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<TITLE>CDNE Chapter 5 - Subculture of the Subcultures</TITLE>
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<P ALIGN=CENTER><font size=2 face="Times New Roman"><b><font size="+2" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Chapter 
  5<br>
  </font></b></font><font size=2 face="Times New Roman"><b><font size="+2" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">SUBCULTURE 
  OF THE SUBCULTURES</font></b></font></P>
<table width="620" border="0" align="center">
  <tr>
    <td>
      <div align="center"> 
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>The phenomenon</b> 
          that started at MIT, becoming global through personal computers and 
          networks, has reached us in a subtle way. It is hard to recognize it 
          as the same thing that drove American youth to spend their days and 
          nights hacking. Few parents had any idea that their sons (and in some 
          cases, daughters) could be influenced by a culture rooted in American 
          universities simply by spending a few hours in front of a computer screen. 
          The screen in question would be hooked up to a </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Commodore 
          64</b>, for (in Sweden) it is with this machine that it all began.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The high-tech 
          ( 1984) C64 had gone into full bloom; hundreds of thousands of youngsters 
          in Europe, the U.S., and Australia sat hunched over their breadbox-looking 
          machine, fascinated by its possibilities. The C64, like the Apple II 
          and Atari 800, was built around MOS's 6502 microprocessor (which is 
          still in use, including in Nintendo's entertainment system), and therefore 
          many Apple and Atari owners saw the transition to C64 as a natural progression. 
          At first, most programs (primarily games) for the C64 were quite primitive, 
          with poor graphics and sound reminiscent of those produced by a PC internal 
          speaker - that is, beeps and screeches. At some point, however, the 
          market broke through a magic barrier and so many C64's were sold that 
          it became profitable to start companies producing software solely for 
          this computer. This had occurred with the Apple II and Atari in the 
          U.S., but since the C64 was first real European home computer, these 
          companies were completely new phenomena on the east side of the Atlantic. 
          The first companies started in the UK, which was the country that had 
          first started importing the C64, and which became the leading edge for 
          European computer culture.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> It was the 
          games, with their (for the time) advanced graphics and sound, that would 
          be copied and distributed through the so-called Scene. The Scene, a 
          kind of virtual society, started in the U.S. around 1979, when Apple 
          II and Atari games were hot stuff. The software companies were angry, 
          and called the Sceners pirates and criminals. Pirate BBSs for personal 
          computers (usually consisting of an Apple II and the program </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>ASCII Express Professional</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">) had mushroomed and mixed 
          their own values and electronic magazines into the underground hacker/phreaker 
          movement. The most notorious BBS </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>was 
          Pirate's Harbour</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, 
          which had such prominent users as the well-known crackers </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Mr. 
          Xerox</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> and </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Krakowicz</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Just before 
          the C64's arrival in Sweden, and parallel with The ABC Club growing 
          into a representative and presentable computer club, a small and tight 
          group of Apple II enthusiasts had created an underground network. This 
          network included </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Captain 
          Kidd</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Mr. Big</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, 
          </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Mr. Sweden</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>TAD</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>TMC</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> (The Mad Computerfreak), 
          and others. Since there was no Swedish market for Apple II software, 
          the group had imported games to crack and share. They even had contact 
          with the infamous American Apple II underground and its BBSs. Most of 
          the group's members advanced to a C64, and it was through them that 
          the Swedish Scene originated.</font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><sup><a href="#FTNT1">(1)</a></sup></font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The concept 
          of a &quot;scene&quot; is the same as in a theater or music stage. A 
          scene is the location of a performance, where the purpose is to show 
          off one's abilities, not to make money or dominate other people. Scenes 
          (or stages) are found in almost all cultural spheres, and, fascinatingly, 
          also in techno-cultural ones such as those of radio amateurs, model 
          airplane hobbyists, and hackers. What separates the personal computer 
          scene from other scenes is that it ran against commercial interests, 
          and therefore it came to be considered a dangerous and criminal subculture.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>Scene</i></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> 
          (capital S) is thus a label for the large group of users that exchange 
          programs (primarily games) and also so-called demos. The thinking was 
          straightforward: why buy a game for 25 bucks if I can copy it for free 
          from my neighbor. This practice was, of course, illegal (which most 
          people realized); however, it was a crime comparable to copying the 
          neighbor's records to a cassette tape, with the exception that the copy 
          did not suffer a loss of quality and could be infinitely reproduced. 
