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Hacker Culture
Let me first recapitulate two brief preludes that figure prominently in Hacker Culture:
- Around 1970 John Draper discovered that a freebie whistle included with Captain Crunch cereal sounded a tone that allowed him, as a literal whistle-blower, to take control of the phone line. Sounding the frequency of 2600 Hz, the high-pitched toy quickly sprouted a cottage industry of small electronic devices called "blue boxes" (first built by Draper) that emitted the commanding tune. Shortly thereafter, in 1971, Steven Jobs and Steven Wozniak built hordes of the boxes and sold them to students in the Berkeley dorms. Jobs and Wozniak would go on to build and found Apple computers by employing the same principle: take existing knowledge and turn it to profit by, eventually, making appropriation proprietary. (Slashdot readers are no doubt familiar with the fact that Mac OS X is not much more than an "aqualicious" -- and expensive -- wrap of FreeBSD.)
- The first personal computer was arguably the Altair. It came as a raw DIY kit that required soldering for assembly and programming to make it work. An early success in coding came in the form of Altair BASIC, a programming language adopted from mainframe systems by Paul Allen and Bill Gates. Unlike other hobbyists who shared their exploits freely, Allen and Gates decided to charge for their adaptation, but were quickly thwarted in their race to the goldmine by the sharing of software at computer clubs, an action that prompted Gates to call fellow developers thieves. For these hobbyists, the notion that programs could be secret and had to be purchased violated the tradition of programming as an ongoing collaboration. The births of our two major personal computing platforms, Mac and PC, consequently both stem from significant changes in the relations between openness and secrecy, sharing and ownership.
In Hacker Culture, Douglas Thomas provides a rewarding account of what preceded and followed these developments, charting the evolution of cracking and hacking from early yet seasoned programmers, generally found at Ivy League departments or under ARPA jurisdiction, to the demonized teenage villains of the 1990s. Although the term "hacking" has become somewhat of an umbrella misnomer to cover diverse behaviors bridging half a century, Thomas does it remarkable justice through, as he puts it, "an effort to understand hacking as an activity that is conditioned as much by its history as by the technology that it engages." To this end, he seeks to engage the role of hacking from an expansive and useful perspective, covering the hacker relationship to technology and society, representation of the hacker through both mainstream media and outlets such as TAP, Phrack and 2600, as well as the juridical construction of the criminalized hacker, which is basically a fancy term for Kafkaesque travesties of justice (the cases of Kevin Mitnick and Chris Lamprecht are analyzed in depth).
Hacker Culture is thankfully not a stylized look at subculture, as an embryonic cult aspiring to become marketable culture, but rather a much broader view of the increasingly computerized networks that comprise society. It is an intelligent exploration beyond the package-design boxes of software, covering our documents, and the product-design casings of computers, housing our institutions. Seen from, or via, an autonomous, skilled perspective on the command line, Hacker Culture provides an indispensable insight into a history of computing that it has become increasingly important to understand for computer users of all levels and abilities. As such, it is perhaps best suited, and intended, for those who do not frequent sites like this, but even pundits with Slashdot bookmarked since it was listed in the root will presumably enjoy the thoughtful analysis Thomas brings to the subject.
A lingering criticism, not exactly directed at the book, is that this publication truly marks the entry of the "hacker" into the realm of academia, where this figure will be dissected ad nauseam along with other minority reports concerned with the so-called radical fringes. Earlier blockbusters on the hacker topic, like Steven Levy's eponymous Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution from 1994, had a certain "sensationalist" appeal that, akin to William Gibson's Neuromancer, drew more of their leitmotifs from classic frontier westerns than cultural criticism. Instead of reading about jacking in and cracking from these primal sources, we got a ton of obligatory theory that read between the lines and reported on the findings at twice the length. Thomas, although he writes both eloquently and lucidly in an entertaining style, is fundamentally connecting the dots of theoretical writing as a second-generation commentator, frequently quoting Levy, for example, and at times the discussion embarks on rather redundant pontifications as a result. (Recall how you can guess the subject of most connect-the-dots outlines, while it usually takes a child careful tracing to number 147 or so before a shriek of joy recognizes the rabbit.) Such misgivings, which are essentially more inspired by the predictable rhetorical mode of academia than this book, are however relatively minor compared to the welcome prospects of actually having some core ideas about free information and open-source computing distributed to a wider audience.
