From hungary-online-owner Wed Mar 8 09:39:38 1995 Return-Path: owner-Hungary-Online Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id JAA01621 for hungary-online-out31415; Wed, 8 Mar 1995 09:39:38 -0800 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id JAA01615 for hungary-online; Wed, 8 Mar 1995 09:39:25 -0800 Received: via =-=-=-=-= from tbeke@hix.mit.edu for hol@hungary.yak.net (hungary-online) Received: from hix.mit.edu (HIX.MIT.EDU [18.74.1.137]) (fnord) by nando (8.6.5/8.6.5) with ESMTP id JAA01545 for ; Wed, 8 Mar 1995 09:38:24 -0800 Received: (from tbeke@localhost) by hix.mit.edu (8.6.9/8.6.9) id MAA05299 for hol@hungary.yak.net; Wed, 8 Mar 1995 12:39:21 GMT From: Tibor Beke Message-Id: <199503081239.MAA05299@hix.mit.edu> Subject: (HOL) hacking To: hol@hungary.yak.net Date: Wed, 8 Mar 1995 12:39:21 +0000 (GMT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 6954 Sender: owner-Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net There's been a lot of sympathetic discussion of unsympathetic discussions of hackers on HOL, but I don't think anyone has quite brought up the point yet. Which, I think, has much to do with the prehistory of the term. Most people know it originates at MIT, but it's much older than the AI Lab. Apparently, in the late nineteenth century, in MIT campus slang, 'hack' meant 'something goofy to do instead of studying'. Some big goof could happen as part of a class rivalry, or football game, or inter-fraternity prank. Something carefully planned, organized and performed to surprise the campus. The tradition continues till this very day, and, I'm sorry to report, it sometimes tends to ignore standards of propriety and political correctness. The last example was some five months ago, when a group of students placed a police car on top of the highest dome of the central building -- that's some 30 meters off the ground. It was made of cardboard and plywood, but I guarantee it looked genuine at a distance most people had a chance to look. In the driver's seat there was an inflatable doll (one of those, I'm afraid :) and the license plate read IHTFP. (This happens to abbreviate the fundamental, primordial undergraduate experience at the 'tute -- phrased succinctly and to the point, as usual: I Hate This F.... Place.) These things are now called institute hacks. They are performed by anonymous groups who identify themselves by codes and nicknames. And MIT prides itself on them immensely, the installations typically go straight to the museum, 'cause it gives the school a human face-lift that MIT, one of the centers of nerdishness in the universe, needs badly. A 'major hack' is something that calls the attention of the entire town. A major hack is something you 'pull'. 'Entire town' has a very practical working definition: at least as far down the road as Harvard. Humiliating Harvard is always a bonus -- at one point, Harvard officials organized a treasure hunt in the Yard for their freshmen class, and the big thing to get was a precious relic, John Harvard's very own nightpot or somethin', which MIT students duly found the night it was placed (ie before the official hunt began) and surrendered, with certain recommendations, to MIT's President. :) 'Hacking' has many shades and layers of meaning, but they all preserve a common thread. MIT's central building, like all big edifices, is a place of wonder and mystery, with nooks, crannies, crevices and passageways, hidden, dark, smelly, industrial and utterly repulsive, and 'building hacking' is the sport of finding and visiting them all. This involves unlocking doors that you were never meant to go through, of course, and there's a long-standing, silent and vicious battle being waged between the perfect lock-pickers and those who perfect locks. But the reason you go to a faraway and impossible place is to show that you can go to faraway and impossible places; once there, you turn back; but you're supposed to _sign in_ beforehand. Leave your mark, code, nickname, "I have been here" on the wall. I've seen rooms with walls literally covered with sign-ins, and some of them definitely dated from the seventies. The Tech Model Railroad Club was in full swing in the forties-fifties. (These were the guys perfecting relay circuitry for appliances 10am-5pm, and perfecting relay circuitry for toy trains 5pm-10am.) In their terminology, a 'hack' was a 'clever trick to stun people [your date, preferably, if you had one who stared at toy trains]; specifically, something done to apparently no end'. Such as the train entering a tunnel and never getting out. When At&T came out with direct-dial long distance, there were very soon phone hackers. The fascination with the phone system is immense, and inextricably linked to a fascination with big, complex entities. Just the thing you can hack. And many, many succeeded in getting free long-distance connections, but few exploited it. The name of the game is just showing you're better. Some of these stories, starting from Captain Crunch, are well-documented. And finally, for God's sake, there're computer hackers. They appropriated a meaning, and the hype-generating media have now appropriated them. There're roughly 4 tell-tale signs of hacking: o It's anti-establishment. It's OK to humiliate some big bloodsucking corporation. o It takes creative genius. It amounts to showing what you can do. o Ain't cause no harm, ain't cause no permanent damage. o Leave a mark, to let the Galaxy know. Computer (or Unix) hackers preserved more of this code than you'd think (before the term started to get immensely diluted). When Richard Stallman came out with his GNU philosophy in Dr Dobb's Journal, in 1983, most people thought it was anarchy (even in the Unix domain not known for its coherence). MIT's and other places early computer hackers used machines for purposes no one else. They _played_ with them. Or on them. A Unix hacker will look at a 40 meg hex core dump, and find a bug in the kernel, and drop a nasty email to Kernighan, and add his name to the revision history -- or the man page. Think of Mitnick: he broke in, he downloaded; but never exploited his advantage. He left mysterious messages behind. He's a lunatic proper, and a hacker (improper). Truth of the matter is, there're no good hackers and bad hackers. There're domains suitable for hacking and ones unsuitable. Because it magically blends in with the system's philosophy, it becomes a progressive vehicle for Unix. A DOS hacker, I'm sorry to say, will write viruses. A virus, when it started out, was something that popped open on your screen and said "HAH! Gotcha! Banglebar the Angler from Stockholm". To show you're cleverer than the operating system, than the user, than the folks who copy blindly. But they became so easy to write, and there are so many botched and evil versions around now that you might as well forget that. There was a major hack pulled at MIT a few years ago that involved having the university's machinery produce and mass-mail a letter to the parents of students with certain unsettling statements about their sons' and daughters' accounts. This was generally viewed as a Bad Idea. (Even if they had done it to Harvard. :) So that's why Mitnick will end up spending 25 years in jail, part of which he'll sit for crimes committed by a subculture and the growing anger against that subculture. There's a huge spectrum between what people (ie classical hackers) started calling 'crackers' in the 80's (ie people utilising their knowledge to illicit ends) and 'creative programming genius'; and Steve, I think, put the mark close to the latter. (But he may've been thinking of Unix hackers.) I'd have to disagree; a hacker, as such, is a creative genius with an anti-establishment slant. From Stallman till the end of the world. Tibor ############# # This message to Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net # was from Tibor Beke # # To unsubscribe, # send "unsubscribe" to # An announcement-only subscription (less volume) is available # at # Send mail to for more information, # or to if you need human assistance. #############