Slashdot Mirror
Anthropologist Spends Three Years Living With Hackers
concealment writes "Coleman, an anthropologist who teaches at McGill University, spent three years studying the community that builds the Debian GNU/Linux open source operating system and hackers in the Bay Area. More recently, she's been peeling away the onion that is the Anonymous movement, a group that hacks as a means of protest — and mischief. When she moved to San Francisco, she volunteered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — she believed, correctly, that having an eff.org address would make people more willing to talk to her — and started making the scene. She talked free software over Chinese food at the Bay Area Linux User Group's monthly meetings upstairs at San Francisco's Four Seas Restaurant. She marched with geeks demanding the release of Adobe eBooks hacker Dmitry Sklyarov. She learned the culture inside-out."
will be studying the grooming habits of Orthodox Stallmanites
..she was not burnt by the hot grits.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
According to the general comments with the article, the book has a creative commons license. The author commented that she will release a copy soon, when she fixes the website to go with it.
Maybe you should have actually, ya know, read some things. The book is being released under Creative Commons and she's putting up a site to distribute it. But since you just want mod points for being a smartass...carry on
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
You introduced a female into a development group? No wonder Debian didn't get anything done for the past couple of years.
TL;DR - she's writing a book and wants us all to know, and Wired is cooperating. It's a fluff piece. Apparently we should buy it when it comes out.
As the sibling posts also say, you wrote a really bad summary. I think you just wanted to be cynical, or troll.
Aside from the fact that she'll apparently release the book copyleft, there's also the fact that it's a scholarly work - a good way to lose money.
A better summary would be something like "Anthropologist studies nerds, finds that they have an interesting culture and a clear interest in civil liberties issues."
But of course that isn't relevant to Slashdot. There are no nerds here, and no one cares about civil liberties here, right? We just discuss computer parts endlessly, right? I hope some smarter moderators show up soon.
"Did I just get old? Or did slashdot really gone down the toilet? Both?"
Generational turn-over. New teens/young adults replace older people with more knowldge = slashdot turns to shit. Welcome to getting older. As you get older you get more knowledge and young people have less life experience/knowledge and hence you have cycles and peaks of greatness and mediocrity. It doesn't help that the net has become so mainstream and children of the next generation know how to use the web so you get morons of all intelligence levels everywhere now. Where as the nerds used to congregate around their favorite sites and not have to worry too much about the IQ level of the readers this is no longer true. The internet is essentially TV now.
Season veterans who have spent literally * DECADES completely immersed in the hacker scene still dare not make any sweeping declaration about the nature of the hacker world.
And here we have, a person who only spent 3 fricking years (as she put it "researching") comes out with her "immense knowledge" of the hacker subculture.
My own experience told me that, while hackers in general do share "common traits", hackers from one community differ from hackers from another community, in term of way of thought, habits, etc.
The term "community" means a lot as well - as the word not only define geographic difference, but also the different fields (shared interests) the hackers are working on.
I still remember when the movie scene started to take interest in hackerism they had actors playing stereotypical thick-glassed, talkative, soprano-toned hackers, and they all come with lousy hairdo - As if we are like that.
I've known some of the greatest hackers and from the outside they look normal - just fucking absolutely normal.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
smash the patriarchy
You have to pay extra for that kind of thing.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-04-11/
vi +
I think the comments here show something clearly:
While some antropologists may be interested in understanding hacker culture, the interest is not reciprocal.
Or maybe, as we all get older and wisdomful, the relative quality of Slashdot seems to go down. We have a chance here to educate the next generation of nerds, let's do it!
Tomorrow is another day...
"Slashdot has always been full of shit, getting older just means you can recognise it a lot faster."
Not quite, I can look at trends in the younger generation that worship Steam and DRM where-as most of the olderschool PC gamers during the 90's detest DRM. Earlier this decade if you made pro-steam worshiping DRM statements you'd be downvoted to oblivion. Now with younger mods/steam fans you see many mods give +5 insightful to more and more glowing comments on Steam DRM. This is a generational transformation and you see it in the modding trends of what gets modded up/down or just left alone/ignored.
Now this doesn't mean all young adults/teens/kids like DRM it just means kids tend to accept what they grow up with and don't question what has always been there. Think about the differences of growing up on command line operating systems like DOS vs say windows xp or windows 7 with fully functional web browsers plus easy-mode steamstore. Huge difference. Night and day kind of difference.
