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I can tell already this won't be a popular sentiment around here. Also, I want to preface this by saying I wasn't around in bbs era, and maybe my reaction woul

I can tell already this won't be a popular sentiment around here. Also, I want to preface this by saying I wasn't around in bbs era, and maybe my reaction would be different if I had been. But this kind of irks me: "...ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?" Did the author ever take a look behind the eyes of the people whose systems he was breaking into and wonder why they didn't react well to having their privacy violated? Perhaps I'm being unfair, but what I get out of it is "I'm smarter than you, so I'm entitled to do whatever I want." And I get that the author was treated poorly in school, and he has my sympathy for that (I was too). But that attitude of entitled superiority is dangerous. It can and has been used to justify really awful things. I don't think this manifesto should be lionized.

api 14y ago
It's a valid point. I have a confession though: I was a teenage hacker (in the cracking sense). I suspect many people around here were. I didn't break stuff or steal stuff on purpose, or have explicit malicious intent. I practiced what is sometimes called "catch and release" hacking. It was a game... to me at least. I'm sure it was an annoyance to the ones on the other end, but I was 14-15 and wasn't thinking like that. But boy did I ever learn a lot. By the time I made it to college, I knew more than a lot of the CS seniors. So much that I didn't bother majoring in CS. I wanted to learn something else. At 18 I knew: C, C++, 80x86 assembler, shell script, Perl, how to compose and validate an IP packet, the OSI networking model, basic protocol design, peer to peer protocol design concepts, and quite a bit about cryptography including how to properly construct an authenticated cryptographic envelope and the importance of choosing the right block cipher mode of operation. Password cracking led me to hash functions and SALTs, which led me down the rabbit hole, and I got fascinated with crypto. At one point I worked through the math of Diffie-Hellman and RSA. It was very hard stuff, and required that I delve into a lot of deep math that was way beyond me at 15 going on 16. But knowing it made me more of a badass hacker ninja. Cause it was crypto, and crypto was big time hacker stuff. When I comprehended the one-way trap door function behind Diffie-Hellman I felt like I'd stolen a car and gone joyriding with the archetypal cool kids. More than that, I found that my knowledge was more hands-on than the CS students I encountered. I not only thought in code, but thought in networks. To this day networking and network protocols are completely natural to me, while otherwise very good programmers tend to gnash their teeth at the thought of implementing them. Also, for some reason this network experience translated right into multithreaded coding. Working with threads, even at a low level, with all the blocking and priority inversion issues, is no sweat. Network hacking made me comfortable with non-determinism. I highly doubt I'd know this without the challenge of hacking (sense 2). But wait, you say... why don't we just create a corewar-style game? Why can't schools have Defcon-style attack/defend tournaments. I wouldn't have touched this with a ten foot pole. No rebellion, no interest. That would have been an "organized activity" put forward by adults. Blech. Honestly, a similar ethos got me interested in startups much later. Startups sort of felt rebellious in a way... like little scrappy hack-trepreneurs sticking it to the big guys. It was when startups popped their shirt collars and went all douchey and "mainstream" that I lost interest.
- loydb 14y ago
  I like the phrase 'catch and release.' We always worked from the philosophy of 'do no harm.' I can certainly see the top poster's side of things -- there are a lot of issues that I feel much differently about as a near-50-year-old than I did as a teenager. For what it's worth, I was never trying to provide moral authority for hacking in the perjorative sense when I wrote it, I was just venting... But you're right, the rebellion was the delicious topping on the technical exploration sundae. By the time I outgrew the illegal portion of things, the technical 'hacking' imperative was firmly established in me, and has continued to this day.
  - api 14y ago
    Oh sure. I'm sure what I did was incredibly annoying to someone, if not downright dangerous. I don't know what the solution is though. We've denuded our society of independent ways of knowing accessible to the young: hacking, cracking, dangerous chemistry sets, and so on. On one hand there are "good" reasons for this. On the other hand: where will the next generation of engineers come from if they can't combine learning with individuation? I really have to underscore this: as a teenager, I had zero to negative interest in anything sanctioned by school or by the adults I was surrounded with. It was by definition lame, constraining, and uninteresting.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  There's one area you can still perform full attacks on, without worrying about getting in trouble for attacking networks: cracking software. It's not entirely the same skillset, but there's still a rush from disassembling and figuring out exactly how to patch it (and with style), or reverse the key validation function to write a keygen. But at least it's still "wild" as in they are real systems generated by others, not an "organized activity".
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  The OP criticizes the manifesto for essentially saying "I'm smarter than you, so I'm entitled to do whatever I want"... and your response is essentially "That's true, but let's face it, I am really, really, really a lot smarter than you." I'd venture that you missed the point.
sp332 14y ago
Lots of stuff I didn't like happened to me when I was growing up. I don't mean abusive stuff just unpleasant stuff, normal school and high school stuff. Including having my privacy violated on a regular basis by teachers and other authority figures. So while I could understand that other people might also not like having their privacy violated, it seemed like it was the status quo. I had a very hard time learning what was OK and what was off limits because of the double standard applied to kids vs. adults.
- api 14y ago
  That's an excellent point too. Kids treat each other like complete and utter crap in school, and teachers often aren't all that much better from a kid's point of view. When I was a teenager I didn't give much thought to other peoples' convenience, privacy, etc., and I disagree that this is an inevitable part of being a teenager. I think it was because others (both peers and adults) did not treat me with respect, respect my privacy, etc.
jdietrich 14y ago
Ask yourself this: Would any of those people think twice about violating my privacy? My high school had no qualms about searching my locker or my bag. My ISP does deep-packet inspection and will hand over my logs to any LEA that asks, without a warrant. Practically every company I do business with resells my data in some way, to their benefit and my detriment. The vast majority of institutions have no respect whatsoever for my privacy, so I have no respect for theirs.
- nsmartt 14y ago
  I upvoted you because I agree with the majority of your comment, but, to be satisfied, I have to say the following: Make sure that any company you damage is one of those institutions with no respect for privacy.
  - ludston 14y ago
    Or, even better would be: Make sure that you don't damage any company.
    - xorbyte 14y ago
      This depends on intent. I don't want to confound exploration with activism, but there are many instances where damaging a company may be the ethical thing to do. In the long run, avoiding damage is in the hacker's continued interest to be able to maintain a 'beachhead' through stealth; but where privacy and 'fairness' are concerned, avoiding damage isn't always desirable.
subsystem 14y ago
Of course with any subculture there's going to be some amount of superiority. I would still claim that there's a lot more arrogance in the IT industry today, even or maybe especially among celebrated companies like Google, Apple and Facebook.
gnu8 14y ago
You have to keep in mind this was a different time. There were no Free unixlike operating systems with full source code available, and no immensely powerful PCs to run them on. There was no world wide web with every bit of information available. There were few practical ways of learning how computers worked except by breaking into them and studying them.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ebertx 14y ago
Yeah, I agree. I like the aspect of curiosity, but I wish the author focused on it without the overpowering tone of bitterness and resentment. Hacking and making are positive things. It'd be easy for someone to miss that when reading this manifesto.
- loydb 14y ago
  Well, it was written at a point that I was feeling pretty damn bitter and resentful... :)
  - marshray 14y ago
    Damn hackers. They're all alike. :-)

