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Bioterrorism Articles? i'm sure you could find some textfiles about it, not to knock textfiles.com or nuthin, but yeah, you could do a lotta damage with a little money and various internet resources /flame> Stop The Terrorists!, Shut Down The Internet!, Think of the Children! /flame>

There's a hell of a lot of text files from the old BBS days at http://www.textfiles.com

Cheers, Orange

The problem with making it a single textfile is that it tends to get a little big.

bbslist.textfiles.com

I have gigabytes of ANSI at the moment that I'm sorting through (Check out ansi.textfiles.com to look at them) but no, the footage so far is of actual people talking about things, including ANSI. (I have an interview with Rad Man of ACiD, Lord Soth of iCE, etc.)

In terms of "notable" Sysops, you'd have to be more specific. Dozens of the interviews I've done have been with Sysops, many of whom got some amount of fame within their scenes or groups of people.

"Notorius" sysops and traders, well, again, that's an odd classification to figure out. I am/will be interviewing people who were incarcerated over BBS activities. Is that what you mean?

The deal is: I want to tell the story of BBSes.

Jason Scott, the one doing the documentary, also runs Textfiles.com.

It makes for some really interesting sessions. Have a beer while you drop down memory lane one night. I've done that. Every now and again you see some of your own files on there! :) cool.

I found it!!!

Textfiles.com

Yay! What do I win?

F*** you!

or you press *67 to block caller ID

sluts!!!! HOES NIGGERS fags poo ehhe

Yes, I'm on it. Seven times. I moved a lot. :-)

Anyone remember "g-philes," little instruction books on hacking/phreaking/applied chemistry? I believe the term came from "general files" text file listings on RBBS's.

What is funny is that they are still out there, stuff me and my friends wrote back in 1986, probably on a handful of BBS's. And let's not forget about Phrack.

If this hasn't already been mentioned... Textfiles is a huge repository of (mostly) old BBS textfiles. Also web.textfiles.com has newer ones.

If this hasn't already been mentioned... Textfiles is a huge repository of (mostly) old BBS textfiles. Also web.textfiles.com has newer ones.

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com: The BBS Documentary, currently in production.
http://bbslist.textfiles.com: My list of BBSes, ever growing, and needing your help (and lists).

- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM

http://www.textfiles.com/history/proudlyserve.txt

http://www.textfiles.com/history/proudlyserve.txt

Check out textfiles.com for dumps of a lot of old BBS stuff. I stumbled across it while looking for documentation on the XMODEM (yes, xmodem) protocol.

How to have sexual intercourse with your computer

TextFiles conspiracy files are a bit old but they are still a very interesting read. Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country covers a very broad spectrum of ideas and theories. Good stuff!

ahh the days of textfiles......

-tried to spell correctly this time. People seem to get irate with miss-typed comments.

That was because TAG was made here in the 313. TAG was better than Telegard in many ways, in the early days, back when Carl Mueller ran it. But, TAG had a tremendous problem of using .CHN files (a Turbo Pascal artifact where your "currently unused" routines were stored on disk, and only loaded when needed). Swapping to .CHN files was much slower than Telegard's "Always in memory" model, since Telegard ran with the assumption that the SysOp would have more than 64k free memory. (Yes, 64k. TAG used a .COM file then.)

When Eric Oman started working on Telegard, he was a spitfire of energy. Amazing, just amazing. It was almost like an open source project: "Hey, Eric, can you add THIS new feature?" Poof. It would be there. (Surprised the hell out of me when I found out he was only about 12 or 13 at the time...) I got to be one of his Beta sites, and got to play with the source code (nothing of mine of import is in the BBS anymore).

I was out of BBSs by the time Tim Strike took over Telegard again, but it definitely looked like a step in the right direction, but by that time Cott Lang got ahold of the source code that a buddy of mine took from my disk box and posted on a lot of BBSs. (He was trying to hurt Telegard, for some odd reason.)

This story and more amusing Telegard nostalgia is available on e2: I miss BBSs, Telegard.

Oh. And wow. I just checked the Timeline of the article above. And um. Wow. Martin Pollard lost it back then. I knew he had "retired" from the programming of Telegard, but I never did catch his "farewell" letter - I was too busy in college at the time. Check it out: Martin says "goodbye"

Captain Midnight!

It's not just a nice "satellite takeover" story, it's also a great "fight the Man!" tale.

