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bemildred

(90,061 posts)
Mon Aug 10, 2015, 11:03 AM Aug 2015

The hacker hacked

Any large and alienating infrastructure controlled by a technocratic elite is bound to provoke. In particular, it will nettle those who want to know how it works, those who like the thrill of transgressing, and those who value the principle of open access. Take the US telephone network of the 1960s: a vast array of physical infrastructure dominated by a monopolistic telecoms corporation called AT&T. A young Air Force serviceman named John Draper – aka Captain Crunch – discovered that he could manipulate the rules of tone-dialling systems by using children’s whistles found in Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes. By whistling the correct tone into a telephone handset, he could place free long-distance calls through a chink in the AT&T armour.

Draper was one of the first phone phreakers, a motley crew of jokers bent on exploring and exploiting loopholes in the system to gain free access. Through the eyes of conventional society, such phreakers were just juvenile pranksters and cheapskates. Yet their actions have since been incorporated into the folklore of modern hacker culture. Draper said in a 1995 interview: ‘I was mostly interested in the curiosity of how the phone company worked. I had no real desire to go rip them off and steal phone service.’

But in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984), the US journalist Steven Levy went so far as to put up Draper as an avatar of the ‘true hacker’ spirit. Levy was trying to hone in on principles that he believed constituted a ‘hacker ethic’. One such principle was the ‘hands-on imperative’:


Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems – about the world – from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things.


http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacker-ethos/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AeonMagazineEssays+%28Aeon+Magazine+Essays%29
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