8 ms·

Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

164 points by oBeLx 13y ago

csl 13y ago
As an aside, do anyone here still use IRC regularly? It seems some open source projects have permanent channels, but I don't know how active these are. Haven't really used IRC since the mid-90s, but perhaps it's a good way to connect to other developers? Is there a representative YC channel?
- daeken 13y ago
  I've been on IRC non-stop since 1997; it's where the majority of my closest friends and I keep in touch. I also run an IRC channel for the class I teach, and it's the primary communication means for most students. As for YC, there's the ##startups channel on Freenode, unofficially.
- spindritf 13y ago
  Absolutely. All day, every day. There is no better way to coordinate. Clients for every platform are available. You can have new tickets, bugs, announcements piped into the channel. Discuss everything instantly and in real time, while leaving a log for those who are offline, highlighting them when necessary. Running your own server is perfectly feasible. And if you connect to a known ircd with SSL forced, it's reasonably secure. There are even OTR plugins for many popular clients (♥irssi♥). There's also FiSH but that's on the inconvenient end of the paranoid spectrum. It is perfect if people you're going to communicate with are proficient computer users.
  - dmix 13y ago
    Could you write (or reference) blog posts of that general set up? Sounds interesting.
  - mtrimpe 13y ago
    How do you handle travelling between devices though? I find it virtually impossible to function on IRC with the gaps in between from when I'm offline, but still haven't found a workable way to keep a persistent session going across devices (work, home, mobile.)
- Bahamut 13y ago
  All the time - I'm part of a community that has been on IRC for almost 15 years, and IRC is also great for various developer tools/topics of interest
- atmosx 13y ago
  Hello, I have a client, spend some hours per week on IRC. Yes, there's great support, extremely skilled developers in various areas can be reached online. I use weechat (text-based) or Textual (OSX GUI).
- koopajah 13y ago
  I do use IRC at work daily. I had to learn Qt/QML for my new job and since school I've always thought that IRC was the best place/platform to learn a new technology. And once again in this case it has proven clearly invaluable. A lot of the QT devs are on IRC daily and help newcomers. Also just hearing about bugs, new patches, ideas and discussion help greatly to increase my knowledge of the platform. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me a lot more time without IRC to be up and ready at the start of this job.
- randomdrake 13y ago
  For years and years on different networks. For the past 7 or 8 years on Freenode. Most, if not all, of the big open source projects have channels on Freenode. They are excellent places to connect with other developers (people). Not only are they just great places to get involved with other developers, they're also great places to talk to professionals using the technologies every day. You can learn best practices and industry standards by idling in the channels and watching questions get answered. In terms of a "representative YC channel," there's not an official Hacker News or YC channel I'm aware of. However, there is #startups on Freenode that some have considered a sort of unofficial Hacker News IRC channel. We're a pretty active and lively bunch and the topics range from startups, funding, and entrepreneurship to programming, good beer, and current events. Just like all decent IRC channels, and you're welcome to come hang out any time.
- dewey 13y ago
  I use IRC all day every day. And with bitlbee [0] you can even use all your Jabber/AIM/Twitter... accounts via IRC. [0] http://bitlbee.org/ http://bitlbee.org/
- seivan 13y ago
  I do.
- spaky 13y ago
  At our company we use Slack [1] all the time for chatting and keeping in touch. It's basically just an IRC front end. (Slack is co-founded by Stewart Butterfield of Flickr) For me the big advantage is that it "just works" (web interface + mobile app) for everyone in the company whereas there is overhead to getting IRC setup. We had tried IRC previously and it didn't take. It also doesn't hurt that Slack looks sexy. I think that IRC has really stuck around because it somehow really captures asynchronous group discussion, but also simultaneously keeps the barrier to participation really low. It makes total sense to me that the IRC community is still so strong. [1] https://slack.com/ https://slack.com/
