Hacking Culture and the Hunger for Knowledge

Hacker Generations

February 5, 2009

By Richard Thieme This article was published simultaneously in the program for Def Con 11 (August 2003), on the hactivismo and Linux World (Australia) web sites, and in the Dutch information security magazine Informatiebeveiliging which is published by Genootschap voor Informatiebeveiligers, an infosec association based in the Netherlands. First, the meaning of hacker. The word [...]

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Zero Day: Roswell

February 2, 2006

[Published originally in Porcupine as a "literary" story, subsequently reprinted in Zahir, a lovely science fiction magazine edited by Sheryl Tempchin.  It has been critiqued, too, as an "essay." So there you have it - life in the 21st century. I received a telephone call from a former intelligence analyst for one of the agencies [...]

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Gibby the Sit-down King

June 1, 2005

[This was published in the Timber Creek Review in 2005. I'm glad it was. Like "The Geometry of Near," it's a geek story, and the people on whom the character Gibby McDivitt was based comes clearly and with a chuckle to mind. The story links to "They Call Him Mister Tubby" in Imaginary Gardens (May [...]

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ShmooCon 1.0 a Big Success – a review for Syngress

February 11, 2005

ShmooCon 1.0 a Big Success by Richard Thieme (rthieme@thiemeworks.com), author of Richard Thieme’s Islands in the Clickstream The first ShmooCon worked. Sponsored by the Shmoo Group, known to hackers and security professionals from presentations at Def Con, Toor Con, and other security forums,  ShmooCon was held at the Wardman Park Marriott Hotel in Washington DC [...]

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The Geometry of Near

July 15, 2004

It’s nobody’s fault. Honest. It’s just how it is. The future came earlier than expected. They kicked it around for years but never knew what they had. By the time they realized what it was, it was already broken. Broken open, I should say. Even then, looking at the pieces of the egg and wondering [...]

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Real Hacking Rules

October 4, 2002

Real Hacking Rules! Or, Before the word is totally useless, what is the essence of hacking? published October 4, 2002 in O’Reilly Media On the tenth anniversary of Def Con, the annual Las Vegas meeting of computer hackers, security professionals, and others, I reflected on how the con – and hacking – had changed since [...]

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Hacking Chinatown

July 12, 2002

Hacking Chinatown By Richard Thieme “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” Those are the last words of the movie “Chinatown,” just before the police lieutenant shouts orders to the crowd to clear the streets so the body of an innocent woman, murdered by the Los Angeles police, can be removed. “Chinatown,” with Jack Nicholson as Jake [...]

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Child’s Play

April 3, 2001

Games Engineers Play was one of the first Islands-in-the-Clickstream columns I wrote. In it I observed that a society socializes its young through games, teaching them through play the attitudes and skills we want them to have. Those of us who have grown to middle age through the current technological revolution have learned to partner [...]

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Hactivism and Soul Power

November 21, 2000

The danger with taking the moral high ground is that, once you take it, you no longer have it. Saul Alinksy, a great community organizer, was committed to delivering power into the hands of the powerless. He worked to create structures that would shift the flow toward the dispossessed. He was an engineer of the [...]

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The Magic is in the Mix

September 1, 2000

The Magic is in the Mix SEPTEMBER 2000/NEWS&VIEWS Information Security Magazine BY RICHARD THIEME NEWS Nearly 6,000 multi-generational hackers, crackers, corporate security gurus, intelligence officers, journalists, corporate recruiters, federal officials and scene junkies flocked to Las Vegas in late July for two security conferences: The 8th Annual Def Con, held at the Alexis Park Hotel  [...]

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In Defense of Hacking

March 11, 2000

The following article was published in the Village Voice, February 16 – 22, 2000 and the LA Weekly under the title “Hacking the Future.” Let’s get our definitions straight. Last week’s attacks on dozens of Web sites were not the work of hackers. They were the work of script kiddies, and the difference is everything. [...]

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In Defense of Hacking: The Director’s Cut

February 20, 2000

In Defense of Hacking by Richard Thieme Computer hackers are a prototype of twenty-first century humanity. Real hackers, that is. Real hackers embody the attitudes, skills, mind-sets, and realized possibilities that the digital world makes possible and rewards. Hackers reveal the kind of multi-dimensional thinking an information society demands – one in which all of [...]

