Back in the '80s and '90s there were both from the bottom-up with anarchistic, civic liberties-focused phone phreaks, greyhat hackers, cowboy coders and the like, as well as from the top-down from free market tech entrepreneur types.
I loved the early internet, IRC, newsgroups etc. The really old school phreakers even before that was also a different time. Back then you could do stuff like that and go on to start companies like Apple (Woz). Now, you'll end up in a solitary confined cell or have to join the FBI/NSA if you are caught.
Hacker groups aren't as tied to freedom as it used to feel.
I went to DC in the 90s and almost everybody you ran into was doing something illegal, like the Shadowcrew guys and a team of motorola hackers I mainly hung out with. Almost every talk gave hommage to whatever current hacker was in prison or on the run, and typically was anti fed, anti surviellance and anti copyright. Totally different now because at the time felt like the whole culture was under seige by overzealous feds and there was constant rumours of feds watching the exits with surveillance like we were the mafia or something
Interesting to see the perspectives from early hacking pioneers. Seems like some things haven't changed much - debates over ethics of unauthorized access, whether it's criminal, free speech implications, etc. But more nuance now as hacking's gone more mainstream.
Biggest change is probably threat models. In 1990 main concern was individuals hacking systems for challenge, curiosity, etc. Today it's nation-states and organized crime using hacking for financial gain, espionage, even kinetic attacks.
Other change is commercialization/professionalization of hacking. Now huge industry around cybersecurity, ethical hacking, bug bounties. Hacking skills lead to lucrative careers, not just hobby or activism.
More diversity today too - no longer just male techies. But part of cyberpunk spirit remains, even as hacking's become bigger business and political issue.
But also black-hat hackers, spammers and all sorts of other nefarious sorts making a lot of the openness that was possible in the 80s and early 90s much less practical.
Yeah sadly all the old heads that tell me stories of putting think tanks together so that consumers owned their metadata, all the excitement of activism by those few super nerds end up telling it to me from their mansions bought by creating SaaS services or whatever.
I'd say the 90s hacktivists for the most part took the golden handcuffs and left the rest of humanity out to dry. We need like 1000 more Pavel Durovs,
Well, firstly I don't know that we would have considered the late 90s to be the early days. I was pretty active during a time where the scene was transitioning from underground bulletin boards to the internet/irc, circa ~1991 and even then it was common to find textfiles describing esoteric systems that were hard to find anymore.
I'm not active at all anymore in infosec (white or blackhat), so it's impossible for me to draw a comparison. But I can tell you that back then it was very much more about trading information and socializing. Google around for anything published from a guy named Fravia. When I remember those days, he more than anybody captured the philosophy I wanted to subscribe to. These days it sounds pretty scary. Back then you could get in trouble for phreaking some phone calls and end up with a stern talking to from the telco. Now you aim a webcrawler at the wrong service and they lock you up.
It also seems like blackhats now have a much more mature ecosystem and financial motives. Right around Defcon6 I think it was, hacker groups started building commercial product and people landed on episodes of MTV True Life. I think that was a pretty important shift.
tl;dr more fun, way less scary?
Edit: If you're talking about programming in general and the dot-com bubble, that's a different story. I may have missed the point.
This definitely makes sense - my knowledge of that time period is much more relevant to internet/hacker culture, and much about the views of the general public.
Why the elite hacker scene has pretty much disappeared is something I have thought about over the past decade as well. I know many people from the groups he mentioned in the beginning - mostly the American ones, but also some European, Australian etc. ones as well.
Ultimately success is what killed it off I'd say. I recognize some HN names as people who were actively, or at least peripherally involved in the scene, hanging out on EFnet's +hack and then #hack etc. Many of these people went into dot-coms and startups from the mid-1990s on. Some sold their companies for billions of dollars, many got tens of millions of VC dollars, or stock options, or buyout dollars, or whatnot. As someone mentioned in the thread for this post, Mudge became a program manager at DARPA - some people went into the security field, and thrived.
Aside from the financial/career success of the dot-com boom, the growth of the Internet helped kill it off as well. Prior to the Internet, a very technical working class kid would take his Commodore 64 hooked up to the family TV, plug it into his POTS phone line with his 300 (then 1200, then 2400...) baud modem, and call a Bulletin Board Service, which inevitably was a Commodore 64 or Apple ][ belonging to another technical teenager, whose class background might be slightly tonier as he often had a dedicated phone line in his room.