          A copy of a copy of a copy would be identical to the original.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The Swedish 
          prosecuting pioneer </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Christer 
          Str&#246;m</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> (from 
          Kristianstad) and his colleagues around the world have, to an extent, 
          been successful in curbing the commercial mass-distribution of pirated 
          copies. However, private distribution is still alive and well, even 
          though it is currently somewhat hampered by the fact that modern games 
          are usually delivered on CD-ROMs, and not very easy to copy (if they 
          are copied, they usually have to be transferred to around 50 diskettes, 
          which makes the practice rather unwieldy and expensive). One buys the 
          original rather than spending hours copying it</font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><sup><a href="#FTNT2">(2)</a></sup> 
          (more on this subject will follow later). </font> </p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Starting January 
          1, 1993, all reproduction and distribution of copyrighted software (even 
          to friends) is against Swedish law, although no individual has been 
          sentenced for giving copies of programs to his/her friends. The crime 
          is, as previously stated, comparable to copying records or videos, or 
          not using your turn signal when making a turn. You can relax as long 
          as you don't mass-distribute pirated software. Perhaps I shouldn't have 
          said that - it is a terribly politically incorrect statement.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Anyway, back 
          to 1984. The people that removed the (often virtually nonexistent) copy 
          protection from the games, the so-called crackers, came up with the 
          excellent idea of displaying their name or pseudonym (handle) on the 
          start-up screen of a cracked program. The phenomenon is, together with 
          many other phenomena in the hacking world, related to graffiti. If we 
          take into account that such a copy could reach tens of thousands of 
          people (many more than would read something sprayed on a concrete wall), 
          it is not hard to understand how the practice became so popular. Hackers 
          with handles such as </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Mr. 
          Z</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, TMC (The Mercenary 
          Hacker), </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>WASP</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> (We Against Software Protection), 
          </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Radwar</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Dynamic 
          Duo</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, or </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>CCS</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> 
          (Computerbrains Cracking Service) figured heavily on screens everywhere. 
          Sometimes individual hackers hid behind these pseudonyms, sometimes 
          loosely connected groups. In the U.S., there were already firmly established 
          and well-organized cracking groups, but in Sweden and Europe, the phenomenon 
          was completely new. The underground hacker movement started to grow 
          from scratch, especially in the larger cities, where there were plenty 
          of hackers that would meet at different computer clubs and exchange 
          knowledge and programs.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The personal 
          computer had incredible penetration as a medium, and several hacker 
          groups soon formed, spending all their time removing copy protections 
          from games, and then compressing and distributing the products (known 
          as wares or warez). Among the first groups was the American </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Elite Circle</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, which had its roots in 
          both phreaker and hacker culture, and had already managed pirate BBSs 
          for Apple II and Atari software. The notion of cracking and distributing 
          games came from the USA, where it had started with an Apple II program 
          called </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>Locksmith</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">. It could remove copy protections 
          from programs using certain parameters. In the beginning, it was enough 
          to simply change the parameters for this program to crack a piece of 
          software, but later it became necessary to spend more work on the actual 
          cracking, and the cracker him/herself would have to be a programmer.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The hackers 
          cracked programs because they were pissed off at the software companies 
          for putting in copy protection routines that prevented them from looking 
          around inside the programs and copying them for their friends. They 
          wanted information to be free. This was the true reason, even though 
          many gave justifications such as &quot;The programs are too expensive, 
          I only copy programs I couldn't afford to buy anyway, I want to test 
          it before I buy it&quot;, etc., which were only partially true. The 
          fundamental belief was that information was not property, and that they 
          did not want to be part of any software industry.</font></p>
        <p align="left">O<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">ne of the 
          first programs to be pirated, and perhaps the first ever, was </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>Altair BASIC</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">. It was delivered on a punch 
          card for the computer with the same name. BASIC stands for Beginner's 
          All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, and Altair BASIC was written 
          by none less than Bill Gates himself. Behind the reproduction was one 
          of the members of </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Homebrew 
          Computer Club</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> 
          in Silicon Valley, a hacker (</font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Dan 
          Sokol</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">) who would 
          later be known as </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Nightstalker</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">. He wrote a program that 
          copied the punch card pattern and thus became the world's first cracker. 
