4 ms·

For me, nothing more clearly signifies "the death of the hacker in the classic sense" than discussions about removing "dangerous" code from Github. I'm from an

by jrm4 4y ago

For me, nothing more clearly signifies "the death of the hacker in the classic sense" than discussions about removing "dangerous" code from Github. I'm from an older era, and it's continually bizarre to me that, apparently, nearly the entire collective hive mind of "tech" has forgotten that the point of Free and/or Open Source code is that you can spread it around everywhere and get it from different places.

derac 4y ago
Outside of this specific case, private platforms are free to moderate themselves as they wish. There are many other places to host code, including your own server. Edit: I did a bit of googling and didn't find evidence that the government told GitHub to do this. Please link if you have evidence ty.
- dopamean 4y ago
  You're right. And in this case "as they wish" is actually "as the US government wishes." I'm not sure they have a choice here.
  - derac 4y ago
    Source? Per the register: "The Register has asked GitHub to clarify its actions or cite the US government order naming these developers as SDNs. We've not heard back." This implies that they weren't told to do so by the government, but it's all speculation.
    - vageli 4y ago
      Their silence doesn't imply anything. Github may be under a gag order for all we know.
      - derac 4y ago
        That's why I said it's all speculation.
- jrm4 4y ago
  Correct, and I suppose what I'm perhaps lamenting is the lack of "Okay, looks like Github is in some ways useless if we want to preserve code freedom, what should we build to fix this?"
  - derac 4y ago
    There are countless alternatives - GitLab, Sourceforge, self-hosted GitLab, a tar file on Google Drive, etc.
    - jrm4 4y ago
      Absolutely. Again, what astounds me is the number of people who work in tech who seem to be unable to intuit this.
bananapub 4y ago
? it's removed because the US government told Github to do so. the US government tells lots of people to do lots of things. it told Phil Zimmerman to stop shipping PGP for a while. Debian and OpenBSD refused to do any crypto work in the US at all for like a decade because of this. it arrested Dmitry Sklyarov for the crime of angering Adobe. you're conflating "tech hive mind" with "most big tech companies are based in the US for tax/regulatory/staffing/VC reasons and so the US government will kill things that threaten it's goals".
- jrm4 4y ago
  I'm not talking about the part that the US Government's doing, I'm talking about the way in which "tech oriented* people respond. Back then it was much more "The internet routes around censorship, lets get to work" and today it's just like "Oh no what will we do without this code on Github?"
  - etchalon 4y ago
    We built the internet without Github, and yet, no one can do work on the internet without access to Github. Programmers have gotten so weirdly lazy.
  - danaris 4y ago
    There have always been "tech oriented" people who were mainstream rule-followers. There have always been "tech oriented" people who were iconoclastic anarchists. In the early days, before CS curricula were as widespread and mature as they are now, a lot more people who knew how to program were self-taught, which self-selects for a much more independent type of person. For what I suspect were cultural reasons (but don't have solid data on), they were also much more likely to be the type of person who is on the fringes of society, in the counter-culture, or at least something of a social outcast. I honestly doubt that the absolute number of anarchist- and libertarian-inclined "tech oriented" people has dropped since the '80s and '90s. It's just that there are now orders of magnitude more people who have some reasonable amount of tech understanding, many of whom are very much part of the mainstream and unwilling to put their comfortable lives at risk just to stick it to the man.
jltsiren 4y ago
You can probably find more of that hacker spirit in places that are less mainstream. Here on this forum, many people see employment in giant multinational corporations as something desirable. Many of them are primarily motivated by compensation. The site itself is affiliated with the tech startup culture, which every single government in the world has long recognized as important to the economy. And which they have tried to support to the best of their ability. In the world we are living in today, tech startups are probably the most conventional way of trying to get rich. If you are looking for alternative subcultures, you should try something little less conventional.
- sunshinekitty 4y ago
  Have any examples of less conventional spaces with this hacker spirit in tact?
  - octoberfranklin 4y ago
  - Velc 4y ago
    Crypto.
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      both communities (cryptography and cryptocurrency)
  - partytax 4y ago
    * https://ungleich.ch/ https://ungleich.ch/ * https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ * https://codeberg.org/ https://codeberg.org/ * https://www.ccc.de/ https://www.ccc.de/ * https://new.paralelnipolis.cz/ https://new.paralelnipolis.cz/ * your local hackerspace or makerspace
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by jrm4 4y ago

derac 4y ago

Outside of this specific case, private platforms are free to moderate themselves as they wish. There are many other places to host code, including your own server. Edit: I did a bit of googling and didn't find evidence that the government told GitHub to do this. Please link if you have evidence ty.