api 14y ago

It's a valid point. I have a confession though: I was a teenage hacker (in the cracking sense). I suspect many people around here were. I didn't break stuff or steal stuff on purpose, or have explicit malicious intent. I practiced what is sometimes called "catch and release" hacking. It was a game... to me at least. I'm sure it was an annoyance to the ones on the other end, but I was 14-15 and wasn't thinking like that. But boy did I ever learn a lot. By the time I made it to college, I knew more than a lot of the CS seniors. So much that I didn't bother majoring in CS. I wanted to learn something else. At 18 I knew: C, C++, 80x86 assembler, shell script, Perl, how to compose and validate an IP packet, the OSI networking model, basic protocol design, peer to peer protocol design concepts, and quite a bit about cryptography including how to properly construct an authenticated cryptographic envelope and the importance of choosing the right block cipher mode of operation. Password cracking led me to hash functions and SALTs, which led me down the rabbit hole, and I got fascinated with crypto. At one point I worked through the math of Diffie-Hellman and RSA. It was very hard stuff, and required that I delve into a lot of deep math that was way beyond me at 15 going on 16. But knowing it made me more of a badass hacker ninja. Cause it was crypto, and crypto was big time hacker stuff. When I comprehended the one-way trap door function behind Diffie-Hellman I felt like I'd stolen a car and gone joyriding with the archetypal cool kids. More than that, I found that my knowledge was more hands-on than the CS students I encountered. I not only thought in code, but thought in networks. To this day networking and network protocols are completely natural to me, while otherwise very good programmers tend to gnash their teeth at the thought of implementing them. Also, for some reason this network experience translated right into multithreaded coding. Working with threads, even at a low level, with all the blocking and priority inversion issues, is no sweat. Network hacking made me comfortable with non-determinism. I highly doubt I'd know this without the challenge of hacking (sense 2). But wait, you say... why don't we just create a corewar-style game? Why can't schools have Defcon-style attack/defend tournaments. I wouldn't have touched this with a ten foot pole. No rebellion, no interest. That would have been an "organized activity" put forward by adults. Blech. Honestly, a similar ethos got me interested in startups much later. Startups sort of felt rebellious in a way... like little scrappy hack-trepreneurs sticking it to the big guys. It was when startups popped their shirt collars and went all douchey and "mainstream" that I lost interest.

