
How is the hacker culture different between the late nineties and now? - rms_returns
The question says it all. If you have seen or were part of the hacker culture during the early days, how do you see it different now?
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rboyd
Well, firstly I don't know that we would have considered the late 90s to be
the early days. I was pretty active during a time where the scene was
transitioning from underground bulletin boards to the internet/irc, circa
~1991 and even then it was common to find textfiles describing esoteric
systems that were hard to find anymore.

I'm not active at all anymore in infosec (white or blackhat), so it's
impossible for me to draw a comparison. But I can tell you that back then it
was very much more about trading information and socializing. Google around
for anything published from a guy named Fravia. When I remember those days, he
more than anybody captured the philosophy I wanted to subscribe to. These days
it sounds pretty scary. Back then you could get in trouble for phreaking some
phone calls and end up with a stern talking to from the telco. Now you aim a
webcrawler at the wrong service and they lock you up.

It also seems like blackhats now have a much more mature ecosystem and
financial motives. Right around Defcon6 I think it was, hacker groups started
building commercial product and people landed on episodes of MTV True Life. I
think that was a pretty important shift.

tl;dr more fun, way less scary?

Edit: If you're talking about programming in general and the dot-com bubble,
that's a different story. I may have missed the point.

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hackernewsuser
How has hacker culture changed? Not at all. I've been living, breathing,
eating and drinking (less these days, tryna clean up my diet) the hacker
culture, hacking continuously since late 1980s. Linux and Windows NT were of
course the biggies, but after Windows XP it's been a meh fest turning into
cringe fest, and Unix never changes.

One thing has changed: nowadays you can be even more reclusive and asocial
than in the early, diskette-swapping, meatspace-meeting days.

Hacking will always be the same activity despite having more code at your
disposal. Keep on hacking relentlessly and one day you'll make a sweet hack.
Only then you truly understand what it is to be a hacker.

~~~
greenyoda
_" One thing has changed: nowadays you can be even more reclusive and asocial
than in the early, diskette-swapping, meatspace-meeting days..."_

...or in the even earlier days when all the hackers hung out together in a
terminal room. I learned a lot about Unix in the early '80s by sitting side by
side with some accomplished Unix hackers, to the point where the powers that
be gave me the root password on the system (a PDP 11/45 running Seventh
Edition Unix).

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znpy
I think the main difference is that it is not a subculture anymore.

~~~
nairboon
Why isn't it still a subculture?

