4 ms·

The meaning of the word has changed somewhat; it was mostly about curiosity and exploration in the 80s/90s. Less of the economy was reliant on computers so ther

• busterarm 8y ago
  And minor celebrities within 2600's culture, namely Emmanuel and Cpt. Crunch used that celebrity to creep on teenaged dudes.
  • flycaliguy 8y ago
    I listened to Off The Hook for years. Is that true about Emmanuel? Dude used to own an old Bell van, super creepy if he was a phreak creep.
• jandrese 8y ago
  2600 was on the B&N newsracks for many many years. I think most people passed over it as a nerdy nerd thing.
• tptacek 8y ago
  That is not the meaning of "hacker" that attaches to security hackers and the EFnet #hack scene. (I was a part of that scene as well).
  • njepa 8y ago
    Largely regardless of ones definition of a hacker it was a subculture in the '80s, '90s and even early '00s. Because of the scarcity of information and resources there was motivation to organize, form groups and publish things in a way that you don't have today. A hacker was therefor at the time (regardless of the underlying activity) largely defined as someone who took part in hacker culture. In that sense it was about curiosity and exploration. You are trying to learn things that aren't readily available or necessarily considered worthwhile. Once the Internet became widely available there wasn't the same need for a culture to being able to do that (at least in theory). Who is considered a hacker therefor changes from people engaged in hacker culture to people who for example do information security. You can to some extent go to university, never talk to anyone and come out of there being considered a hacker. While previously being a hacker would be quite distinct from academia (though there would of course be overlap among people). As the point was that you were doing something different from what was already established. Whether that was coding, security or community. I wouldn't personally judge someone who was consider a nefarious hacker when hackers were more of a subculture, as most of the activities would be considered relatively mundane today and there motivations often benign. I would judge someone for running a dark market, distributing malware or even just run an unethical data business today however. As a further tangent, I do think it is curious how most people (myself included) thought that the plot of the movie "Hackers" was a bit ridiculous. But then 20 years later Maersk gets hit by ransomware.
    • tptacek 8y ago
      I come from the same scene Beto O'Rourke comes from (though, not having grown up in Texas or Boston, I only had cDc friends, not "membership" myself). I'm saying: there's the Steven Levy notion of "hackers", about exploration and getting extra slots on time-sharing computers and ordering sweet-and-sour bitter melon, and there's the Markoff and Hafner notion, about breaking into DEC for source code and owning up a sizable portion of the NSFnet Internet. cDc is from the Markoff/Hafner side of "hackerdom". (That's not a moral argument; there were good people among the Markoff/Hafner-type hackers, and holy shit were some of the white hats in the mid-1990s complete pricks).
      • kakarot 8y ago
        Why can't both of these groups be considered hackers?
        • tptacek 8y ago
          They both are, with differing connotations.
          • kakarot 8y ago
            So then what point are you even trying to make? If the lowest common denominator here is still a hacker, trying to make the argument that they aren't technically "hackers" doesn't make sense.
            • deleted 8y ago
              [deleted]
            • tptacek 8y ago
              I'm sorry, I'm not going to let you pretend like this is unclear. The debate over the meaning of the word "hacker" is the most famous semantic debate in this community, and one of the most famous on the Internet. The meaning connoted by the title of this site derives from the MIT hacker community. The meaning connoted by cDc is the the one from the movie Wargames. And this hasn't "changed since the 1980s"; the debate itself dates back that far. The argument isn't about whether Beto was a part of hacker culture at all. Clearly, he was. It just wasn't the hacker culture the OP was referring to.