Nonetheless, I can't help but admire the rebellious spirit in this article. A lot of human social systems really are conformist and oppressive - high school absolutely included - and I have some respect for people who chafe against it.
I guess it would be good to ask, what specifically was +++The Mentor+++ arrested for, and is that law good or bad?
Blankenship was hired by Steve Jackson Games in 1989.[3] He authored the cyberpunk role-playing sourcebook GURPS Cyberpunk, the manuscript of which was seized in a 1990 raid of Steve Jackson Games headquarters by the U.S. Secret Service.[4][5] The raid resulted in the subsequent legal case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyd_Blankenship
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._U...
I used to read it quite often when I was 15, now that I am in my 40s, I think the manifesto is quite weak, even though its romantic in its attempt to celebrate curiosity and claim a new home for some.
Now I align more with Bunnie's [1] way: when you look at a thing as a thing, strip it from its social weight, a program is just a program, you can study it, understand its machinery and mechanisms, and make it do what you want. You can understand things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyYsVeYzbik
PS: I still think phrack 49/14 was the most iconic article I have read, and has changed the way I look at programs ever since.
As for the hacker's manifesto: we are now old. Teenage rebellion content doesn't resonate as much. I reread it after watching Hackers and agree it's not as great as I remembered. Though I also reread it multiple times as a teenager. It really resonated back then, and I'm forever grateful for it.
This statement tells more about the personality traits of the person that makes it than about age. I, for example, would claim that the central thing that changed with age is that you gained deeper knowledge, and you have more money.
I would say that I still rebel for the same causes as in my teenager time (while many people of the same age got much more conformist), but
- with the insane baggage of additional knowledge, I (can) use a very different approach than the more naive one of my teenager time,
- with more money, a lot of things become easier, i.e. in opposite to the teenager time you don't have to invest you precious time resources in some things that can be solved with money.
Maybe Godbolt has some way to emulate this better
I respect your opinion, but we would have had some flame wars back in the day ;)
The enduring bit of the Manifesto, I think, is the idea that we need to cultivate our curiosity even when society tells us we shouldn't. I mean that in the sense of both "we ought to" and it being a physical need, like an addiction.
The rest of it sounds a bit like Julia Stiles in Ghostwriter (PBS TV series): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLlj_GeKniA
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346387 - Oct 2019 (128 comments)
The Hacker's Manifesto (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520964 - July 2010 (16 comments)
The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178686 - May 2008 (5 comments)
Not any more, now we have “AI”!
The main character is an old school hacker (AND a cracker, which is a different thing) and the game leans heavily on the community's culture.
Or did I miss it..?
The way it is written is a bit like the the Navy Seal, GNU-Linux copy-pastas.
If you go back and read these after knowing what happened over the last 30 years. It is difficult to take seriously. I feel similarly when reading "A declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace".
You just see the world in a way that no one else around you does. A world that is between indifferent and hostile to your way of thinking and seeks to assimilate you into a fundamentally incurious, indifferent, uninspired apparatus.
There is nothing special about this because you happen to be able to do it with a computer/electronics/network.
I understand a lot about how bicycles work because I tinkered and built my own. It isn't exactly the same as hacking, but it is very similar. When you work on old bikes, motorbikes, cars you sometimes have to come up to novel solutions to problems.
The fact that you and the author can't see the similarities is exactly the issue I and others have pointed out.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/7426/loyd-blanke... Loyd Blankenship born 1965
Not everyone was into this hopeful vision of cyberspace though, Masters of Doom comes to mind.
There was a feeling of hope on the Internet at the time that this was a communication tool that would bring us all together. I do feel like some of that died around 9/11 but that it was Facebook and the algorithms that really killed it. That is where the Internet transitioned from being about showcasing the best of us to showcasing the worst of us. In the name of engagement.
Really you’re all just generic and overplayed programmers. It’s the same thing that causes programmers to call themselves ninjas and rockstars while someone like a chemical engineer doesn’t.
I always found it amusing that the original Jargon File defined "hacker" tongue-in-cheekily as "one who carves furniture with an axe"—and when I first learned of Loyd Blankenship's authorship of the Hacker Manifesto in 2000 or so, he was running a business selling custom-made furniture.
The rest of these are just PC wannabes.
Actual hacker knownledge: http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html
Under PC's, today, great hackers should be the guy behing https://t3x.org, the one behind EForth running under Subleq, reverse engineers, people reusing DNS' connections for tunnels such as the folks from Iodine, people reusing AWK+netcat (or plain GAWK) and awk+openssl to create Gopher and Gemini clients, Goerzen from https://complete.org creating NNCP and a bunch of nice tools...
And OFC Fabrice Bellard, which is on par with people from the MIT/SAIL and ITS/WAIS who created and expanded TECO Emacs, LISP, primordial AI, first networked environements, AI grounds...