          The 19-year-old Gates was up in arms: he wrote an angry letter to the 
          user groups in which he claimed that copying a program was theft and 
          would ruin the industry. Most thought little Bill was an idiot; no one 
          had ever tried to sell computer programs before, and the norm was for 
          everyone to share everything. For the large computer systems, the software 
          came with the machine, and nobody really cared if it was copied. With 
          personal computers came software piracy, simply because there were software 
          companies that wanted to profit from this new hobby. The hobbyists themselves 
          never asked for any software companies.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Here, it is 
          necessary to make a crucial distinction: hackers distinguish between 
          regular distribution of a program to friends and the activities of pirates. 
          Pirates are not friends but people who try to profit from reproducing 
          and distributing software. Pirates are parasites that prey on personal 
          computer users, who just want software, as well as the computer industry 
          in general. Both hackers and members of the software industry think 
          that pirates are scum. The software companies hate them for stealing 
          their income, and hackers hate them because they try create a new dependency 
          relationship that is no better than the old one. Hackers, in general, 
          firmly believe that copying should be done on a friendly basis and for 
          free. Only in a few exceptional cases have hackers cooperated with pirates 
          to get original games (nowadays known under the more cryptic term &quot;licenses&quot;) 
          for cracking purposes. Sweden's greatest pirate of all time, </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Jerker</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> 
          (fictitious name), was a retired father of two, in his forties, and 
          hated by the industry as well as the hackers (with the possible exception 
          of the </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Xakk</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> group, which depended on 
          him for their originals). Rumor has it that he's not given up piracy, 
          and still makes his living selling illegal copies. Jerker says that 
          he is not really interested in computers, and it seems to be true. Personally, 
          I think that he has a considerably greater interest in money.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The Scene in 
          1986: as hackers developed their programming expertise, the introductory 
          screens displayed at the beginning of cracked games became more advanced 
          and grew into several dimensions. Hackers were inspired by title screens 
          and sequences from games, and the introductory screens went from comprising 
          mainly vertically scrolling text to advanced graphics with animation, 
          sound, and sophisticated technical tricks that made the show more cool. 
          A new art form, the </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>Intro</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, was born, and it was practiced 
          solely by programmers. Although the art of demo writing had existed 
          (in a simple form) in the time of the Apple II, the C64 and its advanced 
          technology permitted it to bloom. Groups like </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Eagle 
          Soft</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Hotline</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, 
          </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Comics Group</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>FAC</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> (Federation Against Copyright), 
          </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Triad</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, and </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Fairlight</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> flooded the Scene in the 
          last half of the 80's.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Some of these 
          groups started their own BBS's where ideas were exchanged and programs 
          distributed. The word </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>elite</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> was adopted as a term for 
          the groups that were the most productive and had the most distribution 
          channels (especially to the USA). The European part of the Scene had 
          an obsession with distributing their cracked games to the United States 
          as quickly as possible. It was probably due to a form of &quot;sibling 
          rivalry&quot;, since the Scene itself started with the American Apple 
          II computers, and the most experienced hackers were from the U.S. It 
          was important to impress &quot;big brother&quot; with your cracked games. 
          In the European Scene, more ties to the USA meant higher elite status.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The demand 
          for open communication channels led to the hackers attacking the Internet 
          (among other things), and cooperating with European and American phreakers 
          to open more channels to the West. The phreakers and network hackers 
          called these newcomers from the world of personal computing </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>Warez d00ds</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, since they were always 
          bringing &quot;wares&quot; in the form of pirated or cracked games. 