A question remains about what will happen to the figure of the hacker now that we have had, and discussed, both Matthew Broderick, in Hollywood's War Games, and Kevin Mitnick, in jail. In Hacker Culture, both lay claim to capture and coach the collective imagination with regards to what informed autonomy means and the paybacks it receives. Perhaps the future, following Hacker Culture, will prepare a better balance between revered stardom, obscene bankrolls, criminal records and lone isolation cells?
Reviewer Are Flagan has trouble remembering his own passwords. You can purchase Hacker Culture from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Why oh why do we have to go over this again?
figure of the hacker now that we have had, and discussed, both Matthew Broderick, in Hollywood's War Games, and Kevin Mitnick, in jail.
Matthew Broderick, in WarGames, and Kevin Mitnick, in 'low security but you still get pounded up the ass' prison, were not hackers.. they were crackers.
Hackers are friendly quiche eating Pascal programmers and Mac users, whereas crackers are naughty people who do a lot of hacking.
Crackers are also quite nice with some cheese on them.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I wish there was a book that did an enertaining job of chronicling the culture surrounding the people that made the IT world what it is today that did not refer to HACKERS, get them mixed up with CRACKERS and did not play exclusively to the culture of personality around Gates and Jobs.
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Sure, Gates and Jobs should play a big part in chronicle of history around the progress in the computer industry and software industries, sure. However, what about Bill Joy, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie?
They played a big part too. It was not in the PC world sure but it impacted Universities and Corporations on a very large scale. What about talking over the rise of Open Source in a way that did not either make it sound like a magical revolution cheering it forward as the only future or making sound like some horrible fifties commie plot? What about going over it in a detached objective fashion while still capturing the personality and excitement people have?
I am still looking for a good history of the Hacker/IT/Computer Revolution that takes in interesting truly balanced approach.
Does anyone have a good example?
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ACK
History loses to coloquial usage. "hacker" now has a common meaning: one who exploits flaws in computer security to gain access to computers and networks or to disable them. and a sub-culture definition among computer programmers and administrators: (a) a person who is primarily driven to explore technology by curiosity, and who indulges this curiosity in order to learn, often without regard to social convention (b) as (a), but used among computer programmers to define a type of programmer, specifically
These two sets of definitions were caused (as best I can tell) when the latter definition was used to describe Robert Morris Jr. to the popular media. Because Mr. Morris was responsible for the largest-scale computer intrusion yet measured in 1987 (the so-called "Internet Worm"), the media assumed that this term refered only to invasive and/or unauthorized "hacking", which was not true, but turned out to be too subtle a distinction to convey to the press.
The attempt, after the fact, to promulgate the term cracker to replace this mistaken definition of hacker met only limited success among those who already used hacker according to its traditional meaning.
What complicated the situation even more was the advent of the so-called "script kiddies", a sub-culture of disaffected youth who did not match the (comparitively altruistic) historical definition of hacker, but did meet the new, media-driven definition. This schism was forever imortalized in the movie, "Hackers", which besides being a terribly written movie also contained non-classic-hacker script kiddies, idealized to the level of pop heroes.
So, IMHO, when you say "hacker", you mean the media definition unless you are among a sub-culture which would recognize the classic meaning. Get over it.
Aaron Sherman - Hacker at large (and large hacker:)
fact ? eh ? If the whole of OS X is not much more than a wrap of FreeBSD then how come the good GNUstep folks are still struggling to complete a workalike after nearly a decade ?
There is a heck of a lot more to OS X than just Darwin you know , just like there is a whole lot more to GNU than just linux.
-- Oh Well