The Conscience of a Hacker
phrack.org
Edit: removing Aaron's name from the title. In retrospect I don't feel it's respectful.
phrack.org
It is difficult for anyone who didn't live through the BBS years to understand the feeling of no longer being isolated and alone. I strongly recommend Jason Scott's documentary 'BBS' (in which I'm interviewed) for a glimpse at a bygone era.
I've read it (at least) annually for the past 10 or so years.
Thank you. If you read this I will cry.
I've never broke a system but all the knowledge and mindset I got on my own path is a lot more valuable than what I got from my CS degree.
I see comments below mentioning "breaking into computer systems" -- you have to realize this was an era pre-Google, pre-www, in a lot of people's cases, pre-Usenet even. We were often limited to 60 minutes of access daily to a BBS, fighting busy signals to even get a node. Using every minute of that time to download textfiles, download cool stuff from the demo scene (sometimes with the pleasure of compiling them with TASM). We didn't have Linux boxes piled up in the back, to learn and explore Unix, many, like myself, had to fire up a war dialer, find a system, and use those crazy textfiles we read from our local BBS to work our way around. It wasn't, in most cases, for nefarious means -- it was our only option.
It was a great, great era. Hard to understand if you weren't there. Do yourself a favor and check out a few old boards that are still available through telnet. It's not the same, but you'll get an idea.
(I guess this response officially puts me in the "get off my lawn" club!)
"Telehack is a simulation of a stylized arpanet/usenet, circa 1985-1990. It is a full multi-user simulation, including 25,000 hosts and BBS's the early net, thousands of files from the era, a collection of adventure and IF games, a working BASIC interpreter with a library of programs to run, simulated historical users, and more." [3]
Textfiles is an archives of, well, text files.
I grew up in rural Texas about :45 minutes away from Houston. I ran a BSS for my neighborhood around the time of Duke Nukem 3D. We traded our custom maps over it, and coordinated our bamboo fort building plans for the summer so our parents didn't know where it was located.
We also got our hands on the anarchist cookbook and remember Hacker Manifesto being circulated everywhere. And a time when aliases matured into leetness like .oOo. Silicon Toad .oOo.
Then we got our first taste of mass internet with AOL, visual basic war proggies, and IRC scripts like teardrop.c and port attacks on Windows 95... and it's been downhill ever since. :)
Oh the memories...
But this kind of irks me: "...ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?"
Did the author ever take a look behind the eyes of the people whose systems he was breaking into and wonder why they didn't react well to having their privacy violated?
Perhaps I'm being unfair, but what I get out of it is "I'm smarter than you, so I'm entitled to do whatever I want." And I get that the author was treated poorly in school, and he has my sympathy for that (I was too). But that attitude of entitled superiority is dangerous. It can and has been used to justify really awful things. I don't think this manifesto should be lionized.
I didn't break stuff or steal stuff on purpose, or have explicit malicious intent. I practiced what is sometimes called "catch and release" hacking. It was a game... to me at least. I'm sure it was an annoyance to the ones on the other end, but I was 14-15 and wasn't thinking like that.
But boy did I ever learn a lot. By the time I made it to college, I knew more than a lot of the CS seniors. So much that I didn't bother majoring in CS. I wanted to learn something else. At 18 I knew: C, C++, 80x86 assembler, shell script, Perl, how to compose and validate an IP packet, the OSI networking model, basic protocol design, peer to peer protocol design concepts, and quite a bit about cryptography including how to properly construct an authenticated cryptographic envelope and the importance of choosing the right block cipher mode of operation. Password cracking led me to hash functions and SALTs, which led me down the rabbit hole, and I got fascinated with crypto. At one point I worked through the math of Diffie-Hellman and RSA. It was very hard stuff, and required that I delve into a lot of deep math that was way beyond me at 15 going on 16. But knowing it made me more of a badass hacker ninja. Cause it was crypto, and crypto was big time hacker stuff. When I comprehended the one-way trap door function behind Diffie-Hellman I felt like I'd stolen a car and gone joyriding with the archetypal cool kids.
More than that, I found that my knowledge was more hands-on than the CS students I encountered. I not only thought in code, but thought in networks. To this day networking and network protocols are completely natural to me, while otherwise very good programmers tend to gnash their teeth at the thought of implementing them. Also, for some reason this network experience translated right into multithreaded coding. Working with threads, even at a low level, with all the blocking and priority inversion issues, is no sweat. Network hacking made me comfortable with non-determinism.