Kids/teens don't know what has been lost/don't care. People who grew up during the earlier gaming (pre online only games) era are hugely disappointed by the downright criminal changes in the industry because they WATCHED the industry grow from when it was tiny so they have superior understanding and perspective. They were there during game-modding golden years of Quake/duke/doom/etc that has been smothered (Supcom 2 was locked down and made difficult to mod at publisher request). Games like diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 have been increasingly fucked with because of publishers greed.
Not only that, kids are ripe for corporate PR manipulation. Just see this article here where the talk about 'engineering' psychological changes via PR campaigns for the acceptance of F2P / online DRM.
Quote:"But the most important aspect is there is a psychological transformation of the customers and the publishers that has to happen before everything is F2P on every platform. We are promoting these steps with other titles we're doing right now in our company."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-12-ditching-far-cry-piracy-gameplay-and-just-about-breaking-even-crytek-on-the-ups-and-downs-of-the-crysis-series
She uses 'I was like', 'they were like' an awful lot. That, to me, is not the sign of an intelligent person.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
As a member of the "Steam-worshipping younger generation", I feel I should explain my position. A lot of what you say is right. But there are a few points you get wrong.
I don't love Steam because it's DRM. I love it despite the DRM it contains.
You see, I still view DRM as an evil. However, it is not an intolerable one, nor is it a philosophical one. It is, perhaps, a necessary one. As a thought experiment, suppose there is some perfect DRM system - it always stops the software from being used by non-paying customers, and always allows paying ones to use it, regardless of internet connectivity, system profile, phase of the moon, etc. Don't ask how it works - it's magic or something. But it always lets the right people use it, and always stops the wrong ones. I, and most of "my generation", would not object to it. The developer does have a reasonable expectation that they will profit from their work, which DRM can help to protect.
DRM does two things - it reduces the number of non-paying users, and it drives away otherwise-paying customers due to the inconvenience of it. The "perfect DRM" I posited reaches the limits of those numbers - non-paying users are reduced to zero, and the only people it drives away are those with a deep philosophical opposition to DRM (who are, I think, a relative minority). Actual DRM systems perform worse than the ideal, of course. Some, in fact, drive away more paying customers than non-paying, and ultimately cause a profit loss, not gain.
Steam is one of the better ones. You can view it as a compromise between two positions. On the one hand, you have the publishers, who want maximum control over their product, as a corollary to their desire for maximum profit. On the other hand, you have the customers, who want maximum convenience. Steam provides significantly less restriction than many publishers would like - it does not encrypt things, it allows offline play, and it is easily broken. Many publishers supplement it with additional DRM, like SecuROM or GFWL (which are, in fact, noted on the store page), because they don't think it goes far enough. On the other side, Steam DRM is significantly more convenient than any other system I have seen. And Steam also offers significantly more features than a standard DRM system, enough that I would argue that the DRM is just one component of the system.
Steam is fundamentally a content distribution system - the goal is to put software in the hands of as many paying customers as possible. The DRM is secondary to that - it's enough to discourage casual piracy, but anyone who really wants to not pay for their games can bypass it. Rather easily, even - there are fake version of the Steam authentication servers that simply authorizes you for every game, so if you can get the files, you can run the game. If Steam is ever shut down for any reason (and Valve doesn't follow through on their promise to release a DRM-removal tool themselves), I fully plan to use such a server.
For me, Steam is about at the limit of how "inconvenient" DRM can be before I stop using it. In fact, when combined with some other DRM, I refuse to use it. I try to avoid stuff that uses GFWL unless it's a really good game, and I've been avoiding EA (and Bioware in particular) due to their DRM constantly fucking up.
I don't use any other similar services, simply because all but one of them contain more DRM than I will tolerate. The only other one I would consider is GOG, but I simply haven't had a reason to buy anything from them yet.
"Your" generation seems to have refused to compromise, on both sides of the DRM fight. "My" generation is willing to compromise, generally as long as it is an actual compromise, where both sides give up some things in order to get others.
PS: I also think you're being a bit factually inaccurate when you said that old games didn't have DRM. They most certainly did. I remember not being able to install Warcraft II off a copied disc - it has to be installed from an original, although a copy will w