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Any other books like this? Also, what went wrong?

I heard this book is pretty good

>Also, what went wrong? If your asking why the culture changed from nerds in a basement to what we have now, then I would say its money. At the beginning it wasn't a business it was people who were doing what there ware doing for fun, now there is a ton of money involved so companies dictate the terms and not enthusiasts like it happend back then. I remember a story from that book that the first MIT hackers blocked the creation of time sharing system on there pdp-1 for a long time as they didn't want to sacrifice the full control over the system (keep in mind that the computer didn't belong to them, they only had a saying in the decision because they ware irreplaceable).

>Any other books like this? Havent read the book, but maybe cyberia by douglas rushkoff might be what you look for. >Also, what went wrong? Yeah i think on the whole we can blame capitalism, smart phones and social media in particular. I dont mind smartphones per see, i think portable computers are sweet, but goddamn yeah i miss those times when computers were for the geeks and it was like a special club of wizards.

>>16200 I don't remember those days since I'm not old enough but I think the ubiquity of computer technology and how much potential power it gives to the adepts can be considered a decent trade-off for losing that early culture. It's not like the archetypes that spawned those early hackers disappeared either. Maybe it's harder to single out those groups in the infinite sea of information we call the internet. Perhaps it was just as difficult back in those days or maybe more personal since many of those shenanigans were forced to be done in meatspace.

Hacking was easier back in the day, there was a lower bar for entry, besides having rich parents to buy you a PC. People these days are far more talented. There are of course still hacking groups.

Masters of Doom and Soul of a New Machine have a lot of overlap with Hackers. Hackers and Masters of Doom are the better of the three. If you want to go with the vintage hackers theme, it's hard to beat <Clifford Stoll's book>. Peak 80s computing in the format of a page turning thriller.

>>16192 Where wizards stay up late: book about the making of the ARPANET and the creators. The Friendly Orange Glow: book about the creation and use of PLATO programming and teaching system.

>>16200 Those were the outcomes, not the causes. As it became cheaper to produce more powerful computers, it became increasingly possible to market them to the consumer segment, so companies willing to do so began to form. Even if all of the current tech giants were erased from history, nothing would have changed because companies exactly like them would've formed in their place. Also, the shift away from the hacking world happened decades before the iphone came out. Home computers like the Amiga, Macintosh, and Atari ST boasted locked down proprietary operating systems that were catered to non-programmers all the way back in the mid-80s, and by the mid 90s most people were using windows machines that were even more restrictive than any of those systems ever were.

What went wrong? Simple: Current society mistake hacking for cyber security. The former is the idea of bending (not breaking) the rules to work for you. Modifying an RC car's remote to open a garage door would be a good example. You're not technically breaking the rules, you use what's already there in a creative way. Sure, cybersec has been and always will be a large part, but it has turned into a massive industry raking in absurd profits. So you don't do it for the sake of creativity, but you are forced to be creative to make dough. If this wasn't what you meant, disregard.

>>16416 >Current society mistake hacking for cyber security Agree, I think that on one side most people don't understand the huge shift that happened in the software industry in the mid 2000s when a lot of technology was open source'd. Before you kind of needed to reverse engineer code - now you have access to the actual pre compile code, so you can branch out and have fun, make your own builds. Also there's a lot of hacking going on today, a lot more than what used to be now that the technology is cheaper. People just don't consider that hacking electronics to make cool house ware stuff/art projects/curiousities is as sexy as phreaking. Or making soykaf work on computers. I installed Mint on my laptop that came with Windows 10 and found that the touchpad drivers were propietary and wouldn't work on linux. A couple of kind souls though went through the trouble of fooling around with their laptops to install something that would record a boot sequence sent to the device by the motherboard and managed to reverse engineer a custom driver compatible with linux. If that isn't prime time hacking, I really don't know what is.

>>16416 >What went wrong? >Simple: Current society Optimized that sentence for you

>>16619 Yeah, there is plenty of hobbyist stuff going but at the same time it doesn't feel like it will have the opening new frontiers impact the old times offered Think the best way to get near those times is to focus on the technologies that are going to be supposedly breaking new ground, like self driving cars and that kind of crap, but that requires some serious commitment and is not something that an individual can do just by himself, like tweaking on a phone and finding a specific frequency allowed free calls back then. I don't want to give a lot of weight to the corporate culture (we all need to eat anyway) but access to stuff like patreon, where you can get money for your knowledge but end up needing to cater to voices that just put a dime anyway, might get up in the fun for the sake of fun mentality that can drive more interesting hacking endeavors

>>16193 You got a PDF?

