466 DEAR HACKER

466 DEAR HACKER

It’s a real wasted opportunity when someone actually figures out a way to access a heavily trafficked page and the only message they want to convey is how great they are. There are some real important things that should be brought to people’s attention whenever the opportunity presents itself. Childish posturing doesn’t help anyone.

Dear 2600: In your editorial “The Victor Spoiled” (15:4), you mentioned the

fact that many hackers have been selling out to the corporate sector and violating many of the highly held views that have underlied the culture. I enjoyed this article and found it to be very close to the truth, but there’s another problem within the developed hacker society that needs to be addressed, and that is the question of acceptance.

Perhaps the Mentor summed it up worst when he said “We live with- out race, without religion.” That was the ’80s. Now we live without unity. Back then, hackers were largely a united front. When significant threats came to the culture, people were able to work together and fight them away. Even when the hackers fell, they left in rebellion against society.

There is now race and religion within the culture — a horrific tinge of race and religion. The race can be interpreted as the white-hat and the black-hat, both of which distrust each other: the religion as the skill. Nobody trusts anybody outside of their abilities, because they have no reason to. We now exist with such strong lines that entering the hacker society is nearly impossible, and even when it’s possible, it requires the condescendence of a mentor in person. This has to do with many things: the evolution of Linux, the spread of the Internet, the high cultural view of hackers among the young.

Who are we to judge? We work underground because we don’t want to be judged. Too many people don’t want to face that fact, and go on being prejudiced, intolerant, and ignorant of the truth: that there are newbies who can learn.

Are we going to be as ignorant as the society that shuns us, or are we going to shut up, cooperate, and judge people by who they are? I can

A C U LT U R E O F R E B E L S

only pray that someday our world will go through a time when the peasant masses rise up against the oligarchy.

RGBKnight To say that everyone was united in the ’80s is in itself buying into a myth. Hackers

have never been a unified force and it’s unlikely that will ever happen. That’s a good thing for the most part as individual spirit is the most prized of all hacker attributes. If you find yourself being shut out of the hacker community despite your efforts to become part of it, you’re either trying for the wrong reasons or you’re talking to the wrong people. While there are some in the community who genuinely enjoy being in a group and getting lots of publicity, the greatest number of hackers exist in far smaller, even solitary, numbers, and they are constantly learning for the sake of learning without regard to social status or factions. These are the ones who will always endure because nobody really knows who or where they are.

Dear 2600: OK, here is my story. I went to the mall and my friend came along

with me; we got dropped off at Sears because they have computers to mess around with. We were upstairs messing with the computers and

a little nerd store man came over. He said, “Do you guys need any help? We said no, then I put in a disk that had two progs on them: Bios310 and 95sscrk. We put it inside the lousy Compaq PC and he wanted to know what it was so we said we were gonna extract the screen saver password. He didn’t believe us and he wanted us to prove it. We thought this guy was gonna be pretty cool so we showed him but the disk wouldn’t work on their computers because I forgot I formatted it on mine. “Damn.” By that time he left us, so I looked at where he went to go and the bastard was on the phone so when he came back we asked him who he called and he said, “If I were y’all I would leave fast.” We thought he was messing around, but we left and were acting like we were sneaking away but then by the time we got to the elevator

a smart ass security guard came to us and told us not to run, it would just make it harder. We stopped and we were talking to him. While