I personally wonder if someone could do a Captain-Midnight job on an MTV transponder and send the message "PLAY SOME DAMN MUSIC SOMETIME, LIKE THAT MUCHMUSIC CHANNEL IN CANADA!" Or a CNN /FoxNewsChannel/MSNBC transponder - "HTTP://INDYMEDIA.ORG - REUTERS AND AP ARE NOT INDEPENDENT MEDIA!"

A man can dream...

Yep, just like the good old days of copy protecting software. They will lose time and time again.

The only way they'll win is if they make CDs connect to the Internet and verify with the record company everytime you play it, ala Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Or have some crappy activation featuers, ala Windows XP. Then again someone will work around that too ;-)

Read the classic Copy Protection: A History and Outlook

HBBS -- The first graphical BBS software I can think of, circa ~1984, HBBS (HiRes BBS) never fully worked on my Franklin Ace 1000, but I knew people who had it working.

Tele-Cat II - Docs here Basically an Apple II BBS for the Novation Apple Cat modem/miracle. I think this one was actually written by Novation, but i can't remember.

ABBS - BBS system, docs at this excellent site

ProTalk -- A total rewrite of L&L Productions' GBBS by Parik Rao, the only thing ProTalk had in common with GBBS was it used the same MACOS language. ProTalk was pretty popular by like 1988 or so.

Ascii Express -- Anyone writing a history of BBSing on the Apple II MUST include this file-xfer software which was basically the system upon which the Apple II BBS community were built. In the early days of the 1980s, AE *WAS* BBSing, and AE was usually integrated into later BBSes, which would "drop you" into AE for file uh, exchanging.

Cat-Fur ][ -- Not BBS software per say, but this file transfer software was very much used w/the Novation Apple Cat file-sharing set and was integrated into many BBses.

There was also some kind of famous EAMON-like role playing BBS system too for the Apple II but I can't remember what it was called.

Hope this is helpful. Maybe someone else can fill in the blanks.

HBBS -- The first graphical BBS software I can think of, circa ~1984, HBBS (HiRes BBS) never fully worked on my Franklin Ace 1000, but I knew people who had it working.

Tele-Cat II - Docs here Basically an Apple II BBS for the Novation Apple Cat modem/miracle. I think this one was actually written by Novation, but i can't remember.

ABBS - BBS system, docs at this excellent site

ProTalk -- A total rewrite of L&L Productions' GBBS by Parik Rao, the only thing ProTalk had in common with GBBS was it used the same MACOS language. ProTalk was pretty popular by like 1988 or so.

Ascii Express -- Anyone writing a history of BBSing on the Apple II MUST include this file-xfer software which was basically the system upon which the Apple II BBS community were built. In the early days of the 1980s, AE *WAS* BBSing, and AE was usually integrated into later BBSes, which would "drop you" into AE for file uh, exchanging.

Cat-Fur ][ -- Not BBS software per say, but this file transfer software was very much used w/the Novation Apple Cat file-sharing set and was integrated into many BBses.

There was also some kind of famous EAMON-like role playing BBS system too for the Apple II but I can't remember what it was called.

Hope this is helpful. Maybe someone else can fill in the blanks.

I was sifting through some of the enteries on textfiles and smiling now and then with the memories. But nothing got me to smile as much as this about Davy Jones's Locker in Millbury MA.

I remember a few friends and I got on it a few times (the toll call was rather large and the parents very watchful of it... :). It was so easy to get an account and he basically had _everything_ you would want. And things you might want but would even take *days* downloading on a 9600 (the fastest then, though I had 2400).

Gosh, all these things I'd forgotten about! What memories.

I always found this website good in reminding me of 'the old days'...

After reading the link for this story, I was amused to see that things really haven't changed in a number of places. Management doesn't worry about Web site security until it hits them where it hurts, their liability insurance premium, or when the executives spend some time in the cooler.

The majority of defacements I've seen described involve little more than vandelism, electronic tagging by lower lifeforms of script kiddies, that do very little harm to the company whose site is defaced. You "wash the walls" and go on. End of story.

Except that it isn't the end of the story.

What happens when the defacer decides to use your Web site to store a couple hundred cracked credit card numbers? How about the 600 MB of MP3s of copyrighted music material that appears in its own directory of your Web server? The kiddie porn? Can you imagine what would happen if a terrorist cookbook were to be uploaded to your site, given today's paranoia caused by the November 11 terrorist attack?

