucket," to hack on TRS-80s, Commodore-64s, Apple IIe's and early PCs.
These communities seemed to be everywhere, even if they were largely invisible to most people.
mtalantikite
> Don't know the author, but I did know many of the places mentioned.
I was too young to be involved at this particular point in time, but my parents would bring me to that Au Bon Pain and The Garage as a kid in the late 80s/early 90s. I totally know that pizza spot the author mentioned. It's funny to think that not too long after, as a teenager in the late 90s, I'd be aware of those hacker handles, completely unaware that they had been gathering in those places too!
When I finally was allowed to roam Cambridge by myself (late 90s) I remember I'd make my friends stop off at the newsstand in Harvard Square near The Garage to pick up copies of 2600. Really interesting to fill in a little of that history with landmarks I'm familiar with.
hereforphone
I'd like to post my perception since I was a 90s hacker.
Inclusivity is arbitrary here - no one in the scenes that I was familiar with were excluded because of race or sex - it's just that certain demographics weren't attracted to that 'scene'. Those like me, ADHD, awkward, and not extremely socially capable at the time, were however sometimes excluded. There were still the cool nerds and the lame nerds. I was pretty involved in the scene, being a staff writer of 2600 (several articles published under various handles, my name listed in the cover for a couple of years), and spending some time talking to "famous" people.
Later I grew up, spent 4 years in the military, then used money I earned to finally go to college, graduating eventually with an engineering Master's in my 30s. As I grew up I realized that the whole 90s / early 2000s hacker scene was mostly just a social clique. I learned that many people who were revered had marginal skills. I learned that the paranoia and self-aggrandizement ("The FBI totally monitors #2600 to learn our skills") was really just immaturity. The whole thing eventually seemed lame as I grew into an adult. I realized 2600 was really just a money machine and a manipulative scheme. Phrack went downhill quick, sadly (I also published there).
Still, this was a classic and wonderful time. Even I made friends - some that I talk to now, 20+ years later. I learned a lot. I got started on a tech path that took me very far and into regions of tech I'd never learn about otherwise like radio and telephone. I'm still a hacker, but legally. I don't miss the "scene" at all, but I do wish I was more included in it at the time. As this article illustrates it must have been great.
bink
I generally agree, but some of those claims were true. It wasn't entirely immaturity. I was part of the group at the 2600 meeting near the Pentagon that got raided by Secret Service dressed up like mall security. They conducted some busts a few weeks later based on things illegally confiscated from that raid.
https://www.2600.com/secret/pc/pc-pressrelease.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/11/12/h...
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA
Strange that you should mention this of all things. I have a few questions about this particular bust at the mall.
Could you please ping me at herbivore.dragster@dfgh.net? Much obliged.
hacknewslogin
Thanks for sharing these links! I just got to the part in "The best of 2600" that goes over this.
sambull
The FBI did monitor #2600 irc.. it wasn't to learn our skills. But they most definitely ran a bot logging it - they showed me irc logs, asked questions about specific other people I was hanging out with in the SF scene at the time and warned my dad I was in with the bad hacker crowd. This was after a Red hat 6.2 box I built was owned by some php vuln and the person I did it was taking credit cards via email on that same box. He basically pointed at me and said I must be in some l33t hax0r gang stealing his customer credit cards info.
aestetix
It sounds to me like part of your growing up was realizing that the people you looked up to were human, and it shattered some illusions you had.
In truth, pretty much every social "scene" has a small core of dedicated people surrounded by a much larger social clique. This becomes more and more true as it grows in size. There will always be the "talkers" who are good at communicating but have "marginal skills," but I'd argue everyone has different strengths. For example, there are some absolutely excellent hackers who are terrible writers, and other people who write quite well about hacking, but cannot hack themselves. We need both types.
While quite a lot of the worry about government monitoring might actually be paranoia, I'll simply note that Snowden's relevations showed that a lot of the fears were justified. Perhaps there are tradeoffs in privacy that you are willing to make, which others refuse to make.
EvanAnderson
I was on the periphery of the 90s "scene" and this rings true to me. One year at DefCon I ended up (somehow) tagging along w/ (some of?) the Cult of the Dead Cow crew and friends to a dinner. I had a decidedly "Wow, I'm sitting at the cool kids table..." kind of feeling.
