STDIN

Phreaking – “A slang term coined to describe the activity of a subculture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, like equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. Additionally, it is often associated with computer hacking. This is sometimes called the H/P culture (with H standing for Hacking and P standing for Phreaking).” (Wikipedia)

YIP – “The Youth International Party, whose members were commonly called Yippies, was a highly theatrical and anti-authoritarian political party established in the United States in 1967. An offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the 1960s, the Yippies presented a more radically youth-oriented and countercultural alternative to those movements. They employed theatrical gestures—such as advancing a pig ("Pigasus the Immortal") as a candidate for President in 1968—to mock the social status quo. They have been described as a highly theatrical youth movement of “symbolic politics.” (Wikipedia)

The following is a summary with dashes of spice from class on 9/10/2008.

In Class Video

The Beginning of class consisted of a delightful video on phreaking and the fallout following Rosenbaum’s Esquire article. It started the handsome and charming Captain Crunch, and featured a special guest appearance from everyone’s favorite techno-teddy bear, Steve Wozniak.

Hacker Crackdown

Bruce Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown weaved a narrative that demonstrated the conditions leading to the social behavior of Phreaking. The article outlined the history of the telephone itself and then the growth of the telephone company from public service into a giant, simultaneously loved and loathed networking behemoth. The story itself creates a sort of Petri-dish in which the culture of phreaking was able to grow. “Ma Bell” becomes a giant and awe-inspiring system, created by humans but left to be run by ‘stupid’ machines. The phone company as public service being run for private corporate interest, and a flawed matrix of signals and tones waiting to be exploited. The system is an inviting environment for phreakers to break it down, but in the end of the article it was ultimately the machine that broke itself – challenging public perception of phreakers as the destroyers.

Similarities and differences- Hackers vs Phreakers

Similarities

Hackers and Phreakers share a love of the addictive pleasure of breaking into, changing, fixing, defeating, and debugging the system. While the phreakers unlocked the sounds and tones in the telephone system, the hackers broke locks and stretched the limits of a boxy unimaginative machine. Both cultures provided an oasis for those who found themselves of the margins of society- in class we briefly discussed the appeal of phreaking to the blind, and the occurrence of autism or aspberger’s in the hacking community. Another social appeal of H/P culture was the excitement of finding other people like you, as in “Oh, you stuck your fingers in electrical sockets when you were two to figure out how they work also? Sweet!” Both cultures also shared the budding inclination for social engineering, another way of hacking to get what you want.

Differences

Phreakers, by the nature of their medium, appear to be more socially inclined than the hackers at MIT. The phreakers relished in the thrill of getting recognized with their goofy identities, names, and conferences – an early form of non-local social networking. Phreakers lived in an anarchic and non-institutional framework while hackers had a very meritocratic and organized system. Hackers worked feverishly and individually in the middle of the night somewhere deep in the basement of a building at MIT (okay, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point.)

While phreakers had a fan-like love and respect for “Ma Bell,” wanting to work there or at least be part of it, hackers had no love for IBM or the system in place with which they had to work. While phreakers had a vast jungle gym in which to play, hackers had to use the limits of their imagination to work with the clunky first-generation computers. While both phreakers and hackers built and broke-down the systems with which the worked, phreakers were primarily the breakers and reverse-engineers while early hackers focused on building and creating.

The System

Hackers and Phreakers both work within the confines of technological systems. The act of hacking these systems is a politically complex undertaking. Is a hack just a fun activity, or a subversive political act? Is the nature of hacking itself, as a means of subverting the system, inherently political? The complexity of issue can be seen in the phreakers attempts to rationalize their actions by viewing it as a constant test and debugging of the phone systems.

Our discussions about phreaking and hacking have revealed a complex love-hate relationship between H/P culture and the systems they hack. The class handout included a quote from Nietzsche, “The wheel and the brake have differing duties, but also on in common: to hurt one another,” which aptly describes the system-hacker relationship. This tension between breaking the system down in order to fix it up again and take it to new levels began to lead into a discussion about the ethics and aesthetics of hacking.

We also briefly discussed the role media plays in creating the hacker image, which plays into the political position of hacker culture in society, as well as the question of ethics versus aesthetics.

Below are some pieces of hacker pop-culture to check out:

Movie: WarGames (1983).

Movie: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

Zine: 2600 The Hacker Quarterly online

Bad Movie: Hackers (1995)

Thanks! Feel free to criticize, correct, jeer, etc...

