As the author, I've been amazed over the years at how well this resonates with people 25+ years after the fact. I continue to get 2-3 emails a week from people about how it affected them (unfortunately, about half of the emails also ask me to break into something for them).
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.
Thanks for writing this Loyd. It made an impression on me when I was younger and I re-read it fairly often. I recall (with slight embarrassment) translating it into French for an assignment whilst at school (we had to translate an article/story we liked). I don't think the teacher was very impressed with my choice.
The copy that I kept staid with me through two HDD meltdown events since the 2000's, when I first read it. It isn't about me, or of my direct experience. But it is about people like me, and exhibits an emotion that looks exactly like it was ripped directly from my brain, I can almost feel the static when I run my eyes on it.
I hate that the majority (I assume) here on HN didn't get to cut their teeth in the BBS era, you really missed out.
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!)
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. :)
Silicon Toad! Completely forget about that name. Lots of fun groups back then, actually writing interesting code instead of useless antics likes DDoS and website defacement.
Your comment made me think of Telehack [1] and Textfiles [2].
"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]
I absolutely love textfiles.com -- their BBS documentary was amazing. This is the first time I've come across telehack, very cool. I look forward to playing with it more when I get some freetime.
I missed the BBS era and came in around the point where if you had a Windows machine you had to know some cmd magic to get certain things to work (dodgy shareware Doom floppies is the one I remember best), but it seems like it's a missing skill now.
I can tell already this won't be a popular sentiment around here. Also, I want to preface this by saying I wasn't around in bbs era, and maybe my reaction would be different if I had been.
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.
Ask yourself this: Would any of those people think twice about violating my privacy?
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.
This depends on intent. I don't want to confound exploration with activism, but there are many instances where damaging a company may be the ethical thing to do.
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.
Lots of stuff I didn't like happened to me when I was growing up. I don't mean abusive stuff just unpleasant stuff, normal school and high school stuff. Including having my privacy violated on a regular basis by teachers and other authority figures. So while I could understand that other people might also not like having their privacy violated, it seemed like it was the status quo. I had a very hard time learning what was OK and what was off limits because of the double standard applied to kids vs. adults.
That's an excellent point too. Kids treat each other like complete and utter crap in school, and teachers often aren't all that much better from a kid's point of view.
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.
It's a valid point. I have a confession though: I was a teenage hacker (in the cracking sense). I suspect many people around here were.
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.
I like the phrase 'catch and release.' We always worked from the philosophy of 'do no harm.' I can certainly see the top poster's side of things -- there are a lot of issues that I feel much differently about as a near-50-year-old than I did as a teenager. For what it's worth, I was never trying to provide moral authority for hacking in the perjorative sense when I wrote it, I was just venting...
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.
Oh sure. I'm sure what I did was incredibly annoying to someone, if not downright dangerous.
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.
There's one area you can still perform full attacks on, without worrying about getting in trouble for attacking networks: cracking software.
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".
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.
A CS degree has no bearing on one's ability to 'ship software', since that's not what a CS degree is meant for. I see a lot of disappointed second-years want to be taught how to better write software, but they're in a CS degree because it carries higher prestige than a diploma from a technical institute (at least here in Western Canada, and probably elsewhere, but not everywhere)
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.
The OP criticizes the manifesto for essentially saying "I'm smarter than you, so I'm entitled to do whatever I want"... and your response is essentially "That's true, but let's face it, I am really, really, really a lot smarter than you." I'd venture that you missed the point.
I don't think he missed the point. He gave a different perspective on how the attitude expressed in the manifesto can help someone grow in skill impressively.
What I think you've missed from api's comment is the subtext that curious hackers are far more like explorers than criminals, and that their actions should be considered in the context of their mindset.
No, I understand that and I disagree completely. To the extent that you're not mentally handicapped and understand that your actions have consequences, what you think you're up to when you commit a crime is completely irrelevant.
We are going to have to disagree but please reread my comment: I am not implying that you have a mental handicap at all. I'm saying that a person who does not understand the consequences of their actions due to mental handicap should be exempt from full punishment. I stand firmly by rationalization does not constitute failure to understand.
