

Hackers and Painters (on Google Books) - sharpshoot
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=B4dk0tYPrckC&dq=hackers+and+painters&pg=PP1&ots=PP4jV3Ee5V&sig=S8ILcPM3RqMsafSCd6oY1NSWWeY&prev=http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hackers+and+painters&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=one-book-with-thumbnail&hl=en#PPA18,M1

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trekker7
Some pages are missing... go to <http://paulgraham.com/hp.html> for the full
essay.

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hhm
pg: Are any translations of this book going to appear soon? Not that I care in
the language for reading it myself, but I'm very curious about whether it's
going to appear in libraries in Argentina (that it would if there was a
Spanish translation) anytime soon.

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mynameishere
Just flipping through, here's a sentence I never noticed before:

 _There is some thing very _American_ about Feynman breaking into safes during
the Manhatten project_

American? Geez, I hope the _internationale_ wasn't playing in the background
when he wrote that. Stalin (and the soviet scientists) knew everything about
the atom bomb the whole time because of people breaking into safes. Frankly,
Feynman should have been hanged, if that comment is true--romanticism over the
word 'hacker' notwithstanding.

EDIT: I'm going to head off a cliche'd argument in favor of such break-ins,
that they detect defects in the system. First point: The authorities have no
way of distinquishing happy-go-lucky hackers from spies, and second, the real
protection against break-ins is, and always was, the noose, not a combination
lock. The lock just makes it clear what is and isn't hands-off.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Remind me to never, ever, in a million years become your co-worker.

"You stole my stapler! The sentence is DEATH!"

Meanwhile, you are presumably aware that (a) the key atomic spy at Los Alamos
(Klaus Fuchs) was a co-inventor of the bomb and didn't need to break into
anything in order to learn any secrets; that (b) as a co-inventor of the bomb
himself, Feynman presumably had sufficient clearance to read the documents
inside the safes that he opened; and that (c) nobody ever accused Feynman of
being a spy. Well, until you, anyway.

Feynman did confess, in his autobiography, that he borrowed Klaus Fuchs' car
once, on the occasion of his wife's death. Presumably you would only have
sentenced him to ten years of hard labor for that.

~~~
mynameishere
"Meanwhile, you are presumably aware that..."

Meanwhile you are presumably aware that breaking into a top secret military
safe during a war (or at any time) is a federal crime, and that exceptions
cannot be made based upon our personal preferences in celebrity scientists,
and that the atomic bomb was, in fact, not a stapler, but a device capable of
killing millions of people. You are probably also aware that there were co-
inventors of the atomic bomb who did, in fact, pass secrets onto the soviets,
and you are aware that a person breaking into a safe would be suspect #1 for
that in addition to the more specific crime of breaking into a safe.

You are probably also aware that security clearances are compartmentalized on
a need-to-know basis and that having such a security clearance does not
entitle you to all secrets at that level. No doubt you are also aware that the
"hacker" ethics that evolved in-between games of hunt-the-wumpus at MIT are
not universally applicable. You are probably also are aware that you are wrong
in this line of arguing, and so I finish there.

~~~
DaniFong
Are you crazy? The safes didn't provide security sufficient to keep spies out
- some didn't even have the codes set to anything other than the default.
Feynman strengthened the whole system. Most of the safe cracking was done in
order to provide access for the _owners_ of said safes. His activities were
quite well known: would you presume to advise the corrections department at
Los Alamos to hang their scientists leading their technical divisions?

Additionally, he kept Oak Ridge from blowing up when he noticed the water
moderated uranium was stored closely enough to be near-critical. Were he
hanged, there would have been hundreds of direct deaths, and the entire effort
would have been held up for months: they kept all their enriching equipment
there, not to mention that it housed their enrichment experts.

~~~
mynameishere
_Were he hanged, there would have been hundreds of direct deaths_

Well, you're looking forward from a past point of time, and that shouldn't be
done. Actually hanging someone probably wouldn't be a good idea. It depends on
the circumstances: If he made it clear what he was doing, a loss of clearance
would have been more appropriate.

Of course, in the back of my mind are a lot of hypotheticals--using the bomb
was partly strategic, ie, to scare the Soviets. That didn't work, partly
because of the spying. North Korea and Red China were tragedies of the highest
order, and the lost nuke secrets were a part of that game...