>>16416 It is all done to control the narrative. The movies and media surrounding this great and wonderful subculture has been made just to subvert it. Eventually, the good and meaningful implementation of their subvertion, such as hacktivism was also once again subverted (remember that Anonymous was once force to be reckoned with and then fake people who had nothing to do with core ideology started subverting it). Not to mention the fearmongering amongst hacktivist circles of the "FBI plant". All in jest of course, but the idea is put in place there for those who have second thoughts about their hacktivist plans. And then eventually you get to current situation. Hackers and academics are bought up by military and government. Anyone who wants to make real change has to work in secret and fear for their lives. Everyone keeping to themselves either for profit or for fear of getting arrested. Human creativity is being squashed by getting incorporated into already existing system of oppression. Nothing new. Every subculture that sprung out as a form of rebellion was eventually diluted by mainstream culture trying to incorporate it into the larger whole for profit and to keep herd into one group. Remember? Punks, goths, emos, nerds, hackers, whatevers? Where are they now? Exactly. Anyone talks out either gets bought up or scared or eventually dead.

http://textfiles.com/hacking/ Not organized into a book obviously, but got some good stuff about the Masters of Deception group in NYC, Phiber Optik and the rest. It's interesting to see the way they present themselves and communicate with one another in addition to their exploits, brilliance, and daring.

>>17195 I have an epub, don't remember where I got it though... images are better compressed than the one that's available on libgen

>>17201 Hey, thanks for sharing! Here's Master of Doom for you

>>17229 Better copy than the one I already had, have some Knuth and Bogost

>>16298 It was definitely money. People started to get jobs and wives. The money was too good to turn down. The upcoming generation was raised on goody good values while the learning curve for hacking was getting really steep and the penalties were getting insane. As more cases went through the courts it became easier to prosecute, rules were established, law enforcement became adept at gathering evidence. Also as many people in the community became paid informants the community itself broke apart with no people to replace them except for the kids getting brought up in the educational system I got back in touch with a bunch of the scene people of the day as their old IRC channels were dead. They told me to join facebook and they had a hidden group. Yes facebook and yes many of the people mentioned in those books.

>>19895 I don't know a single person on "Hacker" News or 4chan that think that way. Reddit, sure.

>>19896 I think I know what he's talking about. There's a certain type of techie millennial that tends to frequent places like hn and various tech subreddits: >works in IT or as a programmer >uses and adamantly defends vscode over vim or emacs >uses github as a social network >was active on google plus and is sad that its gone now >hosted everything on digital ocean for a while but has since moved to aws >is really into docker >is really into python and/or node.js >will argue to have their workplace's aging xmpp or webex system replaced with slack >has lots of diy home automation involving arduinos >is in the process of transmuting their former love of Google into hatred and replacing it with love of Microsoft, because they are "turning over a new leaf" and support open source now >thinks corporate social media is a necessary evil and would rather see it regulated than destroyed >will try to talk you out of self hosting your email >has an expensive android dev phone which is rooted but still runs google services >has a deep hatred of epic games but loves steam >pays for google play music, youtube red, and discord premium obviously not everyone on those sites are like this but its definitely an archetype.

>>16192 Accidental Empires by Robert X Cringely (1992) Code by Charles Petzold (1999) Countdown to Zero Day by Kim Zetter (2014) Dealers of Lightning by Michael Hiltzik (1999) Fire in the Valley by Paul Frieberger (1984) Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams (2002) Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick (2011) Hackers by Steven Levy (1984) Hard Drive by Wallace and Erickson (1992) How the Internet Happened by Brian McCullough (2018) iWoz by Steve Wozniak (2006) Infinite Loop by Michael Malone (1999) In the Beginning... Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson (1999) Just for Fun by Linus Torvalds (2001) Masters of Doom by David Kushner (2003) My Tiny Life by Julian Dibbell (1999) On The Edge by Brian Bagnall (2005) Return to the Little Kingdom by Michael Moritz (2009) Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1981) Technopoly by Neil Postman (1992) The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S Raymond (1999) The Dream Machine by Michael Waldrop (2001) The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner (2012) The Master Switch by Tim Wu (2010) The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P Brooks Jr (1975) What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff (2005) Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner (1996)

>>16192 >what went wrong? Same thing that happens to every nerd subculture that goes mainstream. Money helped, but wasn't necessary. https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Thanks for the recs in this thread!

