Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club | Hacker News Reader

Inside the Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

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164 pointsoBeLx78 comments

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.

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?

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.

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.

I was there. I'm friends with several w00w00 people, and worked for 4 years with Dug. I wasn't in w00w00 because I was in a "rival" channel (by the way, it sounds weird to mix TESO and ADM up with IRC channels like #w00w00 and #!r00t and #guild).

We were all of us entrepreneurial, but being in w00w00 didn't get any any support from, say, d0b.

I'll do you one better: #!r00t'ers started a bunch of companies together. Other than WhatsApp (WHICH I ADMIT BLOWS THE CURVE), were there a lot of multiple-w00-person companies?

I wrote the article and, yes, I probably conflated TESO and ADM with w00w00 on one level, though I did a ton of research and those other hacker groups were routinely mentioned in comparison.

"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)." -- that's correct and a good way of putting it.

Well, two of those are vulnerability research teams, and one of them is a social club, but sure, I guess you can use them all in the same sentence. ;)

"We were all of us entrepreneurial"

All is a strong word. I was more #hack, but also spent time in #!r00t and the two communities overlapped a bit (tim(al), etc). I was terribly non-entrepreneurial back then. I ported the original iss.c to SunOS and Solaris but distinctly remember telling kewpie that a business around this would never fly. This is one example (of a few quite notable ones) of why people should not take business advice from me.

All that aside, yeah, this smacks of mostly post-hoc fallacy to me as well.

Napster? IIRC, Plaxo. FB. Zivity had at least 2 #w00w00. Some various FF-affiliated stuff.

Frankly, I don't think you're making your point, but swang made it below in another part of the discussion:

"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."

I think that's your actual point: Smart technical young people became smart technical adults, and the hindsight of whats app could have been any number of channels, just as many of the members were parts of many "crews" or channels. Unlike most channels though, as you point out, they met up in real life, generally in august in vegas. :-)

Really I think it's just safe to say that anyone who was on irc in the late 90s probably had their career benefit from it. #winprog got me my first job at the tail of the boom (and I did terribly at it) and that definitely wasn't a 'scene' kind of channel (ridiculous Wired article aside), but I definitely still have a certain kind of fraternity with the other people I occupied that space with (in a different channel, as well as semi-regular real life meetings, now) and a lot of those people have gone on to do great stuff.

> I'm just hoping to forestall another goofy HN conspiracy theory; the idea that w00w00 is, like, the Internet's "Skull & Bones".

That's true. The Internet's "Skull & Bones" of black hat, darkside hackers is l0ck.

Apparently their leader made a fortune preparing for the coming deflation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTTFuOEOhEE

Fuck L0ck. Seriously fuck those guys.

>>We're discussing here a group of people who started their careers dead smack in the middle of the dot-com bubble

This reminds of the Indian IT scene. Where today's so called managers/execs/leaders were just lucky to be in the path of immense inertia in the 90's.

Most of them probably have no experience at all, some of them as little as working in testing projects for a few months. They just had to be promoted because companies were growing 100% year on year, and the only way to get new managers were to promote existing people. People with as little as an year of experience from college became senior managers.

Now we have these people come and repeatedly lecture us 'We are so awesome, they had to make us VP's without doing any work at all'.

Tom, you stuck your neck out here. Those who weren't there will never understand. Everyone who needs to know who's who, already does.. The rest of them can read about halfass explanations on techcrunch

A bad habit of mine.

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.

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).

Except others in w00w00 ended up working at Napster and one is practically a co-founder.

Oh great. I have the TetriNET theme song midi stuck in my head now - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j02bbkyuYw#t=6

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?

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.

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.

Could you write (or reference) blog posts of that general set up? Sounds interesting.

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.)

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

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).

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.

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.

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/

I do.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes.

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.

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 :)

For an IRC-related crime?

I believe he's MinorThreat aka Chris Lamprecht, which means his sentence wasn't for his computer related crimes oddly enough.

Hans Reiser still wins this competition though :)

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.

It's been invaluable to me in keeping up with the cryptocurrency scene the last year or two.

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.

Freenode is still heavily used and is worth frequenting to both meet people with similar interests and get help on a specific project.

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

I like the thinking here: https://globality.be/blog/diversification-personalization--r...

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.

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/

Security wasn't an industry before 2002? Huh? Security made millionaires out of half of #!r00t and (I assume) #w00w00 before 2000, mostly due to ISS. It professionalized in the mid-1990s.

Hm, security made millionaires you say, I'm not sure about that. WhatsUp is not the kind of application that I would expect from a former w00w00/TESO/MoD/ADM/Gobless/LSD-PL/whatever. Most of them are into security I assume and I don't recall anyone becoming millionaire, in the sense that no story made headlines to my knowledge.

But you probably know better, since you're on the field.

People have been selling security companies for 8-9 figures for the last 13 years or so, more or less continuously. And when we're talking about #w00w00 / #hack / #!r00t, you also have to contend with ISSX, which was an extremely successful IPO. So, yeah: reevaluate that thought.

>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.

What does that mean? Tim Berners-Lee might like to have a word with you about when the "web-based" internet came out.

"the internet" used to be much more diverse in terms of protocols / tech used. Gopher / Veronica, Archie, USENET, IRC, etc. Lots more text.

Oh, and you used telnet to get to these things, not ssh. SSH didn't become de rigeur until the very late 90s.

This is not to say that the web didn't exist at the time; it did. Webcrawler was useful back in the days of Webrings.

"PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER".

- Groucho Marx

I think HN counts.

After all a lot of members of this community have already gone to build big companies.

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.

Which MUD were you on?

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.

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

I'm sure he's crying himself to sleep on his pillows stuffed with hundreds over that comment.

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.

#interestingly deep

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

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.

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.

It was difficult to list everybody.

> $19 billion dollars

Great editing standards.

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.)

Fixed.

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

Kinda shows how important your social circle is to your future success even at lower age.

It's not mandatory but it surely helps.

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

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.

Upvote if you used SoftIce and W32Dasm :)

Ahhhh, the memories!

reminds me of the paradox days,good times.

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

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