Is hacker culture dead?

Decades ago, a hacker was someone who just loved computers and wanted to explore them in cool and interesting ways, even if that meant pulling stupid pranks or breaking the rules set by fascistic administrators. Today, people who call themselves hackers are Zuckerberg style Silicone Valley yuppies or white collar pros with cybersecurity certifications. Most of these people seem overly obsessed with money, don't have actual passion for computers or any rebellious spirit, and want to make stuff to get laid and get a soykafty corporate job or be the next Bill Gates. How the hell did this happen? I'm a mechanical engineering student and looking back on the history of engineering I hated how good stuff used to be back then and how boring studying engineering is today. Back in the 1800s, when modern engineering was developing, you had a culture of inventors like Nikola Tesla or self-taught wackos tinkering away in their barn yards making stuff. They took the new technologies of metallurgy, electric, steam engines, and telegraph to innovate or just make junk they found personally interesting. But this culture of innovation and sticking it to the authorities eventually died. Engineering became a more and more professional business, universities and colleges monopolized the knowledge and killed off the self-taught types, and guys like Henry Ford showed that even if you started out in your barn yard you could build a massive corporate business and be rolling in cash if you just made consumer products to serve corporate interests. So that's what all engineers aspired to be. Thanks to corporate takeover and investment, the machines got so sophisticated there was no way that self-taught hobbyists could invent anything anymore. Today engineering is like kicking dead whales down the beach. I was wondering, has the same thing happened to hacker culture? Will it eventually happen? I doubt some self-taught guys or low level academics could ever invent something innovative and groundbreaking in the age of quantum computers and ultra sophisticated machinery which only a handful of universities and corpos have access to. It's also clear that tech culture is changing because more and more people are studying it who just want a high paying job or create the next big start up. Sure, script kiddies and crackers will always be around, but they'll become like those low life mechanics who switch license plates on stolen cars. Is this how things are going? Is it inevitable or can we stop it in some way?

>>37108 I would go by Stallmans definition of "hacker" which is something like "creative cleverness" (https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html). First i would say that a large part of the early hacker spirit was driven by the pre-y2k k-space potential, which kinda died out at some point b4 web 2.0. The Internet has been to the most part territorialized. Also the internet is used by everyday ppl today, as in respect to the academics and programmers of the early internet, so the percentage of people using the internet who fit and exercise hacking has shrunk, even though the actual amount of people isn't necessarily smaller, just harder to see. Todays culture also is one of consumption and passivity, which may have an impact

I see the "hacker", by your definition, fading out but I don't think it will ever completely. The flow of engineering or hacking going to white collar positions takes away some of the unorthodox mastery of the subjects, but there will always be people in their garages with free time to tinker with things. I think cyber security is turning into a different direction. For example if there was a memory leak in a piece of code, hackers could exploit that. There's lots of opportunity for a memory leak in programs written in C or C++ especially with the more complexion. Take the programming language Rust which is almost just as fast as C++ and C that prevents a lot more memory leaks that hackers could have used to exploit. But Rust isn't the end of memory leaks, in fact many malware developers are now writing their malware in rust because Rust is harder to reverse engineer right now. Cyber security is going to evolve with things coming in and things going out.

>>37112 The problem with cracking is that most of the subject is filled with scriptkiddies who doesn't understand how computers work, also the field of penetration testing has been well established and has moved from a hobby to a job, where work ends at five.

>>37112 Compilers has gotten so good now in optimization and security, targets like facebook and twitter don't really have a practically vulnerable source which can be examined (work through API calls etc) and programming languages in general so high level in abstraction that the path of exploitation is through social engineering etc.

Given that the hacker label has been romanticized so much in pop culture there will always low life anti-authority techno people calling themselves hackers. The issue is will they just be useless script kiddies or mature into knowledgeable people with serious skills?

Not that it helps that the whole endeavor of hacking gets harder and harder as the internet becomes more and more locked down by corporate soykaf. I'm having a bit of trouble motivating myself to learn all this stuff because every technique in all the CTFs and in all educational material is outdated and obsolete. It's fun, but does feel like there's no future where any of this stuff is actually going to be practically applicable, out in the wild.