loydb 14y ago
I like the phrase 'catch and release.' We always worked from the philosophy of 'do no harm.' I can certainly see the top poster's side of things -- there are a lot of issues that I feel much differently about as a near-50-year-old than I did as a teenager. For what it's worth, I was never trying to provide moral authority for hacking in the perjorative sense when I wrote it, I was just venting... But you're right, the rebellion was the delicious topping on the technical exploration sundae. By the time I outgrew the illegal portion of things, the technical 'hacking' imperative was firmly established in me, and has continued to this day.
- api 14y ago
  Oh sure. I'm sure what I did was incredibly annoying to someone, if not downright dangerous. I don't know what the solution is though. We've denuded our society of independent ways of knowing accessible to the young: hacking, cracking, dangerous chemistry sets, and so on. On one hand there are "good" reasons for this. On the other hand: where will the next generation of engineers come from if they can't combine learning with individuation? I really have to underscore this: as a teenager, I had zero to negative interest in anything sanctioned by school or by the adults I was surrounded with. It was by definition lame, constraining, and uninteresting.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
MichaelGG 14y ago
There's one area you can still perform full attacks on, without worrying about getting in trouble for attacking networks: cracking software. It's not entirely the same skillset, but there's still a rush from disassembling and figuring out exactly how to patch it (and with style), or reverse the key validation function to write a keygen. But at least it's still "wild" as in they are real systems generated by others, not an "organized activity".
fusiongyro 14y ago
The OP criticizes the manifesto for essentially saying "I'm smarter than you, so I'm entitled to do whatever I want"... and your response is essentially "That's true, but let's face it, I am really, really, really a lot smarter than you." I'd venture that you missed the point.

sp332 14y ago

Lots of stuff I didn't like happened to me when I was growing up. I don't mean abusive stuff just unpleasant stuff, normal school and high school stuff. Including having my privacy violated on a regular basis by teachers and other authority figures. So while I could understand that other people might also not like having their privacy violated, it seemed like it was the status quo. I had a very hard time learning what was OK and what was off limits because of the double standard applied to kids vs. adults.

api 14y ago
That's an excellent point too. Kids treat each other like complete and utter crap in school, and teachers often aren't all that much better from a kid's point of view. When I was a teenager I didn't give much thought to other peoples' convenience, privacy, etc., and I disagree that this is an inevitable part of being a teenager. I think it was because others (both peers and adults) did not treat me with respect, respect my privacy, etc.

jdietrich 14y ago

Ask yourself this: Would any of those people think twice about violating my privacy? My high school had no qualms about searching my locker or my bag. My ISP does deep-packet inspection and will hand over my logs to any LEA that asks, without a warrant. Practically every company I do business with resells my data in some way, to their benefit and my detriment. The vast majority of institutions have no respect whatsoever for my privacy, so I have no respect for theirs.

nsmartt 14y ago
I upvoted you because I agree with the majority of your comment, but, to be satisfied, I have to say the following: Make sure that any company you damage is one of those institutions with no respect for privacy.
- ludston 14y ago
  Or, even better would be: Make sure that you don't damage any company.
  - xorbyte 14y ago
    This depends on intent. I don't want to confound exploration with activism, but there are many instances where damaging a company may be the ethical thing to do. In the long run, avoiding damage is in the hacker's continued interest to be able to maintain a 'beachhead' through stealth; but where privacy and 'fairness' are concerned, avoiding damage isn't always desirable.

subsystem 14y ago

Of course with any subculture there's going to be some amount of superiority. I would still claim that there's a lot more arrogance in the IT industry today, even or maybe especially among celebrated companies like Google, Apple and Facebook.

gnu8 14y ago

You have to keep in mind this was a different time. There were no Free unixlike operating systems with full source code available, and no immensely powerful PCs to run them on. There was no world wide web with every bit of information available. There were few practical ways of learning how computers worked except by breaking into them and studying them.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ebertx 14y ago

Yeah, I agree. I like the aspect of curiosity, but I wish the author focused on it without the overpowering tone of bitterness and resentment. Hacking and making are positive things. It'd be easy for someone to miss that when reading this manifesto.

loydb 14y ago
Well, it was written at a point that I was feeling pretty damn bitter and resentful... :)
- marshray 14y ago
  Damn hackers. They're all alike. :-)