From CCC in the early 80s to TESO in the 2000s, through LoD,
MoD, cDc, L0pht
With the exception of LoD and MoD, these "groups" (brands, really) have nothing in common with each other. And none of them had any common purpose.
With the exception of LoD and MoD, these "groups" (brands, really) have nothing in common with each other. And none of them had any common purpose.
The article talks about uniqueness, but being in a group does not affect uniqueness. You could almost compare it to all the Hacker News advice to not do a startup solo, as you need companions to talk to on the long slog. A hacker in a group can brag to them about his achievements (he could tell the whole world, but then he'd be arrested). He can also brag to other hackers about being in an elite group. It socially enhances them as an individual, it doesn't take away from their individuality.
They say the French revolution was formed in the salons of Paris. What were the salons of this bygone hacker scene? The BBS's running on the Apple ]['s and Commodore 64's that were sitting in the bedrooms of teenage boys. That the means of communication were completely controlled by teenage boys (through a mostly oblivious Bell) affected things in a whole host of ways. Any kid with a phone line in his room and $200 for a Commodore 64 could host a node on this communication network in the mid-1980s.
Two forces destroyed the scene - the carrot and the stick. The stick was the government beginning to notice their existence. The 414's were busted in 1983. There were a series of raids in 1987. In 1990 MoD was busted and Operation Sun Devil happened. This didn't really kill the scene though. A complete free-for-all changed into more careful hackers, not making calls from their house but using acoustic couplers on payphones or (modded) cell phones. They also were quieter about laws they may be breaking. They also became more sophisticated, really understanding the phone system, how Internet hosts and security worked etc. In some ways, attacks by law enforcement made them more dangerous.
The real death knell of the groups was the carrot. The Internet became more widespread, and these people began to get jobs. They formed companies, which they sold for millions of dollars to billions of dollars. Which is not hyperbole. When the guy you knew, who was not all that smarter than you, creates a billion dollar company, wardialing or sniffing the traffic of some host seems less important. Idle hands are the devil's workshop. The closed off world of mainframes on x.25 networks run by Computer Science Phds from top universities, counterposed to another network of working class mischievous teenage boys with their Commodore 64 BBSs in their bedrooms - this is a ripe ground for a hacker scene. A network where you hear stories of teenagers making millions on the hit app they wrote - opportunities like this put a damper on hacker scenes.
I guess I agree with your last graf.
(L0pht obviously had a side in the full disclosure "debate", but they didn't have much to do with the outcome of the debate. I don't recall anyone serious taking the opposing side on full disclosure, by the way; that outcome was a foregone conclusion.)
Can you expand on this? I'd say the outcome has been the opposite of the foregone conclusion, unless I've misinterpreted you. FD seemed like the "of course it's this way" option (unless I misremember), but that's not where we are today.
What I'd say is that today, few people bat an eyelash if a researcher does a detailed writeup of how a vulnerability and its exploit work (for instance, look at the Google security blog). That wasn't true in the 1990s: if a company of Google's stature had published something like that, it would have been controversial and newsworthy.
I'd suggest FD prevailed because it's relatively safe to publish vulnerabilities today; in fact, it's a career booster.
During the FD debate, there were "important" people suggesting that all vulnerabilities be routed to organizations like CERT, which had as a charter the concealment of vulnerability details.
How seriously do you take cDc and the L0pht? We should probably make sure we're not talking past each other before we try to debate.
Not saying all groups by any means, but even with being a few years late getting started in the infosec world of Atlanta there were still a lot of old guard hackers hanging around when I got out of school and people still felt comfortable sharing stories from time to time.
They might have ./smurf.c'd each other constantly but they all pretty much came out of the same environment.