  - jenius 13y ago
    Same here, the ui is definitely a huge selling point for slack. IRC just looks terrible, every client I have tried looks bad and connections are unreliable. Slack is a great solution for that.
- niix 13y ago
  Yes.
- nawitus 13y ago
  I use IRC daily at work and also at home (these days I only frequent 1-2 channels at home). IRC is still pretty popular here in Finland among certain people.
- zecho 13y ago
  I idle in a few rooms on Freenode and am active in a few more. Some open source projects have excellent rooms, others have useless ones. Depending on your interests, your mileage will vary greatly.
- dsirijus 13y ago
  I have messaged with on IRC with at least 4 people from sibling comments in this very thread, and learned most about technologies I'm using (and much more) exactly there - in IRC. IRC is awesome.
- Roritharr 13y ago
  I've been on irc channels for the past 16 years, basically right from my first year online. I've found my closest friends through irc and we are partnering regularly on business related subjects. Best medium to stay connected. The WhatsApp Groups are what kids these days use from what i hear.
- clamprecht 13y ago
  I think the only time I haven't been on IRC since I discovered it in 1991 is the 5 years I spent in prison :)
  - rdl 13y ago
    For an IRC-related crime?
    - keidian 13y ago
      I believe he's MinorThreat aka Chris Lamprecht, which means his sentence wasn't for his computer related crimes oddly enough.
      - rdl 13y ago
        Hans Reiser still wins this competition though :)
- rdl 13y ago
  I'm on IRC, but most of the idling-intensive IRC channel content is not something I'd want in a purely professional setting. Per-project IRC seems mainly on freenode. EFnet is mainly for hate and trolling and lulz.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  It's been invaluable to me in keeping up with the cryptocurrency scene the last year or two.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  I use it in a very limited capacity of keeping in touch with people I knew in the 90s on IRC. But I drop out of doing even that every now and then when I need to focus on other things, because IRC tends to be a drag on my productivity sometimes. I also try to sit in freenode channels that intersect my interests, but I'm not anywhere near as active in them as I was back in the day. But that's where all the good developer-related channels are now.
- ffk 13y ago
  Freenode is still heavily used and is worth frequenting to both meet people with similar interests and get help on a specific project.
pothibo 13y ago
Kinda shows how important your social circle is to your future success even at lower age. It's not mandatory but it surely helps.
- jnazario 13y ago
  similar to what university you choose. (only i didn't figure that out until much later.)
mitochondrion 13y ago
What if I want to join the modern-day equivalent of this group's beginnings?
- whoopiecush 13y ago
  I like the thinking here: https://globality.be/blog/diversification-personalization--rethinking-how-to-approach-your-online-networks https://globality.be/blog/diversification-personalization--r...
  - holycow19 13y ago
    Definitely not the same but very interesting sounding - there home page says "network of leading tech entrepreneurs from around the world" - looks like they're still in beta.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- atmosx 13y ago
  Hello, I was in two 'crews' as they used to call them in the early 00s. I'm not sure if you would really want join them. I think I prefer my current networking (twitter, github, blogposting, hacker news, stack overflow, etc.) Back at the time, there was no StartUp culture (where I lived, not talking about Silicon Valley), everything was closed and there was a huge debate over full disclosure (I'm not even sure how it ended... I remember tf8, antisecurity.is and the rest...). There were a few skilled people around and almost everybody knew them. WEB 2.0 didn't exist (twitter, facebook, etc.) the web was a totally different place... I'm not sure it was better though, it seemed way more exotic IIRC. But the general behaviors of the communities (linux communities, hacker communities, etc.) was awful: You were getting your fair share of curses every day. Some IRC networks were