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Designing the Future

October 11, 1999

Designing the Future by Richard Thieme Former hackers are designing the landscape of the future. Once shaped by their interaction with a technology that now defines the global business environment, they illuminate the contours of that landscape for business and government clients. But do hackers provide more value than traditional security consultants? If so, what [...]

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Knowledge, Obsession, Daring

December 26, 1998

The best of times, the worst of times. Governments prepare for the worst, ramping up toward New Year’s Eve 2000 and the dislocations expected at the ticking of the millennial clock. And yet … so many of my colleagues, out of nowhere, have recently said: “I can’t believe I’m paid to do this for a [...]

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Don Quixote Goes Digital

November 7, 1998

Don Quixote Goes Digital appeared last month with editorial modifications under a different title in Salon Magazine (www.salonmagazine.com). By agreement with the publisher, it is not to be published by other venues until sixty days after the publication date. Much of the email generated by the publication of the article turned on the real meaning [...]

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Life in Space

August 8, 1998

There was so much hullabaloo at Def Con VI! (the recent convention for computer hackers, journalists, screen writers, producers, computer security and insecurity experts, programmers, federal agents, local police and sheriff’s deputies, advertisers and marketers, hotel security guards, undercover agents, refugees from raves, groupies, and endlessly curious mind-hungry men and women of all sorts and [...]

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If Truth Be Told

August 1, 1998

The press coverage of the Black Hat Briefings II and Def Con VI tells part of the story, but the fact that mainstream media covered those cons the way they did tells much of the rest. Def Con is the biggest and most celebrated convention for computer hackers. The con has grown from sixty to [...]

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They Call Him Mister Tubby

May 19, 1998

Like many young people plugged into the patronage system in Chicago, I exchanged political work in my local precinct and ward for summer jobs. One summer I worked in recreation at a large park. One of my co-workers was called Tubby. In addition to his larger size, Tubby was paler than the rest of the [...]

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A Moment of Clarity

February 28, 1998

If we are fortunate, there occurs at least once in our lifetimes a “moment of clarity” in which we observe ourselves with our own eyes and see how narrowly we have lived in contrast with how we might live if we fulfilled the possibilities of our best selves. We see that we have come to [...]

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Don Quixote of the Hackers – or – A Hacker Past His Prime

February 9, 1998

By Richard Thieme – 1998 Processing power is dirt cheap and the Feds are crawling all over the Net. So why did Aaron Blosser hack US West to solve a 17th century math problem? “Why not?” The question hangs in the air, a timid koan posed by a 28-year-old programmer sitting in his apartment in [...]

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The Enemy is … WHO?

August 2, 1997

There are days I miss the Cold War a lot. Things were so much simpler then. The world was divided into two great camps, ours and theirs, and everybody who didn’t fit neatly into the schema could be made to fit with a shoehorn of twisted cold-war logic. Countries irrelevant to the ideological battle were [...]

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Zen and the Art of Hacking

April 7, 1997

“Zen and the Art of Hacking” by Richard Thieme published in Internet Underground, April 1997 Don’t call them hackers, call them homo sapiens hackii — human beings who are “back-engineered” by their symbiotic relationship with computer networks to frame reality in ways shaped by that interaction. They’re not a new species, but they are a [...]

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Off With His Hands

February 1, 1997

Off With His Hands In his award-winning science fiction novel, “The Stars My Destination,” Alfred Bester conceived of a world in which “jaunting,” or short-distance teleportation, was the norm. In order to jaunt, you had to know exactly where you were, so criminals were kept in a  maze-like cave in darkness, denied access to the [...]

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Fear and Trembling in Las vegas

October 1, 1996

It was my privilege last summer to deliver a keynote address at DefCon IV, an annual convention of computer hackers held every summer in Las Vegas. Daytime temperatures near 120 degrees ensured that casual curiosity seekers would be at a minimum. In heat that fries an egg on the pavement, you had better WANT to [...]

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