This book is about the stuxnet attack, I didn't finish it but it was quite good and it touches both political and technical topics.

>>19897 >thinks corporate social media is a necessary evil and would rather see it regulated than destroyed >neurosuggesting social media should be destroyed Any potential law that could destroy corporate social media would also take every other web community with it. Regulation is the only sane answer, and it should be very limited regulation at that, since, again, major sweeping regulation would harm smaller non-corporate communities as well.

>>20148 Who said anything about laws?

there's a book which tells series of stories about russian hackers from poor cities who were eventually captured by american services i don't know if it is translated into english but here's the name of the book Intervention. The History of Russian Hacking and in russian Вторжение. Краткая история русских хакеров

>>16201 > I think the ubiquity of computer technology and how much potential power it gives to the adepts can be considered a decent trade-off for losing that early culture. No, it can't. Not only was the internet/computing world completely ruined, but it was and is used for several nefarious political means, and most people just follow whatever's popular, meaning computing has been effectively turned into a tool of evil. You might think it's too cartooney to use that term, but I really think that's the appropriate word for it, it's disgusting seeing how pretty much all positive aspects of early computing culture were erased despite the fact modern ubiquity is only possible because of those people to begin with. Nerds were used for their passion for something that ultimately became responsible for a large parcel of contemporary ills.

>>20154 It’s always Russians

>>17229 I'm digging this thread, I have CDC in pdf, cyberia and the soul of a new machine. (not the same guy though)

>>20147 This book was great but then it got not so great. It's pretty decent but I'd say not worth finishing (you can safely stop reading at ~300). I'm reading pic related right now (currently at chapter 29). It's pretty good, comparable to Countdown to Zero Day, though I do hope that the ending will be better. If you're considering whether or not you should to read it, here's what the first 4 parts (out of 6 total) have to say; >The beginning of cyberwar >Why Russia is so rude to other countries >Examples of Russia being rude to other countries >Ukraine got raped and how >Proof that we're in the times of cyberwar >Ukraine got raped again and how >Involvement of Fancy Bear in America's 2016 election >Shadow Brokers -- the NSA hack and the eventual EternalBlue leak >WannaCry; what it did; how MalwareTech accidentally stopped it >NotPetya; why it's called NotPetya and some story about Petya; how it raped most of the world (but mostly Ukraine, for the 3rd time)

>>22057 >pic related

>>19915 iWoz was pretty good.

>>16298 >nothing would have changed because companies exactly like them would've formed in their place. Dude a Microsoft would have came by and fuarrrked soykaf up eventually but it would have been awhile. Bill Gates was insecure narcissist genius who was raised by lawyers. In his younger days his need to feed his ego combined with his access to resources and casually litigious nature wrecked the microcomputer industry. Thousands of small businesses owned by guys whose ambitions didn't extend further than a yacht big enough for their family, needlessly destroyed so that Bill could prove a point to himself. After he finally owned the world he gave money away like it was trash and focused on normal things like his wife, kids, and hygiene. Every time you hear about Bill Gates giving away 10 million dollars don't forget that money was going to be someone's well deserved retirement until Microsoft came along and destroyed their life's work. Not only Microsoft, all through the 80s and 90s the microcomputer industry was dominated by lousy near monopolies and there was a whole side industry dedicated to providing higher quality alternatives. It was part of the fun of the time, replacing all the microsoft garbage on your PC with better stuff on the low end (often much of it totally free) , all the fun non-x86 unix workstations on the higher end of things.

>>22078 IBM clones running DOS killed microcomputers because they're easy to make and run everything made for other IBM clones running DOS. You could buy any random PC clone and have guaranteed backwards compatibility with software written as far back as 1980. Microsoft may have owned the operating system, and they were (and still are) definitely dickheads about a lot of things, but when it comes to the death of microcomputers it was mostly IBM's fault, and even then that was by accident.

>>16192 I am not familiar with this book but I have a python book by the same publisher I will probably read it

>>16200 regular people don't know soykaf about computers they just use one,it's just a chrome bootloader for them

>>16200 Cyberia is pre internet boom, actually sat on the shelf at the publisher a little bit I think. So basically, it's a fun book to read, but it's a look into a particular scene that in the end, didn't make much impact I think. A lot about 90s AR/VR and smart drugs. I mean, a lot of the stuff SEL was riffing on, but sort of quaint, and associated with out of fashion dance music.