Age and location had a lot to do with it, too. I was in rural Ohio versus in Boston, Chicago, NYC, etc. I also did community college versus moving away. There were fewer opportunities for face-to-face hacker interactions when you might be the only person in your county into that kind of stuff.
I still lean on my telephony knowledge from back then. It's amazing how much of it is still relevant even in the world of VoIP.
sokoloff
dildog joined the same company I worked at for a short time and I met some of the cDc folks through that. It was a good continuation of my life education on “no matter how good you thought you were [with computers], someone is better.”
myself248
> many people who were revered had marginal skills.
Yeah, socially organizing and motivating people doesn't rank very high on technical achievement, but it's often the difference between groups you've heard of and groups you haven't.
And guess who inspires more young people to go learn?
nikanj
Nerds are upset social people do not respect technical skill, proceed to bash social skills
undefined
max182
Once I make my money I dream of opening a 90's esque hacker space like you see in movies like Hackers.
Dark warehouse, neon lighting, The Protegy playing in the background, a place where hackers can bring there machines, talk tech and rage. Coffee in the mornings, bar at night.
LeoPanthera
That's funny, I've always wanted to open 90s-style Internet Cafe here in the bay area. Maybe not so much Prodigy, but now that my generation is all in their 40s and 50s, I figured it would be fun to combine really really good internet access with retrocomputing resources. I don't know if anyone's done that before. And I doubt it would be profitable. But I'd enjoy it.
almost_usual
I’d totally go to this. I miss the 90s era Internet cafe.
buzzert
Why hasn't this happened yet? Serious question. There are a LOT of Hackers fans here (as evidenced by the Hackers night at DNA Lounge), and a LOT of rich nerds. And the DNA Lounge is close, but it's still not Cyberdelia.
LeoPanthera
Because Hackers fans are all in their 40s and 50s, and a location like that would live or die based on its ability to attract the young, which it would not.
buzzert
Why wouldn't young people want to hang out at Cyberdelia?
dig1
Jamie Zawinski [1][2] (Netscape/Mozilla/Emacs/XscreenSaver fame) is running something similar called DNA Lounge [3], and has a blog with all sorts of stuff [4], from automating things with perl to running a night club business.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
[2] https://www.jwz.org/hacks/
LeoPanthera
DNA Lounge is a great nightclub, and it does have a Hackers-themed night most years, but I wouldn't call it "something similar". It's a nightclub. A very very cool nightclub - but a nightclub.
(PS. If you click these, and your browser correctly forwards the refer(r)er URL, you will get a "funny" image, as jwz blocks links from HN.)
myvoiceismypass
When I moved to the Bay Area a decade ago, I went to DNA just assuming that it was going to be that Hacker (movie)-esque space _all the time_. Like, I just pictured that in my head many many years ago and never bothered to actually correct it, until I got there.
Delicious pizza @ DNA Lounge!
dboon
Man, I love JWZ’s landing page for traffic from HN. He’s living the dream
EricE
Love a lot of his content - find it a bit disturbing he's still pushing masks and the vaxx. Guess he's not paranoid enough yet.
quickthrower2
See also: http://n-gate.com/
quickthrower2
2022, and writing Wordpress plugins. Love it. Ignore all the hype and code what you need.
wkat4242
You could do that but it takes a ton of space, and it's a pain in the ass to work in. Image finding the screwdriver you dropped in a pile of junk when the lighting is nightclub style.
We used to sit in the dark sometimes in our old makerspace but it would really know work if everyone used a computer and nothing else. In makerspaces this is rarely the case.
quickthrower2
The Prodigy? I loved The Prodigy!
e12e
Why the past tense?
quickthrower2
Good point, I will do a prodigy session soon and love them again!
8f2ab37a-ed6c
I miss the more genuine and naive world of 90s hacking, or even something as simple as local LAN parties with people dragging their giant CRTs with them to be in a sweaty room with a bunch of other early PC gamers. I suspect those worlds aren't making a comeback.
dasil003
As a teenager at the time, there was a palpable feeling of being part of a counter-culture that was on the bleeding edge of an inevitable future which adults simply could not grok. That world definitely ain't coming back, in large part because global internet connectivity has rendered quaint the very notion of counter-culture.
On the other hand, retro computing and nostalgia for the era has never been stronger or more accessible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3NQQ7bPf6U
b800h
I predict that your second sentence will be thoroughly disproven by the next generation, who will go offline en masse to find reality once AI makes the entire Internet inauthentic.
mindcrime
who will go offline en masse to find reality once AI makes the entire Internet inauthentic.
