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It's a very different world.

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.




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