IANAL, but I recall the Mogur-BBS debacle when a BBS system was used to traffic in telephone calling card numbers. Some facts are missing from the account the link points to, but it's sufficiently accurate to be useful. Here is another account of the incident. Here is a more thoughtful retrospective and analysis.

Shall I bring up the episode of Steve Jackson Games as an indication of the kind of risk that operators of public computer systems face when security is not a primary concern? Steve Jackson Games is apparently alive and well (and probably mad as hell about being mentioned in a Slashdot article) so the news isn't all bad, but the six months they were effectively out of business -- the publishing business -- must have hurt and hurt badly. Granted, the Secret Service has learned much since that 1990 fiasco, but can you imagine the long arm, and the long flatbed truck, coming and taking your computer systems because of the acts of some malicious script kiddie who does more than tagging?

Can your company afford to have its Web servers siezed and perhaps damaged because of the illegal acts of non-employees?

What you can do: tell your manager to contact your company's general legal counsel and request they research the legal liability, and the practical effects of law enforcement action, resulting from illegal acts committeed on public servers that have inadequate security controls. Emphasize that the research include short-term effects such as equipment seizure and forceable removal, damage inflicted during such action, and the expense of obtaining the timely return of the equipment.

If you run an e-commerce site, also be sure to ask about legal exposure in the event any web server containing crdit card records, customer information records, order histories, or credit search information is compromised and the information released to unauthorized people.

Steve Jackson Games was almost put out of business based on a bogus rumor. How would your company survive the legal onslaught from a script kiddie interested in more than just defacement?

As best I can recall them, the basic engineering variable traded off were:

• Lofting material off the moon.
• Losing solar exposure for 2 weeks out of each month on the lunar surface.

This has been hashed and rehashed a number of times and it would be very good to have a special conference or online debate directly addressing how one might do economic models that predict which approach is more viable, not just from an operational cost point of view, but from a development-risk or time-value-of-money point of view.

PS: February of 1982, Jerry Pournelle posted the first Usenet article on David Criswell's lunar solar power proposal

Hey, me I'm not like these 2600 7am3rz, I know what Babbage is : it's a programming language. Kidz these days don't even know about the pioneering concept of "artificial stupidity". How sad.

Fellow slashdotters,

I have seen many of you write your memories of the BBS time. Please submit them to the history archive at www.textfiles.com also! These memories are worth saving.

My history in brief (from the Finnish BBS scene):
I got my C64 around ~1990, no disk drive, no modem, no nothing. 1992 I got a Hyundai 386SX/20Mhz/2MB/80MB. Soon I got a 2400 bps modem and started my own BBS, which would be open only at night time (our family had only one phone line). I started with Waffle (?), then moved to SuperBBS, later to RemoteAccess.

I quit BBSing finally somewhere in 1995-1996.

Those were the times...

Ah, those were the days.. remember such things as the Apple II, Ascii Express lines, and BBS's? Remember those silly groups like Anarchy, Inc. and Octothorpe? Remember the classic textfiles, the various "Black Box Plans" and whatnot?

Who could forget such classics as "Murder at 300 baud"? Or "Boog and the Art of Zen", a bit of nonsense I wrote back in 1986? I tell you, if you want excellent examples of bad writing, old textfiles really stand out!

Why I prefer Textfiles 2/27/87
- Jason Scott - Written during an illness.

Being the owner of one of the largest Textfile Clearinghouses in the US, I've
been asked a few times why I prefer textfiles over anything else for computers.
So, I decided to put my reasons into a textfile (Wraparound city) and exaplin
to you my reasons:

Textfiles won't erase yer Hard Drive, then print "HeyHey EATME!"

Textfiles don't require a joystick.

Textfiles don't make you rely on your hand-eye coordination at 3:00am.

Textfiles never have to worry about compatibility, or DOS versions.

Textfiles don't feature little green things on the screen named "Glorks".

Textfiles don't become "Old Warez" in 3 days.

You can change one byte in a textfile, and the computer won't crash.

Textfiles don't take up a whole disk every time.

Textfiles don't require 4-color advertising in COMPUTE!

Textfiles don't need programs, but most programs need textfiles.

Textfiles can be drastically changed in a matter of minutes.

Textfiles won't watch you log on, and copy your password to a secret file.

Textfiles are cheap, or free.

Textfiles won't do anything if you're not there.

Textfiles don't need to be compiled.

Textfiles don't can run at any speed you want.

You can tell how good or bad a textfile is, AS you're downloading.