dopamean 4y ago
You're right. And in this case "as they wish" is actually "as the US government wishes." I'm not sure they have a choice here.
- derac 4y ago
  Source? Per the register: "The Register has asked GitHub to clarify its actions or cite the US government order naming these developers as SDNs. We've not heard back." This implies that they weren't told to do so by the government, but it's all speculation.
  - vageli 4y ago
    Their silence doesn't imply anything. Github may be under a gag order for all we know.
    - derac 4y ago
      That's why I said it's all speculation.
jrm4 4y ago
Correct, and I suppose what I'm perhaps lamenting is the lack of "Okay, looks like Github is in some ways useless if we want to preserve code freedom, what should we build to fix this?"
- derac 4y ago
  There are countless alternatives - GitLab, Sourceforge, self-hosted GitLab, a tar file on Google Drive, etc.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    Absolutely. Again, what astounds me is the number of people who work in tech who seem to be unable to intuit this.

bananapub 4y ago

? it's removed because the US government told Github to do so. the US government tells lots of people to do lots of things. it told Phil Zimmerman to stop shipping PGP for a while. Debian and OpenBSD refused to do any crypto work in the US at all for like a decade because of this. it arrested Dmitry Sklyarov for the crime of angering Adobe. you're conflating "tech hive mind" with "most big tech companies are based in the US for tax/regulatory/staffing/VC reasons and so the US government will kill things that threaten it's goals".

jrm4 4y ago
I'm not talking about the part that the US Government's doing, I'm talking about the way in which "tech oriented* people respond. Back then it was much more "The internet routes around censorship, lets get to work" and today it's just like "Oh no what will we do without this code on Github?"
- etchalon 4y ago
  We built the internet without Github, and yet, no one can do work on the internet without access to Github. Programmers have gotten so weirdly lazy.
- danaris 4y ago
  There have always been "tech oriented" people who were mainstream rule-followers. There have always been "tech oriented" people who were iconoclastic anarchists. In the early days, before CS curricula were as widespread and mature as they are now, a lot more people who knew how to program were self-taught, which self-selects for a much more independent type of person. For what I suspect were cultural reasons (but don't have solid data on), they were also much more likely to be the type of person who is on the fringes of society, in the counter-culture, or at least something of a social outcast. I honestly doubt that the absolute number of anarchist- and libertarian-inclined "tech oriented" people has dropped since the '80s and '90s. It's just that there are now orders of magnitude more people who have some reasonable amount of tech understanding, many of whom are very much part of the mainstream and unwilling to put their comfortable lives at risk just to stick it to the man.

jltsiren 4y ago

You can probably find more of that hacker spirit in places that are less mainstream. Here on this forum, many people see employment in giant multinational corporations as something desirable. Many of them are primarily motivated by compensation. The site itself is affiliated with the tech startup culture, which every single government in the world has long recognized as important to the economy. And which they have tried to support to the best of their ability. In the world we are living in today, tech startups are probably the most conventional way of trying to get rich. If you are looking for alternative subcultures, you should try something little less conventional.

sunshinekitty 4y ago
Have any examples of less conventional spaces with this hacker spirit in tact?
- octoberfranklin 4y ago
- Velc 4y ago
  Crypto.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    both communities (cryptography and cryptocurrency)
- partytax 4y ago
  * https://ungleich.ch/ https://ungleich.ch/ * https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ * https://codeberg.org/ https://codeberg.org/ * https://www.ccc.de/ https://www.ccc.de/ * https://new.paralelnipolis.cz/ https://new.paralelnipolis.cz/ * your local hackerspace or makerspace

deleted 4y ago

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