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Remembering Our Roots
corky6921 writes: "I recently stumbled onto a fascinating article that was written by John Perry Barlow, a founder of the EFF and an early member of the WELL. It was written in 1990, but manages to bring up many of the issues that we still have today, namely "What are data and what is free speech? How does one treat property which has no physical form
and can be infinitely reproduced?" This article discusses the history of free software, the hacker movement, and the burgeoning difference between Internet newbies and Internet gurus. An important read for all who want to know the viewpoint of law enforcement regarding the Internet, as well as to understand the increasing paranoia from the U.S. government about "criminals" who steal copyrighted material." It occurs to me that a lot of people on the 'net today probably don't know anything about the events Barlow is describing, so I think this is worth posting even if it is 'old news' to some of you.
Having seen "hire the hacker" security consultancies in action, I can guess at the real reason.
99% of 'hackers' are complete idiots, whose only real skill is self promotion. And 100% of those who end up getting caught are in this category.
When will you people learn? Writing transactional clustered systems is hard. High performance 3D graphics is hard. Writing buffer overrun exploits is not. It just takes some basic assembly knowledge, and lots of free time.
Right on brother. At our high school the skaters, punks and geeks all hung out together because none of us had any respect for the image-conscious preppies or the redneck headbangers, and they admitted no respect for us. I was a skater and a geek; I remember practicing ollie-to-wall-rides behind the school while pondering the best way to go about porting a PASCAL D&D character generation program to assembler for class (yes, I had a cool CS teacher) :)
Odd to see someone like Barlow dissing skaters, just ignorance I guess.
There are many interesting discussions on this subject here.
Artistic works are also information. As someone recently demonstrated with the DeCSS code you could take anything on your computer (a PNG of a painting, an MP3 of a song) and break it down to a prime number. There, it's a prime number. Copyright that, I dare you.
Copyright and patents are dead, they just don't know it yet. It may be centuries before they're gone, but leave us they will.
ahh the good old days I'm with ya. I know there are deeper issues associated with this topic, but I just could not get over the nostalgia that pervades this article.
It reminds me of the days when I felt violated upon finding my archived posts on the Steve Jackson BBS were property of the Treasury Dept., when busy signals and 30 minute login time limits influenced the flavor of my posts, and when the Z-modem protocol was a near-miracle.
Please allow me to second your "Ahh... the good old days."
I can see the fnords!
Good (now historial) book - unforunately, it appears to be totally out of print, so none of you young 'uns can be enlightened...
Chances are you'll find Bruce Sterlings "The Hacker Crackdown" interesting as well.
It's a well-written book about the hacker/cracker community in the early 90'ies and Operation Sundevil.
/Styx
With names like Acid Phreak, it's good to see some historical evidence that skript kiddies have been around for a long time.
:sigh:
The Hacker Crackdown is a great text that is relevant still today, umpteen internet years later.
How does one treat property which has no physical form and can be infinitely reproduced?
The way I see it, any information that can be reproduced over and over is the same as a thought. You can't stop it, because I've already told 10 people about it, they'll tell 10 people and so on.
I don't think this applies to artistic works such as graphics and music, but any type of information or code should be viewed as "speech" or "thoughts".
#include <stddiscl.h>
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
"The first concept of modern jurisprudence to have arrived in Cyberspace
seems to have been Zero Tolerance."
I don't think that this idea should come as a surprise to anyone, nor should it surprise anyone that this attitude persists among law enforcement/corporate interests (the division between the two is a whole other rant I'll leave alone) with respect to the Internet. No matter how much lip service a government (esp. its police and law enforcement forces) give to the idea of freedom, the corrupt and erode it every chance they get. Our freedom is not in the best interest of the police. We view our freedom as the right to do whatever we want, unless it can be proven that we are harming someone. Police (in my experience) tend to look at it from the more authoritarian perspective that we should be allowed to do only what they approve. This is the fundamental difference in approach that is at the ehart of so many of these conflicts. I think that the constitution of the United States (and especially the Bill of Rights) were written with the first, more Libertarian approach in mind. The government naturally would disagree, since this runs counter to their best interest. Therefore, with every new medium, every new frontier, they attempt to use the ambiguity of the new situation to crush their authoritarian views on the people. And the people fight back. It's the way it's always been (especially in the United States). This struggle will continue forever, but as long as it's stil going on there's still hope...we haven't lost our voice.
"Truth is like a tragedy" -Coal Chamber
Thank you, corky6921 and Michael, for the memory. Barlow's screed reminded me of my brush with the FBI in the NuPrometheus affair.