>>22056 The optimism of the types of people from CDC becomes depressing once you realize the underlying political authoritarianism it entails, from actually collaborating with the government and tech giants whatsoever, to supporting the destruction of civil rights (arms, etc). I shouldn't really have expected much else from a bunch of dudes in San Francisco.

>>16195 >If your asking why the culture changed from nerds in a basement to what we have now, then I would say its money. At the beginning it wasn't a business it was people who were doing what there ware doing for fun, now there is a ton of money involved so companies dictate the terms and not enthusiasts like it happend back then. Field is much more crowded. When there was not that many people around it was easier to self promote and show off not doing so much work per week it literally makes you wanna puke. Rate race lefts not too much time for activism and writing zines with fancy ascii arts. >>16202 >Hacking was easier back in the day, there was a lower bar for entry, besides having rich parents to buy you a PC. People these days are far more talented. Yeah. In an era of "microcomputers you plugged to TV" you could have learned Assembly at age of around 13 (or earlier) sitting nights in your bedroom with technical manual that came with your pappa's Commodore or whatever other product of that era. Speaking with hardware in it's tongue was relatively uncomplicated in 8 bit era. But things skyrocketed in complexity pretty fast after that. Operating systems get more complex and user programs moved further from speaking directly with hardware. Layers of glue between CPU and being in the seat in front of computer became thicker. Also field was far less crowded so it was easier to shine with not too much effort. Same stuff happened with maths since XIX century - when you could have done important contribution into field at the age 17-19 just by sorting some stuff developed earlier into some consistent system. In pre WW2 times that age moved toward 23-25 as with guys in field of set theory and topology, by around 1970s we can observe that age moved toward age of 30. And it's still increasing - simply because you have to know more and more stuff to reach the level where there is still room for further improvements, discoveries and innovation. And that DO take time. Often so much that it does require doing it full time while staying single as no partner would stand being 2nd to science interests for too long. Nowadays most of innovations in both CS and math is done by teams rather than single individuals. Individuals still do innovate but typically later in their life than it was typical 100-150 years ago. Nowadays average undergraduate CS student knows more about math that PhD in mathematics knew back in 1800s. Picrel is from https://www.zmescience.com/science/science-ideas-difficulty-9235634/

>>20064 >One as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles >muggles gtfo

>>24615 that graph is an abomination.

>>24615 >>24744

>>24744 >>24745 congatz at failing to address the point and concentrating on a graph i vote you autism/10

>>24747 I don't even care about the point. I didn't read the post and I'm not going to. All I know is, the graph is bad.

>>24748 (not that lain) not really, that there's a relationship between number of researchers and measurement of fruit of research is hardly a stretch

>>16192 >Any other books like this? Also, what went wrong? i recently re-read levy's hackers. i've never liked how it's a hagiography of a few people i think have been harmful to the world (stewart brand and the so-called "california ideology" people, primarily) and he oddly leaves out a lot of things about bell labs, C, and unix. this is strange to me as levy does manage to include a lot of adoration for cyberspace and the web, which was spread to the world on the back of C and unix/linux. levy has a storied friendship with the whole wired magazine constellation of people, to the extent that he was a member of a libertarian hippie commune associated with the whole earth catalog crowd, so he tends to be a very credulous stenographer on that ideological filter. a very large portion of the book, in the middle and in the revised edition's appendices, are devoted to this explicitly but most of the other anecdotes in the book see the world through this filter. on what went wrong, levy describes exactly what happened if you're reading the content actively. on the east coast, the original hackers were either hired by large tech companies or started their own companies, and they grew out of hacking because of the profit imperative. their academic labs were either dismantled or taken over by commercial imperatives. in other words, the defense and telecommunications industries got the labor of geniuses that their charitable donations paid for, and the hacker environment was discarded after they got what they wanted. on the west coast, everything started out with a profit imperative at stanford. the norcal hardware hackers were explicitly out for profit, and the libertarian counterculture gave everyone a false sense of purpose that motivated them to be useful pawns in humanizing technology that was originally invented and developed as a counterinsurgency surveillance weapon, recontextualizing networking technology to an american public that was rightly suspicious and afraid of how it would be used against them. if you read hackers without complete credulity to levy's ideology, he explains very plainly how the hackers died off. their usefulness in developing the precursor technologies had expired, and they were discarded by commerce.

>What went wrong? Hackers are building the new decentralized web. We are at the beginning of a golden age of hacker culture. Fasten your seatbelts.

