he More Things Change...
As we move towards our 25th year of publishing, we find that so much has changed in the world we write about. Yet somehow, a surprising amount of things are almost exactly the same.
Let's look at where technology has taken us. Obviously, nothing has stood still in the hardware and software universe. In 1984, ten megabytes of storage was still more than what most people had access to. Those few who even had their own computers would, more often than not, wind up shuffling 5-1/4 inch floppies before they would invest in an expensive piece of hardware like a hard disk. And speed was a mere fraction of a fraction of what it is today. If you could communicate at 300 baud, it was considered lightning fast to most people. Of course, there were those who were always pushing to go faster and get more. It was this incessant need for expansion and improvement that got us where we are today.
Perhaps not as dramatic in scale but certainly as wrenching in feeling has been the change to our society and the world around us. In the current day, we are security obsessed without having gotten any better at being secure. We seem to have lost any semblance of the trust that once guided us as human beings. Instead, we live in a state of perpetual alertness, suspicion, and fear. Some would say that this is reality and that this state of mind is the only way to survive in a hostile world. We would say that it's a sad reality and one that needs to be analyzed and hopefully altered. Were we to have started publishing in 2008 rather than in 1984, we likely would have been quickly branded as potential terrorists before ever being able to establish a foothold in our culture that enabled us to be seen as a revealing and even necessary voice.
Today we continue to exist in no small part because we have existed for nearly a quarter century. It is that history which strengthens us and one we should all try and learn as much as we can from.
So what has managed to stay the same over the years? A number of things actually, some good and some bad.
For one, the spirit of inquisitiveness that drives much of what the hacker world consists of is very much alive and in relatively the same state it's been in for so long. If anything were to sum up what every single one of our articles has had in common over all these years, it's that desire to find out just a little bit more, to modify the parameters in a unique way, to be the first to figure out how to achieve a completely different result. Whether we're talking about getting around a barrier put in place to prevent you from accessing a distant phone number or a restricted computer system, or cracking the security of some bit of software so that you can modify it to perform functions never dreamed of by its inventors, or revealing some corporate secrets about how things really work in the world of networks and security it's all about finding out something and sharing it with anyone interested enough to listen and learn.
These are the very foundations upon which 2600 was founded and those values are as strong today as they were back in our early days. In many ways they have actually strengthened. The Internet is an interesting example of this.
While its predecessor, the ARPANET of the 1960s and 1970s, was developed under the authority of the military, what has evolved since then is a veritable bastion of free speech and empowerment of individuals. Of course, it's not all so idealistic.
Not everyone cares and there's a constant struggle with those who want the Internet to be nothing more than a shopping mall and those who seek to control every aspect of it. But who can deny that literally any point of view can be found somewhere on today's Internet? And a surprising amount of people will defend that concept regardless of their own personal opinions. Almost without fail, if someone is told that they may not put forth a certain viewpoint or spread information on a particular subject, then the community of the Internet will respond and make sure the information is spread more than it ever would have been had there not been an attempt made to squash it in the first place.
Nobody has yet been able to put the top back on the bottle and prevent this kind of a reaction since never before in the history of humanity has such a tool been so widely accessible. There obviously is still a long way to go and a good many battles to fight in order to keep free speech alive on the Internet. But this is at least encouraging and indicative of how hacker values have easily meshed with more mainstream ones.
But something else which hasn't changed over the years is the malignment of hackers and what we stand for. The irony is that most people understand perfectly well what we re all about when presented with the facts. The (((mainstream media))), however, never has and probably never will. It's simply not in their interests to portray us as anything but the kind of threat that will help them sell newspapers and get high ratings. Fear sells that is the unfortunate truth. And fear of the unknown sells even better because so little evidence is needed to start the ball rolling.
In the media, as in politics, enemies are needed in order to set forth an agenda. From the beginning, hackers have fit the qualifications to be that enemy. They know too much, insist on questioning the rules, and won't stop talking and communicating with themselves and others. These types of people have always been a problem in controlled environments like dictatorships and public schools. It's not too difficult to see why they're viewed with such hostility by people who want to hold onto whatever power they happen to have. A true individual is no friend to autocrats.
If you read a newspaper or watch virtually any newscast, you won't have to wait too long for a story to appear with details on how the private records of thousands (or sometimes millions) of people have been compromised while in the care of some huge entity. We could be talking about a phone company, credit card provider, bank, university, or government. And the information that was lost might include anything from people's names, addresses, unlisted phone numbers, Social Security numbers and/or credit card numbers, a list of purchases, health records, you name it: data that was entrusted to the company, agency, or bureaucracy for safekeeping, which has been compromised because someone did something foolish, like somehow post confidential hospital files to a public web page, or copy customer information to a laptop, which was subsequently lost or stolen.
Yet in virtually every instance of such a profound gap in common sense, you will find that hackers are the ones getting blamed. It makes no difference that hackers had nothing to do with letting the information out in the first place. The media and the authorities see them as the people who will do virtually anything to get private data of individuals and make their lives miserable.
This misdirection of blame serves two purposes as it always has. The first is to absolve those really responsible of any true blame or prosecution. The second is to create an enemy who can be blamed whenever anything goes wrong.
Of course, the irony is that if hackers were the ones running and designing these systems, the sensitive data would actually be protected far better than it is now. There simply is no excuse for allowing people's private information to be copied onto insecure machines with no encryption or other safeguards. The fact that it keeps happening tells us that dealing with this isn't very high on the priority list. Perhaps if those organizations that don't have sufficient security practices were held accountable rather than being allowed to blame invisible demons, we might actually move forward in this arena. But one must ask what would be in it for them? The answer is not a whole lot.
These battles and conflicts will no doubt continue regardless of what direction our society takes us. While we have indeed been frustrated with the seeming lack of progress on so many levels, we can't help but be fascinated with where we will wind up next both in the technological and political spectrum. The combination of the two may very well seal our future for quite a long time to come.
The one thing that will keep us going (and that has made it so worthwhile for all of these years) is the spirit of curiosity that our readers and writers continue to proudly exhibit. It's a very simple trait, and perhaps one that s an unerasable ingredient of our humanity. It will survive no matter how our technology advances, regardless of any law or decree put forth to stifle it, and in spite of misperceptions and overall cluelessness. If we keep asking questions and thinking outside the box, there will always be something good to look forward to.