I highly doubt I'd know this without the challenge of hacking (sense 2).
But wait, you say... why don't we just create a corewar-style game? Why can't schools have Defcon-style attack/defend tournaments.
I wouldn't have touched this with a ten foot pole. No rebellion, no interest. That would have been an "organized activity" put forward by adults. Blech.
Honestly, a similar ethos got me interested in startups much later. Startups sort of felt rebellious in a way... like little scrappy hack-trepreneurs sticking it to the big guys. It was when startups popped their shirt collars and went all douchey and "mainstream" that I lost interest.
But you're right, the rebellion was the delicious topping on the technical exploration sundae. By the time I outgrew the illegal portion of things, the technical 'hacking' imperative was firmly established in me, and has continued to this day.
I don't know what the solution is though. We've denuded our society of independent ways of knowing accessible to the young: hacking, cracking, dangerous chemistry sets, and so on. On one hand there are "good" reasons for this. On the other hand: where will the next generation of engineers come from if they can't combine learning with individuation?
I really have to underscore this: as a teenager, I had zero to negative interest in anything sanctioned by school or by the adults I was surrounded with. It was by definition lame, constraining, and uninteresting.
It's not entirely the same skillset, but there's still a rush from disassembling and figuring out exactly how to patch it (and with style), or reverse the key validation function to write a keygen. But at least it's still "wild" as in they are real systems generated by others, not an "organized activity".
I do have to take offense at the implication that disagreeing with your view is associated with mental handicap.
Anecdotally, I've worked with a number of senior CS majors. We're about the same age, but I can run circles around them when it comes to shipping software.
I never attempted to break into someone else's system, though.
I just built things. Over and over and over. All through high school. Close to 10 years now. Because I loved building things.
So while I'm sure rebellion is a great motivator, it's not the only way.
It would be great if more people understood how the two are different, it would save everyone a lot of headaches and ensure energy is spent where most valuable.
When I was a teenager I didn't give much thought to other peoples' convenience, privacy, etc., and I disagree that this is an inevitable part of being a teenager. I think it was because others (both peers and adults) did not treat me with respect, respect my privacy, etc.
My high school had no qualms about searching my locker or my bag. My ISP does deep-packet inspection and will hand over my logs to any LEA that asks, without a warrant. Practically every company I do business with resells my data in some way, to their benefit and my detriment. The vast majority of institutions have no respect whatsoever for my privacy, so I have no respect for theirs.
Make sure that any company you damage is one of those institutions with no respect for privacy.
Make sure that you don't damage any company.
In the long run, avoiding damage is in the hacker's continued interest to be able to maintain a 'beachhead' through stealth; but where privacy and 'fairness' are concerned, avoiding damage isn't always desirable.
It inspired me to open up my old Packard Bell branded computer and tinker with it until a soldering iron made it meet it's demise. This series of texts also inspired in me a need to know everything there is about computer security, and of course, the only way to put that knowledge to the test is in real world applications like hacking the school systems to take a peek at que quarterly final exams, compromising machines to use as botnets to do fun stuff in IRC, and of course taking advantage of the "unlimited" bandwidth available to the school. Thankfully the school took this as a rebellious kid/teen learning as much as possible about computers and systems and ending up giving me the task to secure their network and physical machines, to the dismay of the actual computer administrators in school.
I bet that this type of reading material inspired an army of people just like me to tinker, hack, and learn as much as possible. Aaron Swartz was probably one of them - being only three years younger than me, and probably one of the most influential in this harsh times for both hackers and activists. Now hopefully his person and his work will become part of the inspiration for future generations, the same way this text by "The Mentor" was for my generation.
Now we have... web development and "front end engineering" and "value creation" which rule the game. It really pisses me off that I care about none of these. I care for technical superiority with scarce resources, but today no such domains exist really. Really depressing.
Hardware hacking is still around, there's just so many other options that it can get lost in the noise.
So fret not! A good old-school time can still be had in this modern age of new-fangled-front-end-engineers!! (of which I am one)
:)
No, I didn't know or interact with Aaron Swartz, but his plight reminded me of this manifesto.
Since I do not follow the EULA/license agreement for each website, and I send a handshake requesting files over a webserver, I am in violation of federal law for unauthorized computer usage.
That's fucking bullshit.
One of the charges against Aaron was Wire Fraud, because he did just that - entering the name "Gary Host" into a captive portal to register for wifi access.
Congratulations, you're a felon too.
"We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals." "Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for."