>>37108 What you're describing with engineering I think is the result of the field maturing. I think that IT in general is still in the process of maturing so you will see a lot more people getting into it in general for the money, as opposed to in the 80s and 90s when there really weren't anywhere near as much opportunity to make money as there is today. We're also abstracting away a lot of the complexity with technology so much that it lowers the bar and anyone can become a 'hacker' (see scriptkiddies and hak5 toys). There are still hackers in the original meaning and spirit, they're just not where you can see them because most of the "hackers" out there are idiots with hak5 toys that at best may know how to search of github for automated exploit tools. I know real hackers, the ones that aren't necessarily criminals. They're basically tinkerers who may or not have a job in tech but they build really cool soykaf. >>37142 also this, for some it has become an aesthetic. >>37143 this is a massive problem with soulless corpos and educational institutions trying to teach people cybersecurity. Nothing beats the real thing and they will say that themselves and will still hand out outdated simulations. This is why if any of you out there is learning the right way, by tinkering, pushing buttons, twisting knobs, etc. you'll be vastly superior to the stereotypical corporate "hacker" type who can't do soykaf but to use splunk and maybe some vuln scanning tools.

> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. There isn't a consensus on what a hacker even is anymore but this attitude you get here has spread out all over the internet. The share threads on forums, people pirating textbooks off scihub to study really sophisticated stuff, people modding consoles and hacking roms or patching Japanese games that never got a Western release even if most of these people don't call themselves hackers. If you look beyond free software, hacktivism, and cybersec you can see the hacker attitude everywhere. It's less of a thing on clearnet social networks but I don't think it's going away anytime soon no matter how hard the system is trying to get rid of it. What will happen to computer hackers though? The suited tech and cybersec professional could kill them off but script kiddies could become hackers if they put in the effort. It doesn't matter if they hijack the label because attitude is what's important and they don't have it. As long as that hacker conscience lives on and personal computers exist there will be hackers of some kind. The system is unnatural so there will always be people pushing back against it.

>>37150 37143 again. I have to soften my statement a bit. Yesterday, I spent the entire night doing some Google dorking and honestly, found hundreds of plain IP addresses with real basic vulnerabilities like PHP's "?file=../../../../etc/passwd" that actually worked. Printers with default creds, all that stuff. A bio lab's virtualbox OVAs on FTP (surely half-intentional but might have something?), controllable cameras in airports... made me feel a bit more hopeful that there's actually *something* real out there, even if those bloated one-page javascript hellholes that make up 99% of the average user's internet are pretty much impenetrable (who cares about them anyway?) There were also so many servers with open windows SMBs. Didn't feel quite comfortable bruting any from behind just a VPN in a VM, though. Anyway, I feel a bit more motivated to learn, now, because apparently there's a lot of people who don't secure their soykaf at all. It's not all standardised cloud solutions, yet.

>>37152 >even if those bloated one-page javascript hellholes that make up 99% of the average user's internet are pretty much impenetrable ( I disagree. If anything as the internet becomes more complex there's more soykaf to take advantage of. I feel like people are becoming dumber with tech, which means that anyone who has anything remotely resembling a grasp of a concept is over powered >Anyway, I feel a bit more motivated to learn, now, because apparently there's a lot of people who don't secure their soykaf at all. It's not all standardised cloud solutions, yet. Don't stop learning, stay curious and true to yourself. Teach others if you can. It's not a competition between hackers it's a competition against those who want to cause us harm.

>>37155 > If anything as the internet becomes more complex there's more soykaf to take advantage of. True but it also means there's a lot more stuff to learn and it's easy to fuarrrk up. Still it's great if you love learning stuff for the sake of it.

>>37156 >Still it's great if you love learning stuff for the sake of it. that's key. You do need to be okay or like learning new stuff constantly in the tech field in general. If you're just doing it for money and just want to learn enough to "get in the door" then you're going to be miserable and will become part of the problem due to lack of motivation.

There never was such a thing as "hacker culture." It's just a word different people in the tech world started using to sound edgy and cool. Stallman calls himself a hacker, so does Mark Zuckerberg, so do edgy teenagers doxxing people online. Then along came sci fi writers, phone cops, and law enforcement who started writing about "hackers" and created this illusion that something called hacker culture exists. There never was a hacker culture. But lots of people tried to create one after the fact.

