Press "Enter" to skip to content

Tag: hacking

1972

A passage from Philip K. Dick’s “The Android and the Human”, written in 1972, in which he is prophesying the appearance of the hacker subculture. This was at a time before personal computers, when phone-phreaking was only getting started:

If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities. If the television screen is going to watch you, rewire it late at night when you’re permitted to turn it off…

Shiro Nishiguchi, magazine illus., 1983-84
Shiro Nishiguchi, magazine illus., 1983-84

Counter-networks [lecture]

Prezi from a lecture on hackers, hacktivism, wikileaks, and a couple of other things. I start with the Enigma cryptanalysis effort (how else?), talk a bit about Rejewski and Turing, and then move on to phone phreaking in the 60s, early hacking crews (LoD, 414s, MoD, cDc), hacker subculture  [l33t sp34k], hacking in popular culture [nmap gets a mention], hacktivist case studies, and a bit on LulzSec and stuxnet.