Sounds like somebody wasn't in the cool kids group.
I'm weakly willing to bet that whoever you think the "cool kids" were actually sucked.
PLA, 303, cdc/l0pht, DoC ... there was precious little technical skill there (although there was some).
However, I'll take a CuervoCon over a pycon and a swamp ratte stage performance over a Steve Jobs presentation any day of the week.
If your comment reflects sincerely held beliefs that accurately represent the scene as it was, I think it's safe to say you were not a part of it. Your derision of that culture is either out of dishonesty or ignorance.
Claim: for any given period of the hacker scene, saying it largely amounted to nothing more than things like carding and harassment is false, and this statement would only be made by someone who either: (a) was not exposed, or exposed only to a poor sample, and therefore doesn't understand the culture (ignorance); or (b) was exposed, but intentionally wishes to misrepresent the situation (dishonesty)
So I guess the possibilities are either that your statement was ignorant, dishonest, or my claim is wrong and the hacker scene (during whatever time period you intended) was in fact nothing more than dishonorable carders and trolls.
If nothing else, you must know that rming a compromised unix box was not the norm.
What I don't understand is how someone who was around in the 90s could manage to mythologize a bunch of teenagers using semicolons and pipe filters to pop shells on boxes and dump mail spools.
Here's the part where you tell me that you once knew a hacker who never rm'd a box. Why am I meant to care about that? There was zero correlation in the 90s between skill and care for other people's data.
Your opening comment was, "sounds like someone wasn't in the cool kids group". Now you've moved the goalposts; turns out you weren't talking about the "cool kids" at all. But it doesn't matter whether we're talking specifics or the broader issue of whether hackers were more or less moral in the 1990s: you're comprehensively wrong. Consider resetting the "tptacek is always full of shit" bit that is obviously stuck in your brain.
I'm not mischaracterizing tptacek's comment. Nor am I suggesting that there were no bad actors.
tptacek said: "The "hackers" FD's moderator is talking about are the ones I'm talking about.", those being "teenagers breaking into phone switches and harassing people, buying Pantera CDs on stolen credit cards, stealing ESNs from other people's phones to make calls on someone else's bill, and rm'ing Unix boxes".
Obviously, this is not who the FD moderator was talking about, making tptacek's comment unfair.