
Your cyberpunk games are dangerous - jgrahamc
http://boingboing.net/2015/05/08/your-cyberpunk-games-are-dange.html
======
esoteric_wombat
It's at the bottom of the article, but I think it's worth noting that Jon
Peterson does some impressive work for role playing game historical
documentation. His book Playing at the World is a labor of love, giving not
only a detailed history of the early days of wargames and tabletop rpgs, but a
history of the science fiction and fantasy genres, a history of games in
general, and how those lead to the creation of modern rpgs. He then wraps
things up with a chapter on how tabletop gaming influenced the star of the
video game industry.

The scope is huge, the book is giant, and he published it under his own
imprint so that no one could tell him to cut things. I found the section on
Kriegsspiel particularly interesting. Highly recommended if you're an
enthusiast for the subject, otherwise you'd probably get very frustrated.

------
zyxley
> The raid couldn’t have come at a worse time for Steve Jackson Games. Already
> in debt, the company depended heavily on new releases for cash flow, and the
> confiscation of the GURPS Cyberpunk manuscript would significantly delay the
> book’s release. On March 9, the company let go eight people from its staff
> of seventeen. Since the Secret Service did not immediately return the
> manuscript, the team frantically reconstructed it from earlier draft
> materials and hurried it into print.

The other moral the story: _always_ keep an off-site backup.

~~~
loydb
As the guy they're talking about, I _did_ keep an offsite backup. The GURPS
Cyberpunk manuscript existed in three places -- my computer at home, my
computer at work, and the Illuminati BBS.

They took all three. They also got my wife's in-progress Master's Thesis, and
she had to restart from scratch because they refused to return even a copy.

I'm curious where the quote attributed to me was sourced from, as I don't
remember saying that. However, since I regularly come across things in old
backups that I had totally forgotten, both code and written text, it may be
completely legit.

I'm kind of surprised the author didn't bother to contact me at all (I'm
hardly difficult to find). We weren't awakened at gunpoint, for instance. That
was Goggans. We were awakened by pounding on our apartment door at 6 AM.

~~~
increment
Hi, I wrote the article. The long quote from you is sourced from a (pre-raid)
article you wrote for Steve Jackson's house organ of the time "Roleplayer"
#15; be happy to send you a scan if you're don't have one.

As for being woken up at gunpoint, that's sourced from a number of
contemporary accounts, including a Mar 5 1990 comp.dcom.telecom post (reposted
in Phrack #31) reading "The Mentor was awakened at 6:30am on Thursday (3/1/90)
with the gun of a Secret Service agent pointed at his head."

I do apologize if it seems standoffish not to have dropped you a line while I
was working on it - it's kind of my shtick that I work exclusively from
documentary evidence of the era I'm writing about rather than from interviews
today. No method is perfect, but the results tend to be pretty decent.

~~~
loydb
Like I said, it doesn't surprise me that I said that, I just didn't remember
it.

But a random Usenet post from someone who undoubtedly wasn't there isn't a
source, it is hearsay....

And how hard would it have been to look at the cover of Cyberpunk and spell my
name right?

~~~
increment
I hadn't noticed that your name is misspelled in the published version - sorry
about that, I'll see if that can get fixed. It must have been spellchecked
somewhere late in the editorial process.

And as for the gun in your face, obviously you know best what happened to you,
I was just explaining why the article says what it says. I will not repeat the
hearsay.

~~~
loydb
They had guns when they came in the door, but Goggans had said something to
the effect of 'you'll never take me alive' on a BBS post, so they were a
little more proactive in his case... :)

~~~
increment
They did manage to correct your name in the story, fyi.

------
DCoder
> _J. Eric Townsend reviewed a copy [of GURPS] for the early computer security
> zine RISKS_

This looks like the review in question:
[http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/10.03.html#subj10.1](http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/10.03.html#subj10.1)

------
hellbanner
" he notes that “now it seems that anybody with any computer knowledge at all
is suspect,"

seems like knowledge is what's being hammered on these days by propaganda.
IIRC a kid was arrested for using DOS / a shell on his school computer (can't
find the link, sorry)

~~~
smosher_
I got yelled at by a teacher for this in the '90s. I used the command line to
access things that weren't presented in the login shell's menu. Since the
system had permissions which explicitly granted me the right to access other
programs I didn't think anything of it... but he thought differently and
accused me of hacking.

~~~
grrowl
We had a similar outbreak of NETSEND at my high school. A couple of kids were
suspended (for sending bad things) but the chorus of kids explaining how easy
it was to send anonymous messages to the entire school caused them to actually
secure the computers.

------
nearengine
"Our cyberspace today has its share of problems, but it is no dystopia"

Really? What changed? The government at least got more proficient at using the
Internet, I guess.

~~~
deltaprotocol
I had just copied this to paste here.

That someone is able to write such an article and at the very end wrap it up
like this, today, after everything that the whole world knows for a fact, this
scares me more than anything in the article.

~~~
increment
Yeah, ultimately I think the Internet today is a lot more open and a lot more
beneficial to liberal society than any network was in 1990. I understand why
you gag at that, but, I can imagine much, much worse outcomes than we got.

------
ploxiln
"Role-playing games were dangerous: they warped fragile young minds, breaking
down the barriers between the real and the imaginary. The irony is that it was
the authorities, not the players, who couldn’t tell a game from reality."

