Without a Traceroute

The last week has been pretty cool. There turned out to be enough space, so I did get a chance to attend most of the presentations at the You Shot the Sheriff conference. It was at an Australia/New Zealand-themed bar, which was slightly random. But they had a really delicious catered lunch of crepes, and a pretty extensive open bar. So props for the venue choice. I’ll try to write about some of my favorite presentations later. There were a lot of interesting people in attendance, from both Americas. The crowd did tend toward white-hat/IT security professional types—”we’re the sellout hackers,” one guy told me—rather than more underground people. I discovered one way you can tell when a hacker’s going mainstream: they tuck their t-shirts in. Although, I did meet a guy who started one of the first e-zines about the hacker scene in Brazil back in the early 1990s. There was even an American representative from Microsoft’s Security Response Team at the conference. He seemed pleasantly indulgent about the fact that everyone else in attendance spent all their time breaking his software.

Tuesday, there was an afterparty at a Cuban bar, with similar open bar. Wednesday, I went out for drinks with the conference organizers, I recorded a brief interview I’ll try to type up later.  Thursday, I got drinks (again) with a really cool Brazilian hacker/security researcher guy. So basically, my liver probably hates me (I took Friday night off), but I’ve been having an awesome time.

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Many people are probably aware that June 6 marked the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. However, until I saw the commemorative Google logo, I hadn’t realized until I that it represented another monumental anniversary: the 25th birthday of Tetris.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine, and he said something like, “Wow, only 25? It kind of feels like Tetris should have been around forever.” I can see where he’s coming from. There’s something about the platonic purity of Tetris that makes it seem timeless. Other computer games from the 1980s, may still be fun, but invariably feel dated, handicapped by the primitive graphics and sound hardware of the era. Not so with Tetris. Playing Tetris, one gets the feeling that it looks and sounds the way it does because that’s what Tetris is.

The history behind the creation, licensing and promotion of Tetris is incredibly convoluted. It is a tale rich with Cold War politics and transnational intrigue. It’s also too long to recount here, and covered in sufficient detail elsewhere.
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Last night I went out drinking with some Argentine hackers; at one point the subject of the Conficker worm (also known by the less-catchy ‘Downadup’) came up. The consensus from a table full of people who play with security vulnerabilities for fun was that Conficker would come to a whole lot of nothing—more irritating work for IT professionals, at worst.

Hack the Gibson!

However, if you had been reading the tech sections of major media sources in the past few days, you might easily be forgiven for thinking that Conficker was on the verge of ending the internet (or possibly the world) as we know it. A roundup of some of the coverage I’ve seen:

“The Worm That Ate the Web” from Slate, who couldn’t resist the temptation to slap an over-the-top headline on an otherwise fairly good article.

“Worm Infects Millions of Computers Worldwide” from the New York Times, which also features the priceless quote, “If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships steaming toward us on the horizon,” from some guy at a security firm.

“The Conficker Worm: What happens next?” from CBS News, which characterizes it as “one of the most dangerous threats ever,” a phrase that practically cries out for some sort of qualifier—surely the Ebola virus and nuclear war clock in ahead of Conficker on the threat scale, yes?

“Computer experts brace for ‘Conficker’ worm” from Reuters, who’ve since redirected some of their links to the more accurate, but still ominous-sounding “Malicious virus quiet, but attack may be in works”

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Way to be late to the party, guys. The world’s least cutting-edge tech media source, Wired, has a decent overview of the hackerspace scene as it exists today in the United States, which this morning made the front page at Digg. I don’t have any major bones to pick with the article, except for the general tone that “Hey, this scene didn’t really matter until it started happening in the United States!”

There’s some acknowledgment of German and Austrian hackerspaces, but we get sentences like, “German and Austrian hackers have been organizing into hacker collectives for years, including Metalab in Vienna, c-base in Berlin and the Chaos Computer Club in Hannover, Germany”

The author of this article is lumping together Metalab, founded in 2006, c-base, founded circa 1995, and CCC, founded 1981(ish?) as though they’re all similar sorts of places. Metalab is relatively recent and operates on a model very much like the American hackerspaces: it’s a platform, with dues-paying members and resources for projects, but nothing in the way of its own agenda or ideology. c-base is much older, predating the late 90s tech boom, and with a great deal in the way of history and self-created mythos surrounding it. CCC predates even the World Wide Web, transcends any one specific location or space (with chapters active in several German cities) and probably belongs alongside institutions like 2600 as founding members of the 1980s hacker culture.

It’s great to see hackerspaces getting mainstream exposure, but it would also be nice to see more recognition of the long history and broad geographic reach of the scene. Say, for starters, a specific mention of any hackerspace outside of the United States, Germany, or Austria. I’ve definitely encountered grumbling from some European hackers about the US-centric nature of coverage of hackerspaces, or of groups (hackerspaces.org sometimes included) pushing an “American” model for hackerspaces. This model includes a rented or purchased space, relatively expensive membership dues (Wired quotes $40 per month as the “starving hacker rate” at Noisebridge, while some of the more anarchist European hackerspaces either have no “members” at all, or charge dues on the order of €15 per year) and fancy equipment (NYC Resistor has their own high-powered laser cutter—which is, admittedly, totally awesome).

I realize that Wired is a US-based media source, so it makes sense that they’d go to American hackerspaces to do interviews and get quotes. I guess it’s just that, as an American traveling abroad, I’m quite sensitive about trying not to fall into the American stereotype of bungling into a situation I don’t understand, and telling people to do it my way. Americans are very much latecomers to the hackerspace scene. In fact, even at the point when I was first proposing this project, in late 2007, most of the American hackerspaces mentioned in the Wired article did not exist yet. During one of my Watson interviews, I was asked, “Why do you need to leave the United States to do this project?” and I answered (at the time, honestly) “Because the kinds of places that I want to visit simply are not in America.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to see these types of places springing up across my home country, I just think the Americans would do well to remember that they are essentially re-inventing wheel, here.

EDIT: Also, since this is pretty much the first time I’ve ever specifically written about hackerspaces in the United States, I think it’s appropriate to throw out a plug for the newly-founded Pumping Station One, in my hometown of Chicago. My friend Dave recently interviewed Eric Michaud, one of the founders.

I’ve written up another interview I did for hackerspaces.org. I think the interviews are pretty interesting and I’m glad I’m doing them/contributing knowledge about the greater hacker community, but the actual process of writing, transcribing, finding appropriate links, sorting through photos, uploading everything is really time-intesnsive. I’m wondering if I’d be better off shooting video interviews and just uploading that, or something.

Also, if people reading here find it irritating to click over to the other site, there’s no real reason I couldn’t just cross-post these things here, too. Let me know.