

The Anthropology of Hackers (2010) - christianbryant
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/the-anthropology-of-hackers/63308/

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peterwwillis
They seem to fail to mention BBSes, which is arguably the most important
influence on the creation of the hacker underground, and IRC, which is today
still the most permeable means to access it. They seem to breeze over
MUDs/gaming even though that's a large part of what got people into BBSes to
begin with.

From the early 1990s and on through the present, if you want to find out what
governments are doing with your data, who has your credit cards and SSN, what
the next major DDoS attack target will be, or get the dirty details [along
with photo evidence] on the social lives of the most popular hackers, you go
to IRC. To learn about the hacker underground they should be reading IRC
transcripts.

Edit: I forgot about one of the newer and more exciting aspects of the cyber
crime, hacktivist and hacker underground groups: web forums. Want to know
who's planning Jihad on a Yahoo! Groups page? Want to know who's planning a
"digital sit-in" (e.g. DDoS) alongside an Occupy or animal rights group? Want
to get crack cocaine delivered to your front door (without using Silk Road)?
Want to buy 10,000 US credit card numbers? Want to rent out a botnet of a
million nodes for an hour? It's all on (somewhat) publicly-accessible web
forums.

While we all like to play dumb that these forms of cyber-crime and vigilantism
aren't "really hackers", they use the same techniques and often co-exist with
the more "respectable" hackers. It's not uncommon for a more traditional
hacker to live a double life (and make some nice coin on the side), committing
a lot of the back-room crimes that someone else later gets caught for using.
And it's just plain interesting to see how they all work.

~~~
codezero
From this comment I am confident in saying we were either friends or enemies
in the 90s :)

------
christianbryant
My first real job out of High School (no, not college) was in 1991 at a Crown
Bookseller where there was an Ingram Micro computer that connected to the
Ingram database and nothing else. I was never the same :)