Textfiles don't make sounds in the middle of the night, while your parents
are sleeping in the next room.

If you take your eyes away from a textfile, it won't go "GAME OVER".

Textfiles don't bring out hidden surprises.

You can bring textfiles to school, and the teacher won't accuse you of
being a pirate. [Usually. My old Computer Teacher took away some Blue Box
plans I was printing on the school computer. Fuck him.]

You can read textfiles during a blackout, with a flashlight.

You won't be accused of being a nerd if you have textfiles in your school
notebook [Unless you're Scott B. (Heh)]

Everyone can use a textfile on the first try.

Ahhh.. it takes me back. My small contribution.

There exists a nice tutorial on game development at http://web.textfiles.com/computers/gamfaq.txt by Ben Sawyer. He explains the process from idea to reality in a FAQ-similar style. Much fun, JiNiX ;-)

I think you're just being contrarian here.

You're mistaking nostalgia and historical perspective for clinging to the past and rejecting the wonder of the present. In fact, I make no assertion that the past is better than the present, in any way except that it gives us a perspective on what we have now. The speed of today's home computers, the ability to transfer files, the coolness of Peer-to-Peer and for that matter Instant Messaging and all sorts of neat new technologies seem that much sweeter when you think of where you've come. Although, reading through your note, I don't think it's a place you've personally come from; you seem rather young.

Please don't speak for others that they don't want to look at ANSI Art or look over old documentation or even to browse old BBS List Entries... everything has its place, and history shouldn't be burned and destroyed at the first opportunity just because you think the time before you got on the scene was neanderthal and useless. People spent years and years working on these BBSes; I'm proud to have brought some memories back for them.

I think you're just being contrarian here.

You're mistaking nostalgia and historical perspective for clinging to the past and rejecting the wonder of the present. In fact, I make no assertion that the past is better than the present, in any way except that it gives us a perspective on what we have now. The speed of today's home computers, the ability to transfer files, the coolness of Peer-to-Peer and for that matter Instant Messaging and all sorts of neat new technologies seem that much sweeter when you think of where you've come. Although, reading through your note, I don't think it's a place you've personally come from; you seem rather young.

Please don't speak for others that they don't want to look at ANSI Art or look over old documentation or even to browse old BBS List Entries... everything has its place, and history shouldn't be burned and destroyed at the first opportunity just because you think the time before you got on the scene was neanderthal and useless. People spent years and years working on these BBSes; I'm proud to have brought some memories back for them.

I think you're just being contrarian here.

You're mistaking nostalgia and historical perspective for clinging to the past and rejecting the wonder of the present. In fact, I make no assertion that the past is better than the present, in any way except that it gives us a perspective on what we have now. The speed of today's home computers, the ability to transfer files, the coolness of Peer-to-Peer and for that matter Instant Messaging and all sorts of neat new technologies seem that much sweeter when you think of where you've come. Although, reading through your note, I don't think it's a place you've personally come from; you seem rather young.

Please don't speak for others that they don't want to look at ANSI Art or look over old documentation or even to browse old BBS List Entries... everything has its place, and history shouldn't be burned and destroyed at the first opportunity just because you think the time before you got on the scene was neanderthal and useless. People spent years and years working on these BBSes; I'm proud to have brought some memories back for them.

Congratulations on making it to the first revision of the list, but I want to stress to everyone (and I say this on the site in the FAQ) that just because you're not listed does not mean you're being excluded! It just means that I didn't find you in the first two weeks of work. Since this article came out, I've added verification, further information, and addition of over 8,000 BBSes. !!! This is from people who saw the list wasn't accurate or missed something, wanted to make things right, and mailed me corrections.

And I want everyone to know I appreciate these corrections very, very much. I also know what I'm doing for the next week. :)

I wish cDc would just go back to writing stories about Debbie Gibson fighting ninjas. Stick to what you're good at.

• The story of Mel
• The Tao of programming
• if you find a link to the Zen of programming please post.

Textfiles.com just went 3.0 and now has over 30,000 textfiles online, many more than the 9,000 I had two years ago when Slashdot first reported on it. Sadly, it's fallen out of favor; attempts to let Slashdot know about both the talks I've given at DEFCON and the updates to the site have gone into the submission bin.

There was an amazing couple of online battles fought in the courts and the media in the early part of the 1990's. It's good to read what was actually said, instead of poor paraphrases from people who didn't actually experience it even second-hand. Come visit the site; I'll appreciate your time.