On the OP's note of practicals There may be a lot of hacking in our future. Consider people using AI to write code. Even if AI code eventually becomes only about as buggy as regular code, the price-per-line-of-code metric will be centimated. More code, more bugs. "The best developers write negative lines of code per time unit" Granted everyone should already see this coming from what we know about software, but if said awareness hasn't already fixed the existing manifestations of the overcoding or technical debt issues without AI why would AI change anything? Prioritize getting your hands on as much of a local/shared model as you can and hack it into a machine built for hunting. >>37298 I don't think there is a lot of "hacker culture" except that their is culture born from the context of the hacker impulse. If you look into the earliest instances of phreaking and hacking etc you will see the hacker impulse ex nihilo. All the feedback between hype movies and IRL wannabies (eventually successful or otherwise) is a layer of context around that instinct. It contributes some character, but it isn't the definition. A hacker by any other name (e.g. tinker, even just hobbyist/enthusiast)

>>37301 https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/homeland-security-details-how-teen-hackers-breached-some-of-the-biggest-targets/ we don't even need AI, just ambition

was hacker culture ever alive? in 1990 when i heard "hacker", the foremost thing that came to mind was some fat 30 year old couple following DIY tutorials out of a magazine to "program" something in basic or a double chinned neckbeard poorly programming some basic piece of software like a clock / calendar GUI that a professional would get right in 1/4 the time i also thought of some nerd correcting people on what hacker vs cracker means even though actual hackers just called themselves hackers while neckbeards were calling them script kiddies despite having trivial buffer overflows all over their code

Hacker culture is dead, but there have never been more hackers. I believe that the sheer amount of people online and the popularity of social media has obscured the small like-minded communities. We're nearing the point of complete centralization, a few large platforms already account for most of all traffic on the web. Media portrayal has also played its role in skewing the definition of a hacker. Money has also driven a large amount of people who wouldn't otherwise be interested into technical domains. I am a software engineer, and none of my coworkers work on their own projects. None of them understand or desire to understand more than is needed for work. For some reason I didn't really register that my hobby was someone's career until I got a job, and it made me pretty sad to realize that I'm in the minority.

I think hacker culture is making a real comeback recently, with people creating the fediverse to skew people away from big corp social platforms (regardless of your opinion on reddit/twittr clones) and veilid being a new protocol that combines tor/ipfs (https://veilid.com/). A lot of yuppies only in it for the money are getting skewed out and disenfranchisement with the current tech landscape is creating breathing room for new things. I think a hacker renaissance is just around the corner. But, I might be high on copium because my dream of hackers returning the internet to the "good old days".

Yes. All the competent hackers sold out to the feds when they realized they were risking their lives for normal people who hate them. When the Panama papers were released, basically no one cared. You can't really blame them for taking a seven figure job instead of risking their freedom for ideals no one gives a fuarrrk about. Now the only hackers are script kiddies, glorified scammers, and feds.

Just look at the difference between early 2600s and modern 2600s, or textfiles from textfiles.net and whatever modern day equivalent (social media stuff i guess). The difference is night and day. One of them had literal instructions on how to steal the tech from a phone booth, or the whole DeCSS stuff, but now the only things are skid wannabes, careerism, and self-censorship. Hacker culture is long gone.

>>37108 >So that's what all engineers aspired to be. Thanks to corporate takeover and investment, the machines got so sophisticated there was no way that self-taught hobbyists could invent anything anymore. Today engineering is like kicking dead whales down the beach. I disagree. Technology is so heavily abstracted these days that prototyping is easier than a few years ago (think development boards like the ones by Espressif). You can even launch social media campaigns to crowdsource your project these days.

>>37108 not dead, there are more but they are a much smaller piece of a bigger pie and mainstream social medias are flooded out by people who don't care about computers outside of either making money or for doom scrolling since you don't need to know anything about computers or think about how to use them since it's so simple now less people get interested, someone who uses DOS or Linux is more likely to learn about how their computers work just to understand how to do things which snowballs into learning more things or having fun learning, windows can be operated by someone crossing their eyes and not focusing towards anything and it's the common option. I heard like 20% of college aged students didn't even know what a file system is

It's like any other social lable people apply to others. If you feel hacking in your heart then your a hacker. Thats it.

Hacker culture was basically tech orientated technopunk subcultures on message boards, BBS, IRC, usenet and mailing lists. Since all of these are virtually dead now, hacker culture died with it and has been replaced by social media tech bro culture. Sure there are some hold outs like there always will be but technological change is making it go the way of the dinosaur.