I've been thinking about this a bit lately, albeit from a slightly different angle. I think people will begin looking for a different "reality" due to the homogenization of everything due to AI. That is to say, it's not "inauthenticity" as such that I think people will react to, but lack of originality and creativity.
I mean, when ChatGPT is writing all new books, screenplays, whitepapers, business plans, etc., etc., it seems to me that everything is going to collapse to one boring, homogeneous, "everything is the same as everything else" state. If my theory is right, the currency of the future might simply be "novelty" and human creativity.
This is, of course, all based on the idea that (current) AI's are, as Emily Bender put it, "stochastic parrots"[1]. All they can really do is spew up a somewhat randomized pastiche of human reality circa 2021 or so. So far they don't really have any innate creativity as such. That said, I don't see any reason in principle to think that AI won't also eventually be able to be creative is the same sense that we are today. What happens then is a whole other question.
Jensson
They wont be able to go back to their childhood programs because they wont exist any more, so nostalgia computing wont be a thing for them even if they wanted it.
ragnot
This is an insight I'm going to remember for a while.
RGamma
You know, being part of any culture (and not just leftovers) would be nice these days...
hammyhavoc
LAN parties aren't dead, but the people that used to attend them got older, had kids, and now will probably get judged by their spouse for going to one. Younger generations most definitely have LAN parties. Now that computers are once again becoming less popular and more appliances have taken their place (smartphones, game consoles etc), the people who are into PC gaming are becoming a more tight-knit and like-minded demographic.
joshvm
LAN parties grew into eSports and once the internet took off, local network gaming became a bit redundant (outside couch play on consoles). Still a thing at nerdy conventions, too - with all the sweat. ETH Zürich still has the PolyLAN society which is alive and well [0]
legerdemain
Meanwhile, here in South Bay, an activist board member (who is a senior lead at Tesla by day) just fired our longtime hacker space director with zero days notice because membership wasn't growing fast enough. Now our events are struggling and members are leaving because of this cavalier display of leadership.
It is almost impossible to find tech-adjacent countercultural spaces in the Bay that aren't fully co-opted by a self-devouring corporate mindset.
weld
The L0pht had no leadership. Only partners that paid rent and utilities. You had to pay to cover your share of expenses but also contribute with sweat equity. We ended up kicking out a couple of people that ceased to contribute to the common good even if they paid.
ValentineC
> We ended up kicking out a couple of people that ceased to contribute to the common good even if they paid.
As a member of a hackerspace myself who's always wondering how to get rid of bad eggs: how does this "kicking out" process happen for the L0pht? Who gets to quantify their sweat equity and decide?
ta988
Kicking people out can be tricky depending on the structure and bylaws of a given place. I've seen different kinds and you'll always have a part of your members that wilm think it is too much and others not enough. In the end what caused 99.9% of the issues I saw in the hackerspaces I've been part of wasn't the people kicked out arbitrarly or too lightly, it was that abusing people were allowed to stay for too long. The reasons were multiple. But in the end if you want to keep the culture alive you have to remove the elements that work against that culture. Or start/find a new place if the whole culture shifts with the majority of the members.
weld
It was unanimous except for the person getting kicked out. The violations of rules or lack of effort was given ample warning to be corrected.
throwawaaarrgh
Leave the bay area, or go find some artists with a warehouse and give them some cash to let you keep some machines there
legerdemain
We used to have that. It was called the Ghost Ship. It caught fire. A bunch of people died.
goodpoint
> It is almost impossible to find tech-adjacent countercultural spaces in the Bay that aren't fully co-opted by a self-devouring corporate mindset.
HN being a prime example outside of SF.
legerdemain
A news website run by a VC firm that is also a startup accelerator? "Countercultural"?
goodpoint
Not at all, I'm saying that HN is coopting the word "hacker".
renewiltord
Yeah, but the website community is decidedly anti-startup so that does make it countercultural in the local culture.
medion
Counterculture in general seems scarce, everything and everyone feels so hyper normal these days.
ljf
There is heaps of counter culture both online and in the real world - even in my small English town. And so much of what was counter culture has been co-opted into general culture now too.