First, some background: I've been attending the Hacker's Conferences for more years than I care to admit, and my name and picture were included in the directory for the conference. At the time of NuPrometheus, I was working for InfoWorld magazine in some capacity or another. InfoWorld was one of the places that got the Color QuickDraw code. I'm located at Lake Tahoe, in Incline Village, Nevada, which means I'm out of the "Bay area" (with apologies to the Boston folks here, as well as other parts of the world that call themselves the "Bay area"). In other words, by Barlow's analysis I was a sure target for interview.
It took the FBI nearly a year before they got around to me. Like Barlow, my agent (whose name I cheerfully forgot when he retired two months later) was completely clueless. He read from a sheet sent by the SF office a list of 10 questions, and dutifully wrote down my answers. Then the agent put down his sheet, his pencil, and his ill manners and just started asking concept questions. It was three hours, with only the first 30 minutes being illness-making.
He was so far out of water it wasn't funny.
The SF office called me a week later to follow up on some of my answers; that call lasted all of 20 minutes. That's the last I've heard from the FBI, and it's been a decade since I heard the word NuPrometheus.
At least they didn't break down the door and cart all the electronics away.
Probably off-topic but when i read the article's heading I thought about when I started becoming a nerd =), stuff like .Mods , RemoteAccess BBS' , DEMO's , etc etc - kinda like the stuff on www.ojuice.net
ahh the good old days =).
--
Jon - TheSpork
Mark Abene (Phiber Optik) Sentence: one year in jail
Kevin Poulsen (Dark Dante) -Sentence: four years in prison, three-year ban from computer use, fine
"My mother works for Microsoft now. A whole other cult."
I was severely on the net when this all happened. Hackers were everywhere. The government was all freaked out, worrying about J. Random Hacker starting WWIII. Meanwhile, I was a college student who used to work for a small game company run by a guy named Steve Jackson. One afternoon, the Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games, looking for evidence (that they never found) about a game called Hacker (for a lot more information, read the absolutely essential book "The Hacker Crackdown," which has been mentioned here more than once). The next week, I woke up one Saturday morning, fired up the computer, and was ready to have a nice easy morning of cartoons and Usenet. There was a knock on the door. Looking out the peephole, I saw two young men in suits, carrying briefcases. Being a rational sort, I immediately thought "The Secret Service!" I opened the door.... "Hello! Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior...?
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.
... is very difficult for information as it is neither rivalable nor excludable. Reading information does not deplete the source of information and you cannot prevent another person from using that information. Our traditional concept of common-law property has been built on these two assumptions, leading to the economics of scarcity and pricing accordingly. Given there is infinite information, artificial scarcity is a short-term illusion as sooner or later, a substitute comes up (e.g. opensource Linux for OS). Ultimately social probium (ie peer pressure) is the only solution for anti-social activities. Stealing data (unless a genuine trade secret), apart from the mebarassment factor, is rather self-defeating as a fair whack of it is useless (e.g. nobody worries about cron-logs). IF you make the assumption that traditional property rights are rather suspect, then the only thing you have left are people's time/space/convenience preference which you can charge for.
... identity theft is one, a good reputation (the only real currency in the hacker world) can be destroyed so easily. The relative anonymous nature of the internet is another (why do so many people choose handles?) gives rise to behaviour (e.g. written abuse that you wouldn't dare say to the same person face-to-face. However, they are not technical problems ... most societies/groups/tribes evolve ettiquette as a means of smoothing interaction. Emoticons is one example in the current internet incarnation. I suspect there will be others (e.g. picons=personal icons). Another question is how do you define (and defend personal space), not merely from criminal but commercial intrusion. Have an ad pop up in the middle of sending virtual snuggles with your better half is not exactly a mood-enchancer. How does one set boundaries that everyone can recognise? The concept of justice ... if someone transgresses, how can corrective behaviour be applied? Given that most people have actually a very small social circle, coming in contact with a mob of (perceived) social misfits is shock (and they probably think you're a uncool square). Gates communities are comforting precisely for the fact that they reinforce pre-existing biases (no matter how ill-concieved).
However, there are some new worries
Technical hacks are no solution to social cracks.
LL
I hate to sound like Katz, but things really are changing. The thing that tech types have which many people don't is a passion for communication and information. Ideas are shared faster and with more clarity in the tech subculture than in any other group. Eventually, those ideas started leaking into mainstream culture, and we now see concepts and opinions once expressed only in text files passed around BBSes being expressed on CNN and in Time magazine. Napster, Linux, Open Source, Encryption are all words being discussed in restaurants, classrooms, workplaces, not just your buddy's basement over a game of Dungeons and Dragons.
And it all started out with guys like John Perry Barlow, who wrote things like that way, way back in the day.
Got Rhinos?