- Rachel

A Recap On Liberalism

There is both positive freedom and negative freedom. It is the water that fish swim in, but that water is at war with itself, so you could be swimming along not taking any notice and then bam get splashed in the face.

View image

Shamo realizes Liberalism is tough to define

Free speech is the market place for ideas and promotes circulation.

Is computer code covered under free speech?
-it is written, but it is complicated due to the fact that it does have action on the world
Does free speech even exists?
-If it was up to Stanley Fish (no relation to the afore mentioned fish) we would “dump the baby from the bath tub” because there is no such thing.
-you have to look at free speech through various lenses not just the pros and cons.

Phun With Pfaffenberger

Usenet was greeted in response to Arpanet.
“In announcing the software’s availability, Daniel, then a graduate student, described Usenet as a poor man’s ARPAnet, a phrase that, Daniel recalls,
explained exactly what was going on. We (or at least I) had little idea what
was really going on the ARPAnet [the Internet’s predecessor], but we
knew we were excluded. Even if we had been allowed to join, there was no
way of coming up with the money. It was commonly accepted at the time that
to join the ARPAnet took political connections and $100,000. I don’t know if
that assumption was true, but we were so far from having either connections or
money that we didn’t even try. The Poor man’s ARPAneto was our way of
joining the computer science community, and we made a deliberate attempt to
extend it to other not-well-endowed members of the community. (Daniel, 1993)” (368-369)

Creators of Usenet were faced with a dichotomy. While they believed in free expression, but they were using professional equipment, it became a major what to do, what to do? situation. The Backbone Cabal which enforced the “golden rule” those that have the gold make the rules (377), began imposing various means to put a stop to those who were using Usenet with out netiquette. The Backbone soon collapsed with the introduction of alt* newsgroups. It had all started at a barbecue when Brain Reid decided to put his foot down, “John was distressed because they wouldn’t create rec.drugs, and I was distressed because they wanted to force me to adopt the name ª rec.food.recipesº for my recipe newsgroup.”
The administration soon went down.

Scientology and Free Speech

Scientologist used copyrights to squelch free speech

I’m sure this guy thought it was epic lulz when scientologist spammed Usenet

But this raises the question of weather or not people have the right to post sacred texts.

Nietzsche Knowledge
A hacker before hackers they have recently discovered a book of his entitled I’m so smart I invented hacking before computers existed (unfortunately the only copy is owned by the man pictured above).

Always dapper

Nietzsche did possess many characteristics that would make a great hacker. He was boastful as were many of the hackers that Sterling discusses. He sought pleasure and like hackers anything that got in his way was a nuisance. His idea of Will to Power can be applied to the perfection hackers seek and the elite that come from possessing the knowledge needed to be a hacker.
He was obsessed with pain and suffering, and not believing in enlightenment science or Christianity he turned to art to explain why such exists in the world. He created the idea of Apollonian and Dionysian creative impulses, a duality, logic and order against the primal pleasure of delight.
Hackers are also faced with this, there is an extreme order to code, but then there is the excessive drive that many hackers seem to poses along side the extremely logical. One could look at the Underground, and the LoD and compare it to Dionysian but they are fundamental Apollonian.

Elitist Contempt in The Digital Underground

According to Bruce Sterling in the Hacker Crackdown much of the hacker world was ruled by elitist contempt, there were certain things that you should didn’t do because other hackers would look at you as stupid, and much of the thrill for hackers came from boasting and acceptance from peers. You needed to have a trophy, but stolen credit cards were no trophy:

“The Atlanta Legion thought most "rules" of cyberspace were for rodents and losers, but they *did* have rules. *They never crashed anything, and they never took money.* These were rough rules-of-thumb, and rather dubious principles when it comes to the ethical subtleties of cyberspace, but they enabled the Atlanta Three to operate with a relatively clear conscience (though never with peace of mind).

If you didn't hack for money, if you weren't robbing people of actual funds -- money in the bank, that is -then nobody *really* got hurt, in LoD's opinion. "Theft of service" was a bogus issue, and "intellectual property" was a bad joke. But LoD had only elitist contempt for rip-off artists, "leechers," thieves. They considered themselves clean.”

Richard posed an interesting question involving the “Is Computer Hacking A Crime?” article, as to computers comparison to religion on page 51
Some points that came up
-In order to have religion you need structure, and there are none
-Perhaps more of a Mystic Religion, when you have reached such a high level you do not need institution
-Computers as Voodoo, Voodoo priest are seen to have special powers, and like hackers legends build up around them.

“What conjoins hackers together?”
When your on the verge of defining it, it slips away.