I'd say things, ideas, opportunities and ways of being/thinking are even broader now than they were than when I was a teenager in the 90s.
ta988
There is a ton of counterculture. You just need to stop looking for large and noisy groups that are taking most of the attention space. It is just that the hum of the crowd got louder. The signal is still there, it is just the noise that got stronger.
medion
I'm not looking for counterculture, I'm quite happy doing my own thing in relative obscurity. I'm merely being nostalgic for when it used to be a lot more visible (physically). Punks, weirdos, hackers, oddballs, flâneur's, were in plain view - their associated shops and hangouts (record stores, counter culture book stores, etc), rowdy pubs, etc. Perhaps they're all just at home on computers now. Or gentrified/normalised. I don't know. Merely anecdotal.
legerdemain
Modern counterculture (for the sake of argument, defined as non-commercial and deeply personal crap produced by marginal individuals) has shifted to mostly online and mostly to expressions that I'm not interested in: most particularly, furries. Furry software, furry art, furry music, furry meetups.
icelancer
There is a pretty strong reason for this; deviancy from the norm is punished heavily on social media. No one wants to be the main character when they have 300 followers and they're just posting their opinions.
anthk
Mastodon, Gemini and the 2007-reborn Gopher.
But yes, you are right. Back in late 90's/early 00's Linux and Unix desktop were trully different and unique. Fluxbox had zillions of different themes. 3D, black, retro, flat-ish, metal-ish, Java styled, Gnome styled, KDE-alike, Gaudi, childish, Bohemian, alien looking... every style was fine for anyone.
Ditto witht the icons. One day I felt technical and I switched into the Slick theme being "workstation/highend" themed with a gray color scheme, and the next day I felt nice and cheerful and switched into Noia with a blue Keramik theme.
Now everything looks bland, flat and everyone looks afraid on having an style.
RugnirViking
social media, especially but not limited to social media revenue models for content creators, demand regression to the norm. When every interesting idea for a video/song/blogpost gets literal orders of magnitude less views, when a clickbaity video with only the most surface-level engagement with whatever "topic" is your usual fare gets far and away the biggest numbers you've ever gotten, its no surprise there is less counter culture.
Take a look at for example the youtube creator dashboard for an established creator, how it directly compares your videos against each other, trying and pushing you to get more numbers, entirely uncaring for anything other than eyeballs.
rolph
these may help
https://hackaday.io/hackerspaces/
https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Bay_Area_Consortium_of_Hackers...
sacnoradhq
Old and outdated lists.
The best thing to do is find some cool rich peeps, go in on a small commercial/industrial space to make it sort of like a college dorm, and keep the membership invite-only and tiny.
weld
My space in Cambridge is not on the list. It’s hastypastry.net. Been there for 20 years. It’s private so no need to advertise. I think it’s good to be on these lists so people know hacker spaces exist
rolph
yes old and outdated, but breadcrumbs... finding the trail and the desired endpoint is often an effective filter for prestige accounts [hey, im on 31l337h4X0r space] that dont have the properties of "adept hacker"
900913 maps is probably anathema to some thus they dont show up.
its best to look thru a span of search engines with different DNS providers, you can dive deeper past the search bubbles
legerdemain
The closest one to me on the map is something called "the fifth space," but I can't find any online presence at all for it (it shares a name with an interfaith org in India, which is what most results are for).
The consortium lists spaces in SF, Oakland, and father out. This could be a major motivator to move to SF.
rolph
not all of these are considered active, some may have gone gray in presence, but still exist in some form.
dannyobrien
you may wish to visit Noisebridge someday
legerdemain
I'd need to move from South Bay to SF first to make repeated visits worthwhile. Over an hour each way is... yeah.
dannyobrien
well, not loading this on you, but many Bay Area hackerspaces started after people spent time at noisebridge or another related space, and then realised they could work with others to build one somewhere nearer to them physically or ideologically: Ace Monster Toys (now Ace Hackerspace), Queerious Labs, Double Union, Sudo Room, Mothership Hackermoms. It's not hard if you find likeminded people, and the best place to look is just dropping by casually to a hackerspace not-so-near you..
ornornor
Who is sick enough to put KPIs on a for fun hobby?
kurthr
Come on you're just holding it wrong, Zero to One is the most important thing! One to zero is next.
Really, how did he become a board member? Donated money or self-important resume? The rest of the board let him do it so it's a bigger problem than just him. Get the email list of membership and start a real space... there's lots of empty office space now so you might be able to get a donation since they get to write it off at old pricing, but it's a huge amount of work for very little return (unless you like running these sorts of things).
Sorry for your situation.
legerdemain
Yeah, I'm not incorporating and ponying up $30k to get an office lease. There's commitment, and then there's commitment.
Our hacker space has had tons of leadership drama over the years, from misuse of funds to a co-founder trying to get a trademark on our name to do a hostile takeover.
Basically, if your hacker space exists because some tech people made big money in company stocks and decided to buy a personal playground, you're constantly subject to their whims and caprices.
weld
If you are in the Bay Area during RSA Conference, Space Rogue and me, Weld, are going to be fireside chatting and signing books at the W Hotel. Come get one and hang out! https://info.veracode.com/rsa-2023-book-signing.html
adam_gyroscope
I had accounts on ATDT East & The Works, and ran a Wafflenet BBS on the south shore of Massachusetts. I was .. 14? 15? And would travel up to the 2600 meetings as often as I could convince my parents to drive me to the T stop. One memorable night I was invited to go to the l0pht and go trashing afterwards. It was awesome, I got a copy of the Nynex dental plan which I gave to someone on The Works who asked for it. No idea why they wanted it. I also met Lemon (later Lady Ada) at the 2600 meetings. I had no idea at the time how big a deal l0pht was, I was just happy older kids tolerated me.
oldstrangers
My entire identity growing up was L0pht, cDc, 2600 magazine, defcon, etc.
Even the "original" Hacker News was ran by a guy from L0pht.
Fond nostalgia for that era.
UberFly
I'm right with you. I went to the 1999 DefCon that cDc unveiled Back Orifice. It was all a pretty awesome experience.
lagniappe
All episodes are on youtube, it was spacerogue's show. HNNCast. https://www.youtube.com/@HackerNewsNetwork
flatiron
I remember getting local admin on my high schools nt3.5 box with l0phtcrack just to setup a http proxy so I can read wwf.com at the library. Fun times.
sacnoradhq
This is a hilarious revisionist history labeling a "hackerspace".
That Wikipedia also calls w00w00 a "think tank" when it was a social forum for teenage / college students is laughable too.
bongoman37
[dead]
narrator
I was around in the early 90s on BBSs. One of the things that amuses me about people asking AI how to do bad stuff and all the handwringing about AI safety is that one of the popular things that was available for download on some of the less reputable forums in the early 90s were various "text files" that would give instructions for doing various illegal or morally dubious things.
There were hundreds of these and it was a practical thing to share back when 1 megabyte took an hour to download. One that cracked up to no end that I still remember vaguely was "How to be a gigolo.". Apparently, you have to move to South Florida and wear a sport coat. I don't remember anything else from it except it was hilariously written. Good times.
Also, since BBSes required a lot of technical knowhow to get into, it was this back channel for all the extreme teenage geeks in the local calling area. It was this phenomenally fun secret club that I met some exceptionally weird people through, but also lifelong friends. There were some great magazines of the time like Mondo 2000, and the ethos was real techno-libertarianism, information wants to be free, and all that fun stuff. Everyone was coming off the high of the Soviet Union falling apart and believed that now human liberty would flourish everywhere.
bink
Shout out to Jason Scott and textfiles.com
RGamma
This feels appropiately oldschool, thx
alexsereno
Thank you for this
totetsu
[flagged]
zozbot234
Hindsight is always 20/20. What matters is that we live in a much freer and more open world today than in the 1980s and information of all kinds is vastly more accessible, often available for free. So these early predictions have basically proven quite accurate.
bsuvc
To which specific type of human are you referring?
undefined
DANmode
s/flourishing/exercised
seneca
What an absolutely bizarre way to interpret them. It shows that the internet was accessible to a very small segment of the world
mytailorisrich
I got onto the internet in the second half of the 90s and as a rebellious teenager I, of course, started by downloading the various 'cookbooks' (anarchist, phreaking, etc) that were very easy to find through Alta Vista just to play cool and boast to my friends.
I would not ask Google about those stuff today and I would certainly not dare downloading them for fear of triggering so many alerts and red flags. Today it would probably be possible to be jailed (in the UK) just for having this material on your computer.
0xGod
Why is the UK full of so many weak nannies and wannabe tyrants that your state can tell you what you can and cannot read over there?
pjc50
The US response to terrorism was directed overseas, while the UK one has for a longer time been directed at "enemies within". The UK press is entirely behind all these restrictions, sadly.