wild, with DOSSes (flood, nuke and other shit which could disconnect a 56k easily) flying around. Exploits were flying around, some private some not-so-private. Security was not an industry and the required skillset was not so extreme as it is today. I mean, you could do quite some damage without being very technical. Things changed after 2002-3 (you can see this in the Phrack articles, turning suddenly extremely technical). Then the web-based internet came out, everything start requiring PHP+SQL and XSS was born. Then Java and after that JavaScript... Which created a new, less sophisticated attack vectors. Then the era were officially sponsored cyberwars came into play arise. Stuxnet was the most prominent example of this era, with the NSA revelations and China's cyber-army giving a clear view of how the security industry is shaped nowadays. Today there are no crews like Team TESO (I'd like to read about the story of their members...), ADM, etc. I still remember 's0ftproject[1]' back in the days in Italy. Some members can still be found involved in the Tor project. Anyway, things have changed for the better or worst. Better keep up with the times... ps. Today's world should be considered a kinder-garden for a security professional. Way more attacking vectors (so more protection needed) and a huge amount of companies which understand the importance of computer security. Back in the 2001 telnet was still widely used... [1] http://www.s0ftpj.org/ http://www.s0ftpj.org/
dangrossman 13y ago
It's weird the way like-minded people somehow all find each other. There are several HN members along with myself who have ended up running bootstrapped SaaS businesses to make their living, who all played the same MUD (the text-based precursor to MMORPGs you could telnet into) in the 1990s/2000s. Creating "zmud triggers" to automate parts of that game was probably some of the earliest programming we all did.
- jorgeortiz85 13y ago
  Which MUD were you on?
rachellaw 13y ago
my co-founder and myself met similarly through IRC, but we never exchanged irl names. Much much later, by coincidence, we ended up in the same grad school program and that's how we started our company I think at a certain age/time, you tend to spend more time with friends rather than family and that's when it begins to happen. For non-hackers it's when they develop lifelong friends in work or school, for hackers/internet-people that's when you start thinking of your ICQ/IRC/fandom/LJ/pick your ancient platform as your true friends even if you've never met in person.
thom 13y ago
Can't wait to find out who'll be the first alt.teens billionaire, but I suspect we were just wasting our youth.
- pcurve 13y ago
  I think we are forgiven for wasting our youth on navigating alt.binaries.* on Lynx. It was wild wild west where everything was still nebulous.
msie 13y ago
After hearing about WhatsApp's security problems I gather that Jan didn't learn much about security from w00w00.
- tptacek 13y ago
  I'm sure he's crying himself to sleep on his pillows stuffed with hundreds over that comment.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- zboralski 13y ago
  People may be better off using a notoriously insecure app like WhatsApp and not use it for anything sensitive. I believe that "Secure" products can only give you a false sense of security, an illusion of safety. Security should be about planning for failure and not about trusting a marketing blurb that says "100% secure". Just look at the Apple gotofail bug, the RSA/NSA fiasco, the Debian fuck up, the ssh crc32 bug... I'll finish by quoting Theo de Raadt : "You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes." * * You can replace 'virtualization layers 'with 'secure messaging protocol' or any other piece of code.
  - omarrasheed9 13y ago
    #interestingly deep
kartikkumar 13y ago
Am I the only one that senses a Hollywood movie in the making?
danielweber 13y ago
> $19 billion dollars Great editing standards.
- jmduke 13y ago
  I think this is a minor flaw of an article with much greater ones -- then again, I'm biased, as I make this mistake regularly. (In my defense, it's incredibly easy to pass over without noticing: I didn't even notice it in the article until you pointed it out.)
- mrspin 13y ago
  Fixed.
kayoone 13y ago
i literally spend years on irc in the late 90s/early 00s but it was mostly gaming related (quake). Still have some contacts from that time though and since a few years i use irc again for several open source projects, which is often great to get quick feedback on questions.