Textfiles.com just went 3.0 and now has over 30,000 textfiles online, many more than the 9,000 I had two years ago when Slashdot first reported on it. Sadly, it's fallen out of favor; attempts to let Slashdot know about both the talks I've given at DEFCON and the updates to the site have gone into the submission bin.

There was an amazing couple of online battles fought in the courts and the media in the early part of the 1990's. It's good to read what was actually said, instead of poor paraphrases from people who didn't actually experience it even second-hand. Come visit the site; I'll appreciate your time.

Textfiles.com just went 3.0 and now has over 30,000 textfiles online, many more than the 9,000 I had two years ago when Slashdot first reported on it. Sadly, it's fallen out of favor; attempts to let Slashdot know about both the talks I've given at DEFCON and the updates to the site have gone into the submission bin.

There was an amazing couple of online battles fought in the courts and the media in the early part of the 1990's. It's good to read what was actually said, instead of poor paraphrases from people who didn't actually experience it even second-hand. Come visit the site; I'll appreciate your time.

Textfiles.com just went 3.0 and now has over 30,000 textfiles online, many more than the 9,000 I had two years ago when Slashdot first reported on it. Sadly, it's fallen out of favor; attempts to let Slashdot know about both the talks I've given at DEFCON and the updates to the site have gone into the submission bin.

There was an amazing couple of online battles fought in the courts and the media in the early part of the 1990's. It's good to read what was actually said, instead of poor paraphrases from people who didn't actually experience it even second-hand. Come visit the site; I'll appreciate your time.

It's been said before but it's worth saying again, Textfiles.com is a terrific repository of a ton of the ol' BBS files. Go on and check out the coffee faq, woo!

So you are saying that her nasty libel was a punishment for him not talking? That sounds like blackmail.

Blackmail isn't a word that scares me, but I don't know if it applies in this case. "Punishment", however, very much does. If Hafner had said to Mitnick something along the lines of "How else is your side of the story going to appear in my book if you don't let me ask you a few questions?", then in some way that might be an unpleasant level of pressure, but nothing a reporter for Newsweek wouldn't be using in the daily course of business anyway. Many subjects don't want to be interviewed, especially when they know their cases are notorious and already overblown, and when the wife of the journalist who got your face on the front page of the New York Times as an FBI's Most Wanted Computer Hacker is there with a pen and a notebook, you already know the article/book being researched isn't going to laud your existence anyway. Mitnick, who was not exactly resplendent in monetary fortune, is not all that out of line to ask for compensation to tell his exclusive story to a couple of book authors who are going to rake in some bucks for splattering his name across the front of their primary-colored book on "Outlaws on the Computer Frontier". And Markoff/Hafner wouldn't be the first authors to not stay their hands in writing about their subject after they're turned down.

By the way, I'm not the first to delve into the intricacies of this debate. And I'm sure I won't be the last.

- Jason Scott
textfiles.com

In the chat transcript that you link to Hafner says that she tried to interview Mitnick, but he only wanted to talk to her for money, which she declined.

Yes, that's definitely her side of the story at that time. But if you dig a bit deeper, looking at writings by Mitnick and other references to her and Markoff's work on the book, a much uglier picture starts to appear.

I suppose I could spend some time writing another massive message with all the different sides of this story, but the fact is I've not met Hafner OR Mitnick, and only the two of them know all the details. Mitnick wanted to be recompensated for his story, which, considering that there was a biography being written about him that would garner no small amount of money for its writers, may or may not have been a reasonable request. Hafner and Markoff, unable to get this keystone interview for the portion of their books about Mitnick, went ahead and wrote in the style as if they had. That's particularly henious. You can read Cyberpunk and really feel like they got that interview. You don't find out otherwise until the end of the book, long after you've been treated to quote after quote after quote.

It's a very, very ugly situation, and not one you can toss off with a single sentence as if this somehow vindicates Hafner.

- Jason Scott
textfiles.com

Ohmigod, am I really about to agree (kind of) with Jon Katz?

It's not that hard to "kind of" agree with Jon Katz. He writes in such a general fashion and generates such a goulash of cross-purposed ideas that he's bound to hit on some aspect of a subject that you agree with. This is the same approach that works with prime-time television and Boy Bands, and speaks more for the banality of not taking a firm stand on anything, than anything else.

After looking at your links, and having read the book, I can't think of any instances in which she even mentions "hackers" or "people who share a love of computers in general", at least in my vocabulary. I assume you're using those terms as euphemisms for malicious crackers and halfwit script kiddies.