InCityDreams
Pretty sure if you download the anarchists cookbook i the usa, it'll probably get flagged.
nonethewiser
The baffling thing is how it’s defended.
undefined
holoduke
Really? Is it that bad? You cannot google what you like. I ask obscene questions all time. Just out of interest. Whats wrong with that?
mytailorisrich
At least in the UK I believe that your search history over the last 12 months is accessible by the police. So if for whatever reason you become under investigation it is sensible to ask yourself what the police would think about what you searched...
crimsoneer
No, it isn't. You can ask google whatever you want, and no "red flags" are being raised, this isn't the Bourne Identity. Police barely have capacity to arrest criminals these days, nobody is checking if you download the anarchist cookook ffs.
If you get arrested for child porn, will police get your google search history and check you haven't googled bad things? Sure.
Cthulhu_
One Rumour I heard is that the ones about making bombs was actually written and published by the CIA and intentionally wrong.
mytailorisrich
Well, I was sensible enough not to try so I cannot say!
nonethewiser
I always assumed it wasn’t that hard to figure out how to make a bomb. That’s not to say it would necessarily be efficient or easy.
ganoushoreilly
Given they did this with terrorist literature, it wouldn't be surprising.
nonethewiser
As I recall the anarchist cookbooks aren’t that bad. Stuff like how to make napalm (gasoline and styrofoam as I recall).
jstarfish
As I recall, there were quite a few about how to mix poisons and improvise explosives.
Arguably "tame" but not something you want to be associated with today.
jon-wood
Also that recipe for napalm didn’t actually work.
Or so I’ve heard from, ahem, some people during the early 00s.
samstave
>>"Also, since BBSes required a lot of technical knowhow to get into"
HA!!! I ran a BBS Warez Site out of my North Tahoe High School CAD lab on an everex step cube on a 9600 baud modem in 1991
I was 14.
I was grounded for a MONTH for calling long distance into a BBS in San Jose CA in order to play "The Pit" and "Trade wars" and the phone bill was $926 and I failed to buy all the wheat in the galaxy and accidentally SOLD all my wheat failing to corner the market, but flooding it...
Yeah, that was on a 286 with an amber monitor that I convinced my dad he needed a computer for his business... and then a 2400 baud modem was important... so I could play Populous with a friend over modem.
mackraken
Similar experience here. “Trade Wars” was amazing for the time and place. I’ve often wondered what happened to it and why someone hasn’t ported it (has it been?!)
thrwawy74
1) I'm against restricting things behind technical know-how to select for "the right group of people" on principle. I'm not talking about then, but now.
2) I wonder if this magical period was only possible because it was reachable by a few, and this knowledge was not largely abused because of the entry fee.
3) AI is lowering the barrier to entry. The great equalizer, to see what we do with valuable insight ~ Politicians should fear computers more than disgruntled citizens.
4) I hope we don't see export laws changed to cover AI models like encryption was.
raverbashing
I kinda agree but technical know-how is probably one of the more "honest" ways of self-limiting something if only because freeloaders usually don't have the patience for anything too complicated
And punishment for abuse is mostly non-existent
nonethewiser
I think people don’t build bombs because they don’t want to. Not because they don’t know how.
bane
I remember those days fondly as well. Compounded with growing up in a fairly rural area, the BBS world was an escape and exposure to people and ideas that would have never been considered where I grew up.
There was also this feeling at the time that I'm finding hard to express or even really understand. There was of course the corporate tech world, exemplified very nicely by various magazines and shows like Computer Chronicles. But there was this other world of real techno-culture that seemed to be growing and compounding on itself. There was literature like the Cyberpunk genre, music like early techno and what we now call IDM, BBSs, periodicals like 2600 and Mondo and countless zines. Wired launched sometime in that era. Linux was the work of a single disaffected hacker. The early piracy and demoscenes seemed to give other artistic voices to this counterculture. Technomages were concepts on popular tv. Early ftp and gopher sites (pre-WWW) felt like the work of super l33t nerds. The USSR had just fallen, information wanted to be free, and communicating with people across the planet became something we could do daily, helping us find more of us. It felt like we were building towards something -- billions of minds were about to be unlocked by the commoditized availability of information, computation, and communication and making money was a secondary thought.
