People who got their internet access by credit card fraud were never hackers in the first place. They were just cheats and wannabe hackers.
Drama and marginal status doesn't make you a hacker. It just makes you a social outcast.
It's true that there are lots of wannabes today, too — more than ever before, now that the richest man in the world got that way by writing a BASIC interpreter, now that Sergey and Larry get to go to Davos.
But you want to see some real hackers? How about http://www.pouet.net/ where the demoscene posts their stuff? Have you not been to a Bar Camp? SuperHappyDevHouse? Hackerspaces like Noisebridge? How about Google, where Rob Pike now works since they've spent 9 years fixing http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/? How about biotech, where they reprogram the very stuff of life itself? How about the Netflix Prize, where AI predicts human preferences for money? How about the algorithmic trading funds that now account for the majority of trading volume on our stock exchanges? Have you been visiting http://www.gpgpu.org/http://blog.reprap.org/http://bathsheba.com/http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/ etc.? How about thirty million people finding one hole after another in the firewall to communicate to each other and the rest of the world, when their election was stolen, through a humble Rails CRUD forum? How about http://vpri.org/html/writings.php, where the objective is to build a whole, modern personal computing environment in under 20 000 lines of code — and they just might do it? How about the OLPC project, where some real hackers — not losers stealing credit card numbers — figured out how to build a machine that would hold up to abuse from kids, in order to revolutionize the world education system (a la Diamond Age), an experiment which is still ongoing? How about Time Magazine listing moot as the most influential person in the world?
Some of these things are good, some are bad, and some are ineffectual. But they are hacking on a scale that you never imagined would be real, in your reclusive vampire credit-card fraud days. These are not people tweaking CSS in yuppie dress shirts, or patching some obsolete proprietary library. These are people pushing the boundaries of the possible.
It's not about the effects, it's about the drive and the feel. A new place, alien and exciting, and you knew, you suspected, you had no idea what could happen there. The things you did, the community you found, all very pure, like thinking code for three days straight. You'd cut your identity down to six characters or so. You could earn your stay, picking off a national company, with the cheapest of your tools. It's not about the effects, yet now you look back and see a petty thief.
Now, the land is settled, everyone and their grandchildren are here, skyscrapers everywhere. You talk to everyone here, you talk business. You use your name - why wouldn't you? Once almost everywhere had the feel. Now, we look for its analogue in dead musicians, business, pleasure - dressed in not-suits, slurping whole-grain ramen, in our exclusive club, HN, no memes allowed.
Like noname123, I'm not sure if I'm doing justice. I think my point is that it's not about what people accomplish. Great and not-so-great people have been doing amazing things for a while now. Once, though, there was a place that seemed to force you to drop that extra crap - your name, your latest grab for cash, your ego. Usenet before the Eternal September, programming before dot-com, the internet before social networking. Now everyone's here, no effort, no stigma, business as usual.
It's not our fault, we didn't mess this up. It's just what happens, after a while. That frontier feel isn't dead though - it's just waiting for us to start going up into space, filtering reality through wearables, hooking circuits into our heads.
Yeah real hacking is still around, just take a look at any torrent tracker to find pretty much any app/game hacked. Or better yet how about all those security breaches at Pentagon and NASA.
The reason you don't see "real" hackers hacking, is because they aren't eager to have public identities, since they don't feel like getting arrested/sued into oblivion.
In the post, noname123 says "hacker," but the areas of endeavor he's discussing cross that boundary. More importantly, the activities he talks about were always restricted to small, secretive communities--I had no idea that stuff was going on 'til the early 90s.
And guess what? The original set of activities, with the original motivation, is still going on in small, secretive communities. It's just hard to tell when your particular community dissolved long ago, and you haven't run across any others in a very obvious way.
Drama and marginal status doesn't make you a hacker. It just makes you a social outcast.
It's true that there are lots of wannabes today, too — more than ever before, now that the richest man in the world got that way by writing a BASIC interpreter, now that Sergey and Larry get to go to Davos.
But you want to see some real hackers? How about http://www.pouet.net/ where the demoscene posts their stuff? Have you not been to a Bar Camp? SuperHappyDevHouse? Hackerspaces like Noisebridge? How about Google, where Rob Pike now works since they've spent 9 years fixing http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/? How about biotech, where they reprogram the very stuff of life itself? How about the Netflix Prize, where AI predicts human preferences for money? How about the algorithmic trading funds that now account for the majority of trading volume on our stock exchanges? Have you been visiting http://www.gpgpu.org/ http://blog.reprap.org/ http://bathsheba.com/ http://www.tatjavanvark.nl/ etc.? How about thirty million people finding one hole after another in the firewall to communicate to each other and the rest of the world, when their election was stolen, through a humble Rails CRUD forum? How about http://vpri.org/html/writings.php, where the objective is to build a whole, modern personal computing environment in under 20 000 lines of code — and they just might do it? How about the OLPC project, where some real hackers — not losers stealing credit card numbers — figured out how to build a machine that would hold up to abuse from kids, in order to revolutionize the world education system (a la Diamond Age), an experiment which is still ongoing? How about Time Magazine listing moot as the most influential person in the world?
Some of these things are good, some are bad, and some are ineffectual. But they are hacking on a scale that you never imagined would be real, in your reclusive vampire credit-card fraud days. These are not people tweaking CSS in yuppie dress shirts, or patching some obsolete proprietary library. These are people pushing the boundaries of the possible.
There's a world of hacking out here.
Open your eyes.