tptacek 13y ago
2000 words of post-hoc fallacy about an IRC channel. We're discussing here a group of people who started their careers dead smack in the middle of the dot-com bubble, practically all of them in software/network security, a field that has stayed valuable since its inception. Of course they've done well for themselves. This would be interesting if the denizens of #w00w00 had, say, invested in each other's companies. But as I understand it (I was a #!r00t person; our biggest win was ISSX) that's not at all what happened. Sorry to sound pissy. I'm just hoping to forestall another goofy HN conspiracy theory; the idea that w00w00 is, like, the Internet's "Skull & Bones". No. Also, I suspect the stories about w00w00 as a "hacking group" that broke into people's machines: total BS.
- jmduke 13y ago
  Can a similar argument be made about the PayPal Mafia? Is there a lot of investment cross-pollination within the members, or is it more just a general sense of "lots of clearly forward-thinking people made lots of money and continue to be forward-thinking/making lots of money", a sort of reverse Seinfeld curse?
  - danielweber 13y ago
    If you work backwards, starting with people who have successful exits, you will find occasional intersections on mailing lists or IRC channels or meetups or model railroad clubs. This doesn't mean that list or whatever caused the success. This is the same problem epidemiologists face when trying to explain cancer clusters. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
- davidu 13y ago
  Gotta disagree with you on this one. Lots of folks in w00w00 worked together. In that sense, they did invest in each other (with time and effort, if not cash). Also, back in the late 90s defcon days, w00w00, CdC, New Hack City, each had an entrepreneurial spirit. w00w00 perhaps more than most. I remember when CdC launched BackOriface, it was just as much a startup launch as anything. Note: I don't claim to be a member of any.
swang 13y ago
Shawn Fanning was part of tons of "crews" on EFNet. Just like anybody else who was on irc at the time. Before WhatsApp's purchase, the "napster on irc" byline was, #winprog taught him all he knew about winsock programming and without #winprog napster would never have been made. Now suddenly it's "without #w00w00, napster would never have been made" because this combined with WhatsApp's purchase lets someone write some 1500+ word article about nothing. I wonder what would have happened if TetriNET ended up selling for millions back in the day, would that have suddenly become the irc hackers made bajillions byline? And surprise surprise, people who used one of the more technical communications medium back in the 90s end up being technical people when they grew up.
- tptacek 13y ago
  As you can probably tell from upthread, I agree with you. I'll point out a difference between #winprog and #w00w00 though: #w00w00 had the con scene --- #w00w00 people would see each other every year at DefCon and Pumpcon and, later, CanSec. Also, a lot of these people wound up working in the same city (say, Atlanta, or Columbia MD --- I get ISS, Monkey, and w00w00 mixed up).
- mrspin 13y ago
  Except others in w00w00 ended up working at Napster and one is practically a co-founder.
- swhitt 13y ago
  Oh great. I have the TetriNET theme song midi stuck in my head now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j02bbkyuYw#t=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j02bbkyuYw#t=6
kclay 13y ago
reminds me of the paradox days,good times.
joshlegs 13y ago
hey can i join the channel? what's the pw? .....
joewee 13y ago
1/2 of my full time employment opportunities came from other w00w00 members. I was also a member of ADM. I was 17 and managing servers during the first dotcom boom when you needed more than just smarts to create a startup. You needed a boatload of VC money. If w00w00 was formed in present day, half of us would have been funded by YC. We were just smart and young people at the start of this internet thing. Not surprising we went on to make internet companies. This article does leave out a lot of people and includes someone that shouldn't be included.
- mrspin 13y ago
  It was difficult to list everybody.
steeve 13y ago
Upvote if you used SoftIce and W32Dasm :) Ahhhh, the memories!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

164 points by oBeLx 13y ago

csl 13y ago

As an aside, do anyone here still use IRC regularly? It seems some open source projects have permanent channels, but I don't know how active these are. Haven't really used IRC since the mid-90s, but perhaps it's a good way to connect to other developers? Is there a representative YC channel?

daeken 13y ago
I've been on IRC non-stop since 1997; it's where the majority of my closest friends and I keep in touch. I also run an IRC channel for the class I teach, and it's the primary communication means for most students. As for YC, there's the ##startups channel on Freenode, unofficially.
spindritf 13y ago
Absolutely. All day, every day. There is no better way to coordinate. Clients for every platform are available. You can have new tickets, bugs, announcements piped into the channel. Discuss everything instantly and in real time, while leaving a log for those who are offline, highlighting them when necessary. Running your own server is perfectly feasible. And if you connect to a known ircd with SSL forced, it's reasonably secure. There are even OTR plugins for many popular clients (♥irssi♥). There's also FiSH but that's on the inconvenient end of the paranoid spectrum. It is perfect if people you're going to communicate with are proficient computer users.
- dmix 13y ago
  Could you write (or reference) blog posts of that general set up? Sounds interesting.
- mtrimpe 13y ago
  How do you handle travelling between devices though? I find it virtually impossible to function on IRC with the gaps in between from when I'm offline, but still haven't found a workable way to keep a persistent session going across devices (work, home, mobile.)
Bahamut 13y ago
All the time - I'm part of a community that has been on IRC for almost 15 years, and IRC is also great for various developer tools/topics of interest
atmosx 13y ago
Hello, I have a client, spend some hours per week on IRC. Yes, there's great support, extremely skilled developers in various areas can be reached online. I use weechat (text-based) or Textual (OSX GUI).
koopajah 13y ago
I do use IRC at work daily. I had to learn Qt/QML for my new job and since school I've always thought that IRC was the best place/platform to learn a new technology. And once again in this case it has proven clearly invaluable. A lot of the QT devs are on IRC daily and help newcomers. Also just hearing about bugs, new patches, ideas and discussion help greatly to increase my knowledge of the platform. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me a lot more time without IRC to be up and ready at the start of this job.
randomdrake 13y ago
For years and years on different networks. For the past 7 or 8 years on Freenode. Most, if not all, of the big open source projects have channels on Freenode. They are excellent places to connect with other developers (people). Not only are they just great places to get involved with other developers, they're also great places to talk to professionals using the technologies every day. You can learn best practices and industry standards by idling in the channels and watching questions get answered. In terms of a "representative YC channel," there's not an official Hacker News or YC channel I'm aware of. However, there is #startups on Freenode that some have considered a sort of unofficial Hacker News IRC channel. We're a pretty active and lively bunch and the topics range from startups, funding, and entrepreneurship to programming, good beer, and current events. Just like all decent IRC channels, and you're welcome to come hang out any time.
dewey 13y ago
I use IRC all day every day. And with bitlbee [0] you can even use all your Jabber/AIM/Twitter... accounts via IRC. [0] http://bitlbee.org/ http://bitlbee.org/
seivan 13y ago
I do.
spaky 13y ago
At our company we use Slack [1] all the time for chatting and keeping in touch. It's basically just an IRC front end. (Slack is co-founded by Stewart Butterfield of Flickr) For me the big advantage is that it "just works" (web interface + mobile app) for everyone in the company whereas there is overhead to getting IRC setup. We had tried IRC previously and it didn't take. It also doesn't hurt that Slack looks sexy. I think that IRC has really stuck around because it somehow really captures asynchronous group discussion, but also simultaneously keeps the barrier to participation really low. It makes total sense to me that the IRC community is still so strong. [1] https://slack.com/ https://slack.com/
- jenius 13y ago
  Same here, the ui is definitely a huge selling point for slack. IRC just looks terrible, every client I have tried looks bad and connections are unreliable. Slack is a great solution for that.
niix 13y ago
Yes.
nawitus 13y ago
I use IRC daily at work and also at home (these days I only frequent 1-2 channels at home). IRC is still pretty popular here in Finland among certain people.
zecho 13y ago
I idle in a few rooms on Freenode and am active in a few more. Some open source projects have excellent rooms, others have useless ones. Depending on your interests, your mileage will vary greatly.
dsirijus 13y ago
I have messaged with on IRC with at least 4 people from sibling comments in this very thread, and learned most about technologies I'm using (and much more) exactly there - in IRC. IRC is awesome.
Roritharr 13y ago
I've been on irc channels for the past 16 years, basically right from my first year online. I've found my closest friends through irc and we are partnering regularly on business related subjects. Best medium to stay connected. The WhatsApp Groups are what kids these days use from what i hear.
clamprecht 13y ago
I think the only time I haven't been on IRC since I discovered it in 1991 is the 5 years I spent in prison :)
- rdl 13y ago
  For an IRC-related crime?
  - keidian 13y ago
    I believe he's MinorThreat aka Chris Lamprecht, which means his sentence wasn't for his computer related crimes oddly enough.
    - rdl 13y ago
      Hans Reiser still wins this competition though :)
rdl 13y ago
I'm on IRC, but most of the idling-intensive IRC channel content is not something I'd want in a purely professional setting. Per-project IRC seems mainly on freenode. EFnet is mainly for hate and trolling and lulz.
waterlesscloud 13y ago
It's been invaluable to me in keeping up with the cryptocurrency scene the last year or two.
stormbrew 13y ago
I use it in a very limited capacity of keeping in touch with people I knew in the 90s on IRC. But I drop out of doing even that every now and then when I need to focus on other things, because IRC tends to be a drag on my productivity sometimes. I also try to sit in freenode channels that intersect my interests, but I'm not anywhere near as active in them as I was back in the day. But that's where all the good developer-related channels are now.
ffk 13y ago
Freenode is still heavily used and is worth frequenting to both meet people with similar interests and get help on a specific project.

pothibo 13y ago

Kinda shows how important your social circle is to your future success even at lower age. It's not mandatory but it surely helps.

jnazario 13y ago
similar to what university you choose. (only i didn't figure that out until much later.)

mitochondrion 13y ago

What if I want to join the modern-day equivalent of this group's beginnings?

whoopiecush 13y ago
I like the thinking here: https://globality.be/blog/diversification-personalization--rethinking-how-to-approach-your-online-networks https://globality.be/blog/diversification-personalization--r...
- holycow19 13y ago
  Definitely not the same but very interesting sounding - there home page says "network of leading tech entrepreneurs from around the world" - looks like they're still in beta.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
atmosx 13y ago
Hello, I was in two 'crews' as they used to call them in the early 00s. I'm not sure if you would really want join them. I think I prefer my current networking (twitter, github, blogposting, hacker news, stack overflow, etc.) Back at the time, there was no StartUp culture (where I lived, not talking about Silicon Valley), everything was closed and there was a huge debate over full disclosure (I'm not even sure how it ended... I remember tf8, antisecurity.is and the rest...). There were a few skilled people around and almost everybody knew them. WEB 2.0 didn't exist (twitter, facebook, etc.) the web was a totally different place... I'm not sure it was better though, it seemed way more exotic IIRC. But the general behaviors of the communities (linux communities, hacker communities, etc.) was awful: You were getting your fair share of curses every day. Some IRC networks were wild, with DOSSes (flood, nuke and other shit which could disconnect a 56k easily) flying around. Exploits were flying around, some private some not-so-private. Security was not an industry and the required skillset was not so extreme as it is today. I mean, you could do quite some damage without being very technical. Things changed after 2002-3 (you can see this in the Phrack articles, turning suddenly extremely technical). Then the web-based internet came out, everything start requiring PHP+SQL and XSS was born. Then Java and after that JavaScript... Which created a new, less sophisticated attack vectors. Then the era were officially sponsored cyberwars came into play arise. Stuxnet was the most prominent example of this era, with the NSA revelations and China's cyber-army giving a clear view of how the security industry is shaped nowadays. Today there are no crews like Team TESO (I'd like to read about the story of their members...), ADM, etc. I still remember 's0ftproject[1]' back in the days in Italy. Some members can still be found involved in the Tor project. Anyway, things have changed for the better or worst. Better keep up with the times... ps. Today's world should be considered a kinder-garden for a security professional. Way more attacking vectors (so more protection needed) and a huge amount of companies which understand the importance of computer security. Back in the 2001 telnet was still widely used... [1] http://www.s0ftpj.org/ http://www.s0ftpj.org/

dangrossman 13y ago

It's weird the way like-minded people somehow all find each other. There are several HN members along with myself who have ended up running bootstrapped SaaS businesses to make their living, who all played the same MUD (the text-based precursor to MMORPGs you could telnet into) in the 1990s/2000s. Creating "zmud triggers" to automate parts of that game was probably some of the earliest programming we all did.

jorgeortiz85 13y ago
Which MUD were you on?

rachellaw 13y ago

my co-founder and myself met similarly through IRC, but we never exchanged irl names. Much much later, by coincidence, we ended up in the same grad school program and that's how we started our company I think at a certain age/time, you tend to spend more time with friends rather than family and that's when it begins to happen. For non-hackers it's when they develop lifelong friends in work or school, for hackers/internet-people that's when you start thinking of your ICQ/IRC/fandom/LJ/pick your ancient platform as your true friends even if you've never met in person.

thom 13y ago

Can't wait to find out who'll be the first alt.teens billionaire, but I suspect we were just wasting our youth.

pcurve 13y ago
I think we are forgiven for wasting our youth on navigating alt.binaries.* on Lynx. It was wild wild west where everything was still nebulous.

msie 13y ago

After hearing about WhatsApp's security problems I gather that Jan didn't learn much about security from w00w00.

tptacek 13y ago
I'm sure he's crying himself to sleep on his pillows stuffed with hundreds over that comment.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
zboralski 13y ago
People may be better off using a notoriously insecure app like WhatsApp and not use it for anything sensitive. I believe that "Secure" products can only give you a false sense of security, an illusion of safety. Security should be about planning for failure and not about trusting a marketing blurb that says "100% secure". Just look at the Apple gotofail bug, the RSA/NSA fiasco, the Debian fuck up, the ssh crc32 bug... I'll finish by quoting Theo de Raadt : "You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes." * * You can replace 'virtualization layers 'with 'secure messaging protocol' or any other piece of code.
- omarrasheed9 13y ago
  #interestingly deep

kartikkumar 13y ago

Am I the only one that senses a Hollywood movie in the making?

danielweber 13y ago

> $19 billion dollars Great editing standards.

jmduke 13y ago
I think this is a minor flaw of an article with much greater ones -- then again, I'm biased, as I make this mistake regularly. (In my defense, it's incredibly easy to pass over without noticing: I didn't even notice it in the article until you pointed it out.)
mrspin 13y ago
Fixed.

kayoone 13y ago

i literally spend years on irc in the late 90s/early 00s but it was mostly gaming related (quake). Still have some contacts from that time though and since a few years i use irc again for several open source projects, which is often great to get quick feedback on questions.

tptacek 13y ago

2000 words of post-hoc fallacy about an IRC channel. We're discussing here a group of people who started their careers dead smack in the middle of the dot-com bubble, practically all of them in software/network security, a field that has stayed valuable since its inception. Of course they've done well for themselves. This would be interesting if the denizens of #w00w00 had, say, invested in each other's companies. But as I understand it (I was a #!r00t person; our biggest win was ISSX) that's not at all what happened. Sorry to sound pissy. I'm just hoping to forestall another goofy HN conspiracy theory; the idea that w00w00 is, like, the Internet's "Skull & Bones". No. Also, I suspect the stories about w00w00 as a "hacking group" that broke into people's machines: total BS.

jmduke 13y ago
Can a similar argument be made about the PayPal Mafia? Is there a lot of investment cross-pollination within the members, or is it more just a general sense of "lots of clearly forward-thinking people made lots of money and continue to be forward-thinking/making lots of money", a sort of reverse Seinfeld curse?
- danielweber 13y ago
  If you work backwards, starting with people who have successful exits, you will find occasional intersections on mailing lists or IRC channels or meetups or model railroad clubs. This doesn't mean that list or whatever caused the success. This is the same problem epidemiologists face when trying to explain cancer clusters. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
davidu 13y ago
Gotta disagree with you on this one. Lots of folks in w00w00 worked together. In that sense, they did invest in each other (with time and effort, if not cash). Also, back in the late 90s defcon days, w00w00, CdC, New Hack City, each had an entrepreneurial spirit. w00w00 perhaps more than most. I remember when CdC launched BackOriface, it was just as much a startup launch as anything. Note: I don't claim to be a member of any.

swang 13y ago

Shawn Fanning was part of tons of "crews" on EFNet. Just like anybody else who was on irc at the time. Before WhatsApp's purchase, the "napster on irc" byline was, #winprog taught him all he knew about winsock programming and without #winprog napster would never have been made. Now suddenly it's "without #w00w00, napster would never have been made" because this combined with WhatsApp's purchase lets someone write some 1500+ word article about nothing. I wonder what would have happened if TetriNET ended up selling for millions back in the day, would that have suddenly become the irc hackers made bajillions byline? And surprise surprise, people who used one of the more technical communications medium back in the 90s end up being technical people when they grew up.

tptacek 13y ago
As you can probably tell from upthread, I agree with you. I'll point out a difference between #winprog and #w00w00 though: #w00w00 had the con scene --- #w00w00 people would see each other every year at DefCon and Pumpcon and, later, CanSec. Also, a lot of these people wound up working in the same city (say, Atlanta, or Columbia MD --- I get ISS, Monkey, and w00w00 mixed up).
mrspin 13y ago
Except others in w00w00 ended up working at Napster and one is practically a co-founder.
swhitt 13y ago
Oh great. I have the TetriNET theme song midi stuck in my head now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j02bbkyuYw#t=6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j02bbkyuYw#t=6

kclay 13y ago

reminds me of the paradox days,good times.

joshlegs 13y ago

hey can i join the channel? what's the pw? .....

joewee 13y ago

1/2 of my full time employment opportunities came from other w00w00 members. I was also a member of ADM. I was 17 and managing servers during the first dotcom boom when you needed more than just smarts to create a startup. You needed a boatload of VC money. If w00w00 was formed in present day, half of us would have been funded by YC. We were just smart and young people at the start of this internet thing. Not surprising we went on to make internet companies. This article does leave out a lot of people and includes someone that shouldn't be included.

mrspin 13y ago
It was difficult to list everybody.

steeve 13y ago

Upvote if you used SoftIce and W32Dasm :) Ahhhh, the memories!

deleted 13y ago

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