... well said.

~~~
digi_owl
What is the quote again? "Do not expect a man to grasp it, when his continued
employment depends on him not doing so".

------
pyre
I've read a couple of previous write-ups regarding the raid on Steve Jackson
Games, but this one provided a number of details I don't remember the others
having (though I could have just failed to remember them).

~~~
waterlesscloud
Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling's non-fiction book _The Hacker Crackdown_ covers
the era pretty well, and is freely available. Sterling, after all, coined the
very phrase "Information wants to be free."

[http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html](http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html)

~~~
escap
per
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free)
the phrase is attributed to Stewart Brand "On the one hand information wants
to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right
place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free,
because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So
you have these two fighting against each other."

~~~
waterlesscloud
Huh. Looks like I've wrongly attributed that phrase for pretty much its entire
lifetime!

------
njharman
I remember this from when it happened. The SJG raid and sun devil made me join
the eff. At the time it looked like we needed help defending against the war
on information.

------
aphrax
Had no idea Legion of Doom were connected to GURPS. Good read.

~~~
loydb
LOD is even thanked in the book credits.

------
marincounty
There are degrees of Black hat hacking. Let's not make the laws so serve most
Americans don't even think about ways to penetrate a system?

While other countries, like Russia, and China--seem to encourage their
citizens to become better black hat Hackers? Russian Hackers seem pretty
efficient, and we can't touch them.

prosecutorial laws should be not so heavy handed. A Prosecuter should not be
able to stack charge after charge against a black hat Hacker(like Arron
Schwartz)--to the point where he commits suicide. Or, make Black Hat Hackers
so angry with their government they turn their backs if asked to help? Crimes
--even computer crimes are not black and white; neither should the punishment
be one big blow in order to send a message.

When other countries become better Hackers than Americans and take over
critical infrastructure; I picture some Gsometing government employee scouring
Google trying to figure out exactly what the Russians and Chinese have done to
our servers? Or worse, hiring some slick security outfit who claims they know
how to fix the intrusion?

(No wonder Hackers keep Obama up at night? I don't think he was referring to
American Hackers either?)

------
lkrubner
I am not sure which is more dangerous, the era in which the government did not
understand the Internet, and accidentally lashed out in hysterical fear
against non-threats, or the era in which the government does understand the
Internet, and deliberately lashes out in hysterical fear against non-threats.

~~~
wtbob
Or the era in which the government does understand the Internet, and
deliberately attacks actual threats…getting caught in the crossfire is never
fun, no matter how legitimate the battle. How many people died in the Battle
of Britain from shells, shrapnel and planes falling on them? But of course,
many more would have died had the RAF not fought the Luftwaffe.

Likewise, how many will suffer today in the crossfire between criminal gangs,
extremist organisations and legitimate governments? How many would suffer if
legitimate governments didn't fight?

~~~
pliny
>Likewise, how many will suffer today in the crossfire between criminal gangs,
extremist organisations and legitimate governments? How many would suffer if
legitimate governments didn't fight?

About as many, or even less.

Governments not using mass surveillance, and other forms of spying on their
own citizens, implies the following benefits:

The money spent on mass surveillance is either spent elsewhere (so you merely
need to find a more productive use of those untold billions to decide that the
surveillance is not worth it) or not collected as taxes or tariffs to begin
with.

The man hours spent constructing, maintaining and operating the apparatus of
surveillance is spent elsewhere (this coincides with the benefit above, where
the government takes engineering talent and uses it for more productive
projects or increases the supply of engineering talent in the private market
alongside a tax rebate).

The money & man hours spent by innocent people (read: people caught in
'crossfire') defending themselves from mass surveillance is free to be spent
on more productive projects (whereas now it merely serves to lower the impact
of the 'crossfire').

The chilling effect caused by mass surveillance ceases to exist (or is at
least less in the world where people are unsure whether mass surveillance
occurs vs. the world where they know it occurs for sure).

As for the detriments, I'm not sure how effective mass surveillance has been
at achieving its stated goal - while I cant reliably reason about a world
where mass surveillance never existed, I can say that the impact of domestic
and international terrorism on the quality of life in US and Europe was not
high prior to mass surveillance and that I see no good reason to believe it
should have increased dramatically enough to justify both the resources spent
and the loss of privacy (or even either of those separately) - but this is an
argument that you need to make, I can't provide it for you.

I'm also not aware of any notable achievements of the mass surveillance
programs, and although these may be classified, I doubt they exist since the
US gov't still refuses fair trials to the alleged terrorists it imprisons, and
if the surveillance projects had generated a significant amount of useful,
incriminating evidence this would not be necessary (under the, imo, fair
assumption that the reason they avoid trial is that the govt is incapable of
proving guilt in many relevant).

~~~
smil
Intelligence collection is not about security but about * control*, though
security is a small subset of control.

The problem is that, as Gall's Law states, systems and organization eventually
become counter productive: the NSA and the security industry generally are
threats to individual and national security.

~~~
Karunamon

         <comment class="devils_advocate">
    

This seems like a mighty conspiracist view on the topic. There haven't been
any inklings, covert or overt, that the recent actions taken by governments
are for anything other than their stated goals.

How can you confidently say that this is about control and not security?

~~~
smil
Have you ever managed an organization? Then you would understand why it is a
fundamental need for those in control to have the maximum amount of
information possible. It's impossible to govern an organization of you know
nothing about it.

That you call it a conspiracy betrays your ignorance of this matter.

~~~
Karunamon
You just did an excellent job of not answering the literally one question I
asked you. Could you do that, please?