So what kind of social structures evolve when the kind of kids who gather on 4chan today get together on this network of Commodore 64's that are fairly independent of everyone else? One thing is for sure, to take a page from this fellow's essay, all of the rules and structures that make up American society with its class structures and relations, large international military and police force and so forth go out the window. If the kids want access to a Cray, they're going to get access to a Cray. They don't care if it's used for some secret DoD research project, or some Goldman Sachs number crunching. These were the days when your local Bell switch might be on a dialup, when a tone-generating blue box could seize hold of the telephone company's in-band signalling.
So some of this fits into what the essay writer says. We had our own communication network, a kind of 4chan'ish network of Commodores and Apple ]['s in teenage boys bedrooms across America. We controlled it. When the Internet came, we shifted to that, but our communication network became controlled by DARPA, then the NSF, then a variety of corporations, which were then whittled down to a handful - AT&T, Verizon, Centurylink, Sprint, Comcast, Time-Warner and several more. The network became corporatized, firewalled, censored, monitored, spammed and spam-resisted etc. Under the threat of spam, attorney generals and corporate control tightening, Usenet effectively disappeared. The disappearance of Usenet is tied to the disappearance of the hacker scene. The same forces which killed Usenet are the forces which killed the scene. Understand why Usenet died and you understand why the scene died.
The carrot is what killed it, not the stick. In 1990 Operation Sundevil happened, the MoD guys were arrested etc. Repression didn't really kill things, it just made people a little more careful. Maybe the arrested guys would quit, but everyone else just started buying early cell phones and such to hack outside their house.
The Internet killed it. It swallowed up the need for a network of BBS's in boy's bedrooms. It swallowed its own Usenet via monopolization, shady corporations doing spam, attorney generals and such. It also started a dot-com boom and then social boom and now mobile/cloud boom. A teenage boy can publish a traction-getting app or website for next to nothing in a way that could never have happened back then. Some of the scene people from the 1980s and 1990s are very, very wealthy Tesla-owning retired founder dudes nowadays.
The 90s were cavalier. We're talking over 20 years ago, different time.
The big difference was that people were... for lack of a better designation, intensely naive back then. There just wasn't a lot of understanding around consequences.
Everything you've written would have been just as true in the 1980s, with a few of the names changed. Then too there were authentic hackers, glib fakers, and corporate drones.
The great majority of the computer world in the 1980s was profoundly unsubversive. The smart, subversive people were a tiny minority. They seem a larger proportion when you look back from 30 years later, because the fakers and PHBs had no lasting effects.
It's underappreciated just how tolerant society was, with respect to 80s and 90s hacking culture.
We had the war on drugs, but pre-9/11, secrecy and hacking were... novelties. As in, people couldn't conceptualize the worst results of bad people using bad methods.
You can see this in the legal filings of early computer prosecutions. Much of it is spent trying to explain to a jury just why phone phreaking or computer hacking is bad. E.g. "Could launch nukes from a payphone!" Or Tron, WarGames, etc.
Now, network intrusion brings to mind ransomware, and a hop, skip, and jump away from helping ISIS, in terms of jury sentiment.
On the other hand, there's an entire white and grey hat culture that wasn't really as defined in that period, so it's fair to say there are also more legimate paths for someone deeply interested in systems.
It wasn't just the '80s. Things persisted into the mid '90s as well.
- Pirate FTP sites were in plain sight with folders named with unprintable ASCII characters
- My college-provided Telnet client for Windows included a backdoor FTP server with a plaintext user name and easily brute-forced password (unsalted hash that turned out to be a birthday of a school admin)
- Admins had to resolve our network issues by connecting to network via modem, from our computers. Of course terminal program had keylogging enabled...
- Open SMTP relay was widespread and everywhere. Spoofing and forging was as easy as a little Telnet and HELO
The real poignancy is the shift in hacker political views. Call it post-software-is-sexy world. Those usenet sigs were by hackers who lived in a world where software engineer or programmer were social reject code words. That world changed after geeks came into money. Suddenly but soon thereafter, paranoia about privacy was rewarded by tinfoil hats. (And then yes, years later, came along this guy called Snowden.)
I think the landscape has changed a lot since then. Back then computer security had more of an underground feel it, where free and open discussion about it was viewed as being discouraged by 'the authorities'. The 'underground' pretty much existed for this reason.
Now the information out there is so widely available. Given enough time and effort, you can become pretty well-versed based on what's available.
Still, even back then most people weren't aware of Phrack, defcong and 2600. Kevin Mitnick was the only thing people knew of, and that came pretty late. Whereas today if you haven't heard of Anonymous you've been living under a rock.
(Phreaking also has become less relevant with the proliferation unlimited cellphone plans, ubiquitous broadband, and proper encryption of cell calls. I never hear the term 'phreaking' anymore, which was a large part of 'the scene'.)
Overall, I think the spirit of encouraging the'free exchange and discussion of information' has ultimately been successful.
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