>>39456 I share the same feeling. It's definitely not dead. and like >>37110 says, we are just hard to see in a sea of new users. It also doesn't help that we hackers like to fragment and decentralize everything, too. :D When I think of hackers like OP describes or Stallman does, I think of one of the more recent popular hacker like Maia. The one that leaked the No-Fly list. She wasn't really looking for it. Just having fun snooping around. I also think of the console homebrew community. Trying to reverse engineer the hell out of proprietary soykaf. Releasing their own CFW and software free of charge. Mostly doing this for the people and prolonging the lifespan of their favorite consoles.

what even is a hacker? how do you become a hacker? given how tight sec is right now how can you actually hack anything? also why does hacker just mean anyone who knows stuff about security when guys like stallman used to be called hackers?

>>37108 >Engineering became a more and more professional business, universities and colleges monopolized the knowledge and killed off the self-taught types That is definitely NOT what happened. After progress in a field has been made, making further progress requires more effort and knowledge because the low hanging fruit has already been plucked. Also to advance a field, you must first be caught up with the knowledge in the field. There is vastly more knowledge now than there was in the 1800's, so getting caught up to the point of being on the cutting edge requires more learning.

>Back in the 1800s, when modern engineering was developing, you had a culture of inventors like Nikola Tesla or self-taught wackos tinkering away in their barn yards making stuff. There still are those people. You're learning to be a professional engineer; this is completely different from tinkering in your backyard or even inventing new technologies. A professional engineer's job is to assure to the bossman that the technology will work as advertised. You can go online and find people basically making explosives for the fun of it in their definitely-not-meth lab, or people making EMP devices and radio jammers. They'll tell you how to do it too. Heck, when I was a kid my friend had access to a lathe and a welding torch and we would slap together modded minibikes and boats and ride them around. That's not very unusual. >I doubt some self-taught guys or low level academics could ever invent something innovative and groundbreaking in the age of quantum computers and ultra sophisticated machinery which only a handful of universities and corpos have access to. Quantum computers are a red herring. "big science" is there mainly to look good on a university's news release page and to launder money. It's true that there are lots of things you can't do without fancy machinery, but there are many many things you can do without fancy machinery, and the field is still wide open in a lot of ways.

It's mainly hardware hackers and people that use exploits in video games to cheat or troll.

>>39630 >given how tight sec is right now how can you actually hack anything? are you kidding? Shit is not tight at all

>>39685 lol yeah, it's not even remotely... Actually, it might even be worse than it was in the early 2000's. Man, people are fuarrrking retarded.

lains this thread gives me a lot of hope, thank you all.. >>37126 maybe Snow Crash was right. >When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that’s no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves. The prospect of becoming an assembly-line worker gives Hiro some incentive to go out and find some really good intel tonight. >>37112 >Cyber security is going to evolve with things coming in and things going out. this, and its true for hacker culture too. the late 2000s / early 2010s hacker culture was defined by Anonymous after which was followed by a lull in activity when everybody went to jail. but there's a new generation of hackers who were inspired by this as well as each other. they seemingly mainly use social media like neocities and tumblr, matrix or fediverse and are comparatively small, but it was never a lot of people doing it in the first place. they also might look very demographically different / cringe if you hate transgendered and i honestly feel like this is causes a lot of the hipster type to overlook the underground dissident technology counterculture. there was a point in time when lainchan was considered 「the place」 for this sort of person but I don't know if it really is anymore. however as an old user i think its nice that we made some sort of contribution, especially because lains seem more interested in not getting caught and doing things safely than doing something stupid for clout or to feel like part of something, getting arrested, and winding up doing less than they hoped because of how in-jail they are. >>37142 >>37143 >>37152 you don't need to be skilled to be a hacker. maia for instance has on the record stated that her actions didn't take a lot of serious effort, and I'm confident as many in the thread have stated this sort of thing will continue to be easy. the question is what kind of legal attention you want. i think that it would be good for continue having the reputation / role mentioned earlier in this post while being kind and gentle about it instead of dismissiveness and using thought-terminating language, shutting people down, calling them stupid, etc. for engaging in reckless activity. you were young once too (or still are..), and even if you weren't reckless and goingtojailcore you're probably doing / did or not doing things right now that you'll regret. the point is to have compassion and humility, being open to other ways of doing things and giving people the benefit of the doubt. like, you certainly don't have to completely frame your identity / persona while smothering yourself to somebody whos simply confident, authoritariantative, dramatic childlike or "cool" to you, its more about not dismissing someone out of your solipsistic reclusion outhand or their experiences with toxic positivity / negativity and actually see them as people, even and especially if somebody else tells you directly not to.