You have to keep in mind this was a different time. There were no Free unixlike operating systems with full source code available, and no immensely powerful PCs to run them on. There was no world wide web with every bit of information available. There were few practical ways of learning how computers worked except by breaking into them and studying them.
Yeah, I agree. I like the aspect of curiosity, but I wish the author focused on it without the overpowering tone of bitterness and resentment. Hacking and making are positive things. It'd be easy for someone to miss that when reading this manifesto.
Of course with any subculture there's going to be some amount of superiority. I would still claim that there's a lot more arrogance in the IT industry today, even or maybe especially among celebrated companies like Google, Apple and Facebook.
I remember being around 7 or 8 and reading this (and other texts of the times in question) and being inspired by the inherent culture which had at it's simplest reduction an insatiable need to consume knowledge by means of discovery. It inspired me to learn C and tinker with Linux and BSD. It also had a part on a quirky math phase I had - which ended causing my math teachers pain when trying to teach a 13 year old the usual basics ended having to grade exams with the most intricate and elaborate (and long) solutions to simple questions and puzzles.
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.
It's a shame that the old computing culture is dead. VX scene, demoscene, crack scene, ... Everything that used to be interesting for the curious is dead.
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.
Mmmh, sorta. Mobile development often lets you work bare-metal with scarce resources, especially in the world of game consoles. One of my favorite experiences in high school was developing homebrew games for the PSP and experimenting with homebrew on the GBA. Right now I'm reverse-engineering an NES game from 1992 just for the hell of it (god it's fun).
Hardware hacking is still around, there's just so many other options that it can get lost in the noise.
Yah, even though that scene is growing smaller by the year, the 6502/2A03 ASM geeks are still crunching away... looking for extra space inside NES Rom's to cram some new, cool feature their favorite games would benefit from. Did a little in the mid-00's, was a great time and taught me how a microprocessor works.
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)
Really? I think the hacker news community is more focused around node.js than it is around unauthorised access to computer systems. I do agree there is a common theme of the joy of discovery, but I find it hard to cheer on people breaking into computer systems.
I think the hacker news community is more focused around node.js
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.
Hur, indie programmer humor. People who think that are idiots. We live in a time when you can buy a computer the size of your hand that can do real time image analysis on a couple of AA batteries for $40. A couple decades ago that would be a classified munition with the assumption that one would build a better guided missile from it. Just because that computer in your pocket is polished doesn't mean it's a toy. A toy is a remote terminal incapable of executing machine code outside of drawing letters on the screen. Or a computer that only can remember 16,000 numbers at a time (that's not enough enough space for a crappy, unanimated GIF). Remember War Games, when he cracked open the handset of a payphone and made a free call by touching a soda can tab between the microphone and a ground wire? That was the level of technology not so long ago. Try writing your RoR craigslist knockoff using that.
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.
So much of cultural is contextual, and on closer inspection the hero and villan are rarely who you thought they were. I saw your manifesto a long time ago, in a small town far, far away, and it played some part in making a bankers son want to be a hacker. Thanks for that.
No, I've just been on the Internet long enough to know that I have better ways of spending my time than trying to hold a debate with a person who calls me an idiot.
You should see what kind of shit disturbing Robert T Morris (the Y Combinator partner) was up to back in the day. If Aaron Swartz was facing 30 years for his curl script in a closet, rtm's hacking would have him on death row today by comparison. His worm was pretty bad ass - way ahead of its time.
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.
Yes, that is true. I think most of the people here do not condone breaking into other people's systems and harming them. Rather the community inspires curiosity and seek of knowledge. But the manifesto is very relevant to the case of Aaron.
"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."
Have you ever been to a website that prompted you for your name to make an account or have temporary access, and you put in a fake name? Perhaps some forum that wanted you to register?
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.
I support them, as long as they do the right thing afterwards and make the owners aware and do not do anything destructive or that violates someone's privacy.
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.
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.
Forums and IRC actually made the Internet much friendlier ... The era in which this was written might have let you dial into a BBS and (if you were lucky) participate in usenet.
For those interested in this timeframe and what it looked like being tracked and caught at that time, one can turn to The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling, a non-fiction work incredibly reminiscent of the events currently of interest to us.
Free (as in beer) in its electronic version ([0], hosted at MIT), and available as paperback on Amazon.
