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This is really neat! The only issue is the ability to use it in different environments. OsX compatibility would really make this more usable. From the looks of the issues list Windows as client is never going to happen. Android would be really cool too but very unlikely
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Nifty! That got me past the transportation compilation but in the end it still chokes on some of the *nix bindings (getgrouplists setgroups). Super promising though and thank you for dropping me the note :)
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Posted this here because really this is the story of a program and the guy that wrote it. Totally fascinating stuff. In part 2 we learn that in 2015 he rewrote the “deep note” program to run on a standard desktop computer in C.
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The story is really cool too. True innovation is looking at something that nobody else really pays attention to and making it so much better. I think this is possibly Lucas Film’s biggest contribution to theater and it’s not even a movie.
Also, Hey! found you on here I guess haha.
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I’ve read this for the first time when I was 17, almost 21 years ago. It was somewhat useful, but not formative.
I was able to program in Pascal back then, and I was a sort of black hat (or maybe a yellow hat :-D) as I hacked all my school pcs to boot with an interactive homage to girls on International Women’s Day (yeah… I know… that’s geek!).
Back then however, ignorant as I was about the hackers’ culture, I completely missed the deep cultural biases that the text spreads. Worse, while it give kids some useful hits, it completely misses the point.
It does not even cite curiosity, the core value of hackers’ ethics that lead their behaviour.
A good question from @tome reminded me of it and made me give it a more critical read.
ESR cultural biases are pretty evident in the Historical Note:
It would be important to note that, instead, it has never been so.
More subtle, however, are the bias spread in the other sections of the text:
Wow… everything the hackers did spread from the USA! What a chance!
It’s indeed funny to read his concerns about the English language as cultural imperialism, while hackers should learn English even just to enjoy The Tempest of Shakespeare!
The cultural imperialism is spread all over the text, and while historically connected to imperialism, the language we use to communicate is not an issue.
Why? So, I do need your permission to hack?
This is deeply false. And still, back when I was 17, I trusted these lines.
Hacking is about experimenting.
Experimenting at times means breaking things to understand how they work.
The difference is the goal not in what they do.
Hackers pursuit knowledge.
Crackers pursuit something else, be it success, visibility, money, power or anything else.
Both can create and/or break things as it fits.
How To Become A Hacker was not an hack.
ESR was just exploiting his position to impose his own vision and interests on a nascent self-aware group.
He’s basically a cracker himself.
OTOH, most phrack’s authors were hackers, as they were lead by curiosity.
An excellent breakdown! I agree as well. Curiosity is the key to it all. It’s not just the pursuit of knowledge. Knowledge is the road to pursue your curiosity! It’s secondary and picked up along the way to satisfying the question.
re spread from USA
Most of it did in tech or built on stuff that was US-centric. Specific universities, companies like Burroughs/IBM/Xerox/Apple, Silicon Valley, and the Strategic Computing Initiative collectively created the foundations for much of what you see in tech and the Net depends on. It seemed to be a combination of cultural environment, funding, and similar-minded people in close proximity to bump into each other a lot. For a long time, these factors existed in America in ways they didn’t exist in other places. The American companies aren’t doing much of the fundamental innovation they did in 1960’s-1980’s, though. Environment changed.
The big ones now mainly acquire startups to integrate their innovations and get any patents. Most of the startups making these techs look to still be in America, though, again due to the environment that makes them successful. I think this is the best article I’ve seen on why America, especially Silicon Valley, is an excellent environment for tech innovation. And why there might not be another unless a country can recreate the things that led to it and sustain it.
The issue here is not to negate (nor denigrate) in any way the USA for the innovation they spread.
The term “hacker” itself and the original jergon file were born at MIT.
But hackers existed before and all over the world.
For example, ESR forgot to mention that hackers created computers, radio and telephone.
Honestly I think the distortion was deliberate (he defined himself as the hackers historian, and everybody knows that history writing is often used as a political tool), but even if effect of a naive bias and overconfidence, he did a serious disservice to the community.
ESR projected his own culture and beliefs on texts that were designed to be among the most influential in our narrative.
Hacking does not presume recognition from the earlier American hackers (they were great hackers, don’t get me wrong, but they were not the firsts and didn’t seeked recognition from the even earlier European hackers, as no hacker needs recognition). It doesn’t presume the elitism that is suggested in the text when speaking about “brain scarsity”. And so on.
Ok, that makes more sense. Yeah, there’s always been hackers all over the world. If taking a broader view, I’d have definitely included non-Americans like da Vinci. ;)
Exactly! :-D
Leonardo da Vinci is probably the best example of hacker of all time (at least in western history).
He has always been my own inspiration, way before I heard the term “hacker”: not just because of his visionary inventions, his experiments or because of his creativity, but because his creative curiosity was a deep love letter to mankind.
What was neat about da Vinci is he was inventing stuff with very little prior work to go on in fields as different as machines and art. Hackers today have so much to build on to get stuff done faster. People like da Vinci were coming up with stuff seemingly out of nowhere.