I use the term "Hacker" as a general-purpose term for all aspects of deep technology lovers/users. I personally think the "Hacker/Cracker" language war was lost a long time ago; and I do think the whole "geek" idea has turned out to be a good approach. If you would prefer, switch "Hacker" with "Geek" or "Technophile", and I think it still works. This is a bit of a language issue and is partially the work of 1980's era journalists, who also pioneered the use of "-gate" as a suffix meaning "scandal".

As for Cyberpunk, if you feel like doing so, try this experiment: Reread the "Kevin" chapter, and count how many times it mentions Kevin's weight, face, and eating. And ask yourself how, if Katie professed that she'd never actually met Mitnick, how she garnered such details as describing how he held a wine glass on page 85. You don't have to use the word "Hacker" to be anti-hacker; in fact, it's better if you don't. At least re-read the introduction to Cyberpunk and ask yourself what the writers are trying to do.

- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM>

Well, this puts me into an interesting position, Jon, because I like you even less than I do Katie Hafner. But until Ms. Hafner asks me why I don't like Jon Katz, I'll answer your questions.

1. Does she have to be a technology advocate to be on a panel?

No, she doesn't have to have any credentials at all to be on any panel, although one would hope the credentials one does have would lend themselves to whatever the subject is at hand. Her speaker bio for this conference certainly leads one to the impression that she is not only a technology writer, but has been one for 17 years. One would hope, in that sort of starry-eyed mistiness I get whenever I think about journalism, that someone who writes about a subject for such a long time would have some small respect for the figures within that subject, and more importantly would be focused on bringing to light the story that a group or subculture might have to tell. It's not altogether earth-shattering to note that there's people who like computers or who are really driven to create things, but it is important that someone who calls themselves a journalist help these folks express their motivations and story in a way that people not intimately involved with them will understand or at least have a clear picture of what these folks are about. If you're not using your skills as a writer to bring your audience an improved awareness of your subject, then you're just another sideshow barker, gaining a quick buck for your publishing masters by redrawing perfectly normal/human people as scary, freakish monsters bent on the destruction of all.

I see very little evidence that Katie doesn't "use" her subjects, a technique possibly learned from Markoff. She certainly doesn't bring, in her writing, the thoughts of the people she's writing about in the hacking/hacker community; she DOES do an awful lot of finger-pointing and telling you what they're thinking. This is a subtle difference, but important. These figures that she and Markoff choose to cover are alive, and quite capable of communicating, but she chooses instead to speculate on what they're thinking (which she generally doesn't know) and guesses at motivations. She doesn't quote; she narrates. This is not a very flattering approach, and often not all that accurate.

Nowhere in her writing, I might add, does she ever profess an understanding of the draw of technology. She might as well be talking about serial killers, pharmacists, or alligator wrestlers for all she brings to the table in writing about her subject. I can make a pretty assured bet that she would write about all these subcultures with the same distant lack of fundamental characterization. She can string sentences together, but she does her subject (and audience) no favors.

2. You really think she's anti-hacker. I didn't get that from her book at all..plse explain.

There's many examples, and remember she's written several books and articles on hackers and hacker culture, so you can't just say "her book". One burning example of her approach is her hatchet job on Mitnick in Cyberpunk, which is captured wonderfully in Charles Platt's review of Markoff's later book Takedown, where Hafner admits quite freely that she never talked to Mitnick before writing the book, and professes ignorance of her subject. Platt goes on to Focus on Markoff, worse than the two of you (Katz/Hafner) combined, but my insistence that she has not only a lack of understanding of the Hacker Subculture, but a fundamental distrust/dislike of this group of people, stays firm.

As for her upcoming book on The WELL, I'm one of those folks who has really cringed at the Canonization of The WELL by yourself and others, and another "Book of Revelations" onto the pile will no doubt add to that mythology, but I would say that I have very little faith that Hafner will capture anything but a surface glimmer of the motivations of the hacker psyche, assuming of course she actually touches on it at all in this book! There's actually a very good chance she could avoid that aspect entirely. But now we're running into a smorgasbord of conflicting dislikes I have about this whole rotten business that Hafner, Markoff, Yourself, and Littman have in what you've all done.

I apologize to any outside readers if my dislike of Katz has distorted the clarity of what I'm trying to get across. I'll probably cover it some time on my site, in better thought-out detail, starting from Richard Sandza and progressing forward.

- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM