I learned to code specifically because as a kid I wanted to be a hacker; I was reading explanations of a buffer overflow in physical magazines before I learned how to code.
It’s been more than a decade since I even touched these kind of resources, but in a way those people are still the reason I can put food on the table now.
I really should revisit the community at some point, if only to see what the current environment is like. Things must have changed a lot since the time a teenager could bypass any security in their surroundings.
"Riffling through other files, Mendax found mail confirming that the
attack had indeed come from inside MILNET. His eyes grew wide as he
read on. US military hackers had broken into MILNET systems, using
them for target practice, and no-one had bothered to tell the system
admin at the target site.
Mendax couldn't believe it. The US military was hacking its own
computers. This discovery led to another, more disturbing, thought. If
the US military was hacking its own computers for practice, what was
it doing to other countries' computers?
"
firefax · 6h ago
>This is not unlike the surprise in underground.txt
I thought that was originally a book?
I distinctly remember reading it during an in school suspension in the 2000s.
I tried to go back to my township library and read it again years later, but someone had stolen it around the time that Wikileaks truthfully revealed that the DNC had kneecapped Bernie in the primaries.
(Many folks don't seem to distinguish between the public airing of unpleasant truths that could not be aired without their own actions, and "disinformation" in the "covid is a hoax" vein. To them, anything contrary to their narrative is evil and bad, and if only those dastardly Russians would stop making them look bad my making them send several illegal emails they could stop voting like Republicans)
supernetworks · 3h ago
It is a book, "Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier". I seem to recall cross it hosted under mit.edu/~hacker/underground.txt or something like that
> Then: We were the kids who saw the blinking cursor not as a barrier, but as
an invitation. We typed characters into the voids and got back secrets. Our
goal was not destruction, it was understanding — to understand the systems
better than those who built them.
> Now: Hacking is a job title. Curiosity has been commodified. A thousand
"Bug Bounty Platforms" are trying to monetize your desire for
understanding, to turn it into CVEs and T-shirts.
alisonatwork · 7h ago
There is an ASCII chart in https://phrack.org/issues/72/18_md#article which references https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.07753 [PDF], a 2020 article showing that open source peaked in 2013. In some qualitative sense that feels intuitively correct, but I am skeptical that in the modern world filled with a zillion NPM dependencies and the cloud YAML explosion and now vibe-coded everything that we are actually producing less lines of open source than we did in 2013. Is anyone aware of newer studies that investigate this?
I learned to code specifically because as a kid I wanted to be a hacker; I was reading explanations of a buffer overflow in physical magazines before I learned how to code.
It’s been more than a decade since I even touched these kind of resources, but in a way those people are still the reason I can put food on the table now.
I really should revisit the community at some point, if only to see what the current environment is like. Things must have changed a lot since the time a teenager could bypass any security in their surroundings.
https://phrack.org/issues/72/19#article
"Riffling through other files, Mendax found mail confirming that the attack had indeed come from inside MILNET. His eyes grew wide as he read on. US military hackers had broken into MILNET systems, using them for target practice, and no-one had bothered to tell the system admin at the target site.
Mendax couldn't believe it. The US military was hacking its own computers. This discovery led to another, more disturbing, thought. If the US military was hacking its own computers for practice, what was it doing to other countries' computers? "
I thought that was originally a book?
I distinctly remember reading it during an in school suspension in the 2000s.
I tried to go back to my township library and read it again years later, but someone had stolen it around the time that Wikileaks truthfully revealed that the DNC had kneecapped Bernie in the primaries.
(Many folks don't seem to distinguish between the public airing of unpleasant truths that could not be aired without their own actions, and "disinformation" in the "covid is a hoax" vein. To them, anything contrary to their narrative is evil and bad, and if only those dastardly Russians would stop making them look bad my making them send several illegal emails they could stop voting like Republicans)
In the Realm of the Hackers (2003) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42281735
> Then: We were the kids who saw the blinking cursor not as a barrier, but as an invitation. We typed characters into the voids and got back secrets. Our goal was not destruction, it was understanding — to understand the systems better than those who built them.
> Now: Hacking is a job title. Curiosity has been commodified. A thousand "Bug Bounty Platforms" are trying to monetize your desire for understanding, to turn it into CVEs and T-shirts.