>>22057 Sounds like one of those "expose" that American propagandists write where they describe something that all countries capable of doing it, are doing it, but conveniently only discuss how a particular enemy (Russia, China, North Korea) does it so as to imply they're the only ones doing it, or they're somehow exceptional in it.

>>25944 What are you talking about? IPFS?

>>25955 >IPFS GNUnet, Tor, I2P, BitTorrent (Now with DHT), Bitcoin, LokiNet, ActivityPub, Batman2, Funkwhale, bitchan, nntpchan etc.

>>25956 Which of those do you expect to go mainstream?

>>25957 Not the same guy, but we should all aim to use more of these technologies instead of sitting back and compla8ning about javascript on our web browsers, and that there is "no us ble alternative."

>>16192 > what went wrong nothing went wrong, things simply changed as all things in life do. There may be something wrong with you if you hate the fact that things have changed, or view the past as preferable to the present. Computing matured, it became at once an academic, hobby, AND commercial pursuit as people began to realize its power. Hackers never disappeared, they transformed into their modern counterparts, they evolved. λ is one of the gathering places for those passionate computer enthusiasts, a modern usenet so to say (certainly a lot better than usenet was).

>>25961 >There may be something wrong with you if you hate the fact that things have changed, or view the past as preferable to the present. Considering that your use of words like 'hate' or 'view' appears to acknowledge that the metrics by which people judge a given time are subjective, this is quite the preposterous claim. Let me assume that the claim refers not to any possible past and present, but specifically to the past depicted in the OP book ('DoY', for days of yore) and the present as of posting ('PDPT', for present day, present time). What is being claimed is that any metric that judges DoY as preferable to PDPT is probably inherently wrong, despite being subjective. Now, I know all about the paralyzing effects of nostalgia, but maybe you went a tad too far the other way? For ordinary humans, "don't let nostalgia for a golden past (that probably didn't exist) keep you from living the present" suffices as good advice. It is only High Elves, Vulcans and other such true neutral characters that really need to refrain from having any subjective preference whatsoever.

>>25964 I can't tell you how many times I've heard people blinded by their fetishism of the past tell me that going back to banging rocks together is somehow objectively better than having modern medicine because "life was simpler", but they lack the awareness to understand that their life is easier than it ever was. Every single age and generation comes with its own difficulties and strifes. The manchildren blabbering on about how much better soykafty computers and soykafty graphics in the 90's were compared to now frankly piss me off. You're absolutely right though, I went a bit too far in the opposite direction in the short speel that I gave. A better way to phrase it would have been "there is something wrong with your evaluation if you think that the past was nearly as pleasant as your rose tinted glasses make you think it was." Cyber dystopias aren't preferable to PDPT but PDPT isn't worse than DOY unless you ignore all of the nicities that we take for granted. They have no perspective and miss the forest for the trees, which gets my knickers in a knot.

>>24615 Really good post. fuarrrk the idiot who replied to you about the graph.

>>25957 Today, people sink significant power and bandwidth into BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and ActivityPub. They are all mainstream. I expect Batman2 or other meshnet solutions to take off, since they're currently popular in areas without competing infrastructure. Out of I2P, GNUnet, and Tor, I don't know, but my money is on GNUnet since it wants to exist within popular protocols rather than replace them.

>>16192 isn't that book that says Steve Jobs was a hacker?

>>26011 He sure hacked the masses Present Day, Present Time! AHAHAHAHAHA!

>>26011 Only insofar as he sometimes touched blue boxes that he was reselling, which were made by Steve Wozniak.

Does anybody here have Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge ?

>>26291 Depending on how bad you want it, you can loan it from archive.org https://archive.org/details/mondo2000usersgu00ruck/ They have a load of DRM-free Mondo 2000 scans as well: https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22mondo+2000%22

>>26291 Here is my soykafty attempt to convert it into pdf https://files.catbox.moe/z06g1w.pdf

>>26304 How do you "convert" an encrypted file to a readable pdf? Are you trying to spread malware again?

>>26305 Nah. It's just a bunch of screens, that are combined into a PDF via imagemagick. Quality, as I said before, is soykafty, but mostly readable. BTW, what do you mean by "trying to spread malware again" ?

>>25956 Can't speak for anything but TOR, I2P,Bittorrent,Bitcoin, but out of the things I have tried i2p looks most promising along with bitcoin, bittorrent will still have a place as well. Bitchan looks promising as does IPFS. However time will tell.