The modern hacker isn't a hacker. It's a scammer. They socially engineer SIM swaps to get 3 letter names on social media's and sell them for 10k+. They try brute forcing accounts till they get limited. It has no meaning anymore, just profit and a cool account name.

>>37108 "hacker" in pop culture has always meant the scary black hat. Only if you hacked around you would see the word hacker through a different lens.

>>39960 Sorry, but that's not true. In the early days, a "hacker" was someone who hacked away at programming simply for the fun of it. The term slowly changed to mean someone who used programming skills for unauthorized access. t. very old lain

>>37108 > I doubt some self-taught guys or low level academics could ever invent something innovative and groundbreaking Will not post proof of concept till patents are secured, but just to counter the sentiment: I'm self taught, forged my skills in the demoscene. As for innovation I just decided to take my hacking hobby seriously, and have created a new optimization strategem that when applied to C, generates binaries that run 100,000 times quicker than -O3 set of transforms. Make a benchmarkable binary, just a bunch of math in a series of operations, no conditional jumps, then wrap that in a loop of some sizable N. Now inject a GOTO followed by a label that is jumped to; Yep, jump to next instruction (might have to do inline __ASM() to make the optimizer leave it alone). The point in to test the hardware and see how slow a jump to next instruction is. It is GLACIALLY slower. Now that you see how slow a jump is (3mil cycles on my INTEL rig), agree jumping is the slowest opcode (invalidates cpu cache). Lets think about Boolean Operations in C. Short Circuiting OPs are the STANDARD way to perform conditional boolean logic... That means your shortcut && or || will avoid maybe a few hundred cycles, but that jump to do so will cost a full invalidation of the cpu cache and rebuild of microcode. Hardware is a cargo cult; folks imagine all kinds of optimisations are being done that simply aren't. Benchmark it and see. So, where there is no real side effect we can replace the short circuiting && or || with bitwise & or |, and avoid those stupidly slow jumps that explicitly boolean operators introduce. This alone vastly increases execution speed... > WTF are C compiler devs even doing then, shouldn't static analysis handle this? Yep, but it's time to leave the cargo cult. Start to benchmark things and see. OK, that's ONE (short circuit) optimization making code slower for no reason (it was quicker on z80, no cpu cache... -march=native? Does basically nothing), lets look at All Of GCC's optimizations. There are unit tests for each optimization. just check out the repo, build the unit tests and see for yourself that none of the benchmarks are fair. Objdump the two binaries being tested and you should see that -O0 (non optimized) is doing lots of useless memory access that, say, loop unrolling optimization doesn't have. We are not testing loop unrolling vs non optimized code. We are testing artificially slowed down -O0 vs register allocation + loop unrolling (reg alloc is turned on silently with any optimization). It is the reg alloc that is primarily making the loop unroll transform (or any optimization) quicker. Can we get reg alloc enabled alone? There is no option for reg alloc, but turn on an optimization, then -fno turn it off afterwards in the cmdline and test that as -O0 vs the optimization. Does ANY optimization actually run quicker than just reg alloc alone!? Come on Lain, if you are a real hacker why haven't you looked at the objdumps of the unit tests for the optimizations you use? Aren't we all just cargo cultists? Just believing that all these microcode unfrendly optimizations are beneficial, and allowing biased unit tests to be the scripture of the false idol of the Compiler God that we brow beat "noobs" and asm purists with? So, I hope that this gives you some hope. There is tons of room for improvement, just imagine: What if someone actually has a few optimizations that actually work instead of pretending to work against an artificially hamstrung -O0? That would be ground breaking... Just recompile everything, and your PC runs 100,000 times quicker. This is just the beginning, I have a new RISC chipset running on ordinary ASIC at 150Ghz (it has efficient instruction decoding, no microcode, and very small cpu cache so invalidation is cheap). I have a new numeric format that makes my software rasterizer quicker than a GPU (IEEE754 floats are the slowest way to represent numbers with fractional component -- GPU industry subsidizes supercomputing FLOPs, and is th3 suxxorz at gfx). I know the patent system is used to detect and silence innovation that secret cabals and their govs don't control... already dealing with mild COINTEL bs, and hopefully it doesn't silence me -- a deadman switch that releases the tech open source is a must nowadays.

Joker or something. What’s up with you?

>>39963 There are several areas where doing anything that stands out is unwise. The patent system as a modulatory + preemption layer should be obvious but people somehow still fall for it. You should realize there are several remote (and possibly automated) ways of thwarting or otherwise degrading your ability to function.