And then there was a shift. I don't know when it was, but it felt like the shift onto the WWW allowed the Computer Chronicle watching corporate world to buy up, buy out, co-opt, and extinguish all of it. That nascent tech-culture of the BBS era wholly was unable to truly pivot to Web. Instead of connecting and growing us, it stole, fractured, and repositioned us away from those passions. The corporatists realized that we would never pay for things at the revenue they wanted, and slowly raised the temperature like frogs being boiled, with free services for advertising and entire generations of possible techno-culturalists were diverted from counter culture into optimizing ad placement. Instead of challenging people with new information and ideas, the populace was encouraged to build information echo chambers through which propaganda could be injected and money extracted. What we're becoming was not Hiro Protagonist, Y.T., or Case, but the cautionary "Fitless Humans" from Wall-E.
I'm writing this on a site called "Hacker News" which uses the word "hacker" in a way that I would not recognize back in the 80s and 90s, to drive discussion about hyper growth startups.
I think I'm going to go outside now.
ElfinTrousers
I refer you to Dr. Thompson's writing on "The Wave". Similar vibe to what you had to say here. https://genius.com/Hunter-s-thompson-the-wave-passage-fear-a...
samstave
MONDO 2000 was Amazing!
Its wear i learned the first of Jaron Lanier and UI/AI/etc whatever he was talking about at the time.
Was later a long time subscriber to WIRED before they got too smug.
narrator
I've bumped into R.U Sirius a couple of times. Whenever I do I always congratulate him on Mondo 2000 and being so far ahead of the curve at the time.
samstave
Whats nuts is that my middle school Lake Tahoe Bus Station sold MONDO - and for a middle schooler, it was pretty expensive... I Think it was ~$7 or maybe $5.99 - regardless, it was NUTS in 1989/1990 F I cant even recall the time...
But the sold it in LAKE TAHOE. IN 1990-ish!
UHM, was also a subsccriber of 2600 and a total phreak (built blue/black boxes that fit into film canisters, and had an official captain crunch cereal whistle when it was released)
We used to troll 411 (in the early US, you could call "411" for "information" and it would connect you to operator who you then ask "Connect me with [BUSINESS] or [WHAT IS THE TELEPHONE NUMBER WITH PERSON X IN CITY Y]
So we wou;d have contests on how long we could keep the 411 OP online, and social engineer where they live, where work, how big call center, etc... we were like 14 years old and just doing this for laughs in 1988 or such.
I also pulled the famous 'packing tape on dollar bill' hack (theft) to play video games ;
So there was this 'hack' where you put a strip of packing tape (folded over itself such that the sticky parts are together) - you put them on a $1 or $5 bill\
You put the dollar into a vending machine at the post office to buy stamps.
You buy the cheapest amount of stamps, then you YANK the dollar-in-packing-tape from the machine...
You receive the stamps, the change from the yanked bill, take the change to the Safeway (grocery store) next door and you play the video games they had in them ; Defender and Contra.
It took us $25 in stolen quarters from the post office machine vuln to this attack to beat contra.
My buddy who I did this with is now EVP at Blizzard.
dstroot
I was only “hacker curious” back then. I always wondered - was it pronounced “loft” or “low fat”? I know dumb question but I always wondered…
lagniappe
pronounced as "loft heavy industries"
abudabi123
I always wondered - was it pronounced “loft” or “low fat”?
sanswork
Loft.
TacticalCoder
> ... various "text files" that would give instructions for doing various illegal or morally dubious things.
I was there in the BBS era too. I remember one such text file explaining a simple mechanism to light up a bomb without leaving much trace of the mechanism used to delay the bomb blowing up: it consisted of lighting a cigarette in which a small hole was drilled. Then the text file was going into details, explaining which type of cigarettes to buy so that it wouldn't consume too fast / not get blown by the wind / etc. It was totally hilarious too.
nonethewiser
I feel like the concerning thing is that someone seemingly had direct experience with this. But you just reshared the information and no one cares. The info itself just doesn’t seem that terrible.
867-5309
can't forget the Terrorist Cookbook - that thing must be as old as the internet
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA
Are you thinking of the Anarchist’s Cookbook?
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
Is there a second part to this article? It felt like it ended only part-way through. What happened after being invited to the space? History I suppose.
Engaging writing in any case. So engaging that I thought there should be more lol.