          They referred to themselves as traders, or, more expressly, modem traders, 
          since they used modems to connect to different BBSs. At first it was 
          Americans skilled in the fine art of phreaking who contacted different 
          European cracking groups, and later the Europeans themselves started 
          calling the U.S., hacking Internet computers, etc.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Eventually, 
          the Europeans' inferiority complex with respect to the &quot;big brother 
          of the west&quot; had the result that the European home computer hackers, 
          in their struggle to excel, developed programming and cracking skills 
          totally superior to their American counterparts. During 1987-88, American 
          computer game companies began adding copy protection to software exported 
          to Europe, but not to the games sold within the U.S. They feared the 
          European cracking groups, and Sweden in particular was considered an 
          unusually dangerous country. The computer gaming industry suggested 
          that much of the pirated software that circulated through the U.S. and 
          Europe originated in Sweden, which is actually true. Most of these games 
          came from an imports store in G&#246;teborg (Gothenburg), which was 
          visited once a week by a Swedish hacker who was supposedly &quot;reviewing&quot; 
          new games. Without the storekeepers' knowledge, he copied the games 
          and distributed them to various Swedish crackers.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">It didn't take 
          long for someone to come up with the idea of separating the intros from 
          the games, letting them stand for themselves; the intro would even be 
          allowed to occupy all of the computer's memory. This resulted in the 
          birth of demo programs (or </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>demos</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">), which were dedicated to 
          graphical and musical performances and extraordinary technical tricks. 
          The first demos were collections of musical themes from various games, 
          usually accompanied by a simple text screen. For the most part, it was 
          the same groups that had previously done cracking and intros that migrated 
          to demo creation, but &quot;pure&quot; demo groups also surfaced, such 
          as </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>1001 Crew</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>The 
          Judges</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Scoop</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, 
          and </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Ash &amp; 
          Dave</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">. A distinct 
          jargon and theory of beauty developed, mainly through the exchange of 
          programs and knowledge on England's </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Compunet</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, which was an enormous conferencing 
          system dedicated solely to personal computer fans. Compunet became the 
          hard core of the demo groups, but most of the software exchange still 
          took place through disk trading and BBSs. Later, and especially during 
          1988, the underground magazine </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>Illegal</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> became a sort of cultural 
          nexus for this rapidly growing society.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Norms for telling 
          the bad from the good evolved quickly, and the widespread expression 
          </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>lamer</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> was introduced as a term 
          for people who didn't want to program, and instead used presentation 
          software to produce demos. Probably, the term originates in skater slang. 
          The word lamer spread far outside hackers' circles, and soon applied 
          to any computer-illiterate person. Many similar slang terms have been 
          derived from the Scene, but these relationships are not expressed in 
          the Jargon File; rather, the document serves to perpetuate the negative 
          view of subcultural hackers (to whom it invariably refers to as warez 
          d00ds). This view is both erroneous and prejudiced.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">From an American 
          perspective, it is understandable that the academic hackers from MIT, 
          Berkeley, Stanford etc. considered the personal computer hackers amateurs 
          of little value; in the U.S., virtually all teenagers with a personal 
          computer were exclusively interested in games. American demos and intros 
          were primitive, and nowhere near the level of sophistication of the 
          European ones. On the whole, the American part of the Scene had a less 
          developed culture than the European side. The American hackers were 
          heavily influenced by the phreaker culture, and as a result usually 
          insolent and aggressive. The feelings of contempt were mutual.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">An unfortunate 
          consequence of this animosity is that European hackers searching for 
          their identity are easily attracted by American hacker ideals, and thus 
          assume a slightly scornful attitude towards personal computer enthusiasts. 
          It is worth noting that the cultural foundation of European hackers 
          consisted of personal computer hobbyists, and not of phreakers, network 
          hackers, or small academic clubs at universities. The European hacker 
          identity was built around Commodore's and Atari's personal computers, 
          and this is where the European hacker should seek his/her roots. In 
          addition, there are (of course) values and traditions inherited from 
          the American universities. However, one thing is fairly certain: the 
          European personal computer hackers developed the art of computing in 
          a way that never occurred in the U.S. The aggregate of European teenage 
          hackers created a beautiful and amateur-based art form of a kind that 
          MIT and Stanford never witnessed.<br>
          </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><br>
          </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>The Art Form of 
          the Demo<br>
          </b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">A demo is somewhat 
          difficult to define; it really has to be experienced. Even the first 
          hackers at MIT created (around 1961) simple demos in the form of small 
          mathematical patterns that were displayed on a simple screen. These 
          were called </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>Tri-pos 
          </i></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">or </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>Minskytron</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">-patterns (after the professor 
          of the same name). The demos were beautiful, but lacked practical applications.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Sine curves, 
          scrolling text, and mobile blocks of graphics coupled with music constituted 
          the first personal computer intros. As time has progressed, the products 
          have come to resemble motion pictures or corporate demonstrations, known 
          