I second this. And if you enjoy The Hacker Crackdown you should also read The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stole, and Do It! by Jerry Rubin, which are also non-fiction. The latter one is only a little related to the hacker subculture since it happens just before it existed but there are strong links between the Yippie movement and the phreaker scene which is the predecessor of the hacker scene.
I think that those three are my most favorite books of all time.
The Cuckoo's Egg is an amazing read. You get a very play-by-play account of the story, see an 80s honeypot in action, and if I remember correctly, read about interactions with the still running Chaos Computer Club.
I'm sorry to hijack your comment for this but if you want to read something related but on another tangent (phreaking) then this article is highly recommended - http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/lbb.html
"Friendly" is the wrong term - I meant the subculture that it promoted in contrast to internet culture today. Today, internet isn't too different from mainstream culture. Back then, mainstream was MTV and the counterculture was the internet.
"The main thing is to have a soul that loves the truth and harbours it where he finds it. And another thing: truth requires constant repetition, because error is being preached about us all the time, and not only by isolated individuals but by the masses. In the newspapers and encyclopedias, in schools and universities, everywhere error rides high and basks in the consciousness of having the majority on its side."
Yeah, I think we tend to forget our history (since tech evolves so fast).
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.
I think it has a lot to do with these words and the sentiment behind them. The childen of that era (like the author) have grown up, and through their experiences and determination helped to shape a world where we can learn, explore, develop, interact and hack on things, like they did, but in a more tolerant and willing (and less illegal) environment.
Many of the stories on HN focus the problems with education, big corps and the authorities (the stories about Aaron Swartz encapsulate all of these), particularly with regards to people like HN readers. Its a different world to that story, but the issues are still relevant.
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.
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."
>whereas earlier hackers often worked with people.
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.
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.
AKA the teenager manifesto. Sorry but the feeling of superiority that many hackers have is their biggest weakness. You are not a beautiful butterfly that nobody comprehends. Everybody else is not less intelligent than you, no wonder hackers are always in the wrong side of the police boot. You better start working fast.
The problem with writings like this is that they murky the waters between curiosity , creativity and doing stuff that is actually illegal.
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.
Those waters were murky from the beginning. Always have been, always will be.
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.
I assure you, these people were not interested in your life savings. Having never met the author of this piece, I can still confidently say that he and everyone else in that culture, then and now, would have opposed anyone hacking to raid some poor bystander's bank account.
It's this sort of fear mongering that got us here.
Well, that's not strictly true. I know at least a couple of folks from that era who would pilfer a bank account in a heartbeat, given the opportunity (they tended to be active 'carders'). They were, however, treated with disdain by 99% of the 'exploratory' hackers I knew.
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...
I'm not saying none of them existed, just that isn't what this culture was about. As you said, such types were unwelcome in the community, and I'm pretty sure that isn't what your manifesto was about (but correct me if I'm wrong).
No, you're right. I just don't want to see it painted in a fairy dust of nostalgia. There were some real criminals involved, and I'm sure there were many who nobody ever knew played both sides. There were plenty of guys that were good enough at hiding their True Name that they could have been anyone. Not just random dudes on a bbs, but folks I "knew" with serious technical skills.
Because in todays legal climate most of the things that were 'gray' back then are forbidden explicitly now. Things that as a kid in my days you'd be receiving a stern talking to for will now cause you to go to jail for very long periods in addition to likely resulting in you filing for bankruptcy.
Also, remember that back then it was way harder to get caught. We did stuff like wardial entire area codes with impunity. The general lack of awareness/focus on computer security combined with non-digital phone switches (oh crossbar, how I loved thee) made it much less risky.
Just one little anecdote for old times' sake. I used a sequential dialer to scan for interesting numbers in the country capital. After hitting one particular number the phone to which the modem was connected rang. This was before the days of anr indicating that whoever backtracked that number in less than a minute had quite a bit of pull. The guy on the other side asked me what we were doing calling that particular number. The phone actually felt hot in my hand and I realized: Busted. So on the spur of the moment I said I was trying to connect to a bbs and he said 'don't call this number again' and hung up. I was still shaking an hour later.
My attitude (and that of most of my contemporaries) was that hacking government computers (in our own country at least) was a Damn Stupid idea.
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.'
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.