Ugh, do you have to remind me? The community here is becoming so risk averse I can't fathom how they expect to hack by any definition. The Manifesto was from an era when the hardware you owned was practically a useless toy, and learning about computers almost required sneaking some time. The well off were able to take it more legitimately from their institutions at night, but what about everyone else? And what about systems that even the well off couldn't play with? Jobs was adamant that Apple never would have existed without him and Woz cutting their teeth blue boxing (a crime which sadly in modern times would be labeled terrorism, with extradition from anywhere in the world). How far ahead of the game do you really think you can get when you're asking permission at every step? Just don't be malicious.
I wish we could drill this mentality into everyone.
I'd argue that's what we're moving towards.
Kids these days.
One of the arguments I make against black hat hacking when I answer emails to (mostly) kids is that there is soooo much available you can do to fulfill your wildest geeky dreams. I'm around 90% sure that, were I growing up now, I would have eschewed cracking and instead be hip deep in some nerdvana corner of the maker universe, wiring cats up for spaceflight or something similar.
> People who think that are idiots.
> Kids these days.
I try my best to keep the level of Hacker News discourse high, but your response is incredibly rude.
Can we have a HN old farts T shirts for us old timers :-)
Taking down a large part of the internet was not a good thing, but obviously the guy had/has a lot to offer society, and not ruining his life with prison was the right call.
A lot of us are not that different, either in terms of what we came from, or where we are now.
There is an entire generation of adults that grew up when the internet wasn't as friendly and layered as it is today, when forums and IRC reigned supreme.
Free (as in beer) in its electronic version ([0], hosted at MIT), and available as paperback on Amazon.
I think that those three are my most favorite books of all time.
-Goethe
For me, I originally had this on the BBS I hosted as a teenager. And it was something important to me as an out-of-place teenager at the end of the world in NZ - the thought that we live in a borderless community of like-minded people.
What's interesting to me is this disconnect between our world (borderless, egalitarian, where information wants to be free) and reality (legal jurisdiction, protective business models). It was a problem then, it's a problem now, and future conflict is certain.
It makes me think of civil disobedience. And it makes me wonder: hackers today are used to tinkering with machines, whereas earlier hackers often worked with people. It feels like we lost something there. So many hackers today look at the world and The System and say, "It's too hard. Let's not try."
There's a book detailing the rise of hacker culture. There's a bit about hackers 'borrowing' tools from someone. The contempt they showed that man, and his tools, shows that working with people was even then not a skill that all of them had.
The stakes are higher, both risk and reward, but some of the most important similarities remain.
Those two guys named Steve were just a couple of law-breaking hippy hackers before they went on to build that company called Apple.
The innovation that came from open Internet and from open source technology that can be accessible to everyone can mostly be traced back to the original underground scene.
People have been breaking into MIT systems (like Aaron Swartz did) for as long as there have been systems there for us to hack, and we owe a great debt to some of those guys for innovative technologies we have to day.
With the recent political suicide we're all painfully aware of the risks, but not nearly enough coverage is given to the positive contributions many hackers make.
In some societies people turn to self-immolation as a form of protest. In others we have hackers.
One day, after the smoke clears, we may look back at the "hacker scene" as one of the most important counter-cultural movements of the 20th Century.
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Nobody is going to arrest you for "curiosity" but they might arrest you for bank tampering because somebody might you know have their life savings in there.
It's this sort of fear mongering that got us here.
The catalyst for me getting out of the black hat side (other than aging out of the 'being bad is fun' stage) was getting into a massive system from which I could have easily pilfered millions. Thoughts of everything from "set up Swiss bank account, fill up" to "offer to 'consult' with the company in question to fix the holes" went through my head. In the end, I just said "game over, I won," stopped cracking systems, and put up the Phoenix Project BBS as a center of learning. Which lasted until the Secret Service showed up at my door in 1990...
Also, "illegal" is not a constant, often arbitrary and usually serves only the interests of those that want to maintain the status quo.
If curiosity and creativity was constrained by what happens to be illegal at any given time, our society would look a lot different, and not for the better.
Hard to tell how to judge that text if you didn't experience that time.
If someone wrote that today, I'd think that he'd be a hypocrite. But I am sure the situation was different in 1986.
A corporation will make an ROI decision about pursuing someone. Is it worth their time and money and hassle to pursue, or should they just change the admin password to something other than "secret123" and forget about it.
The government, on the other hand, has whole branches of people with nothing better to do than follow up on this kind of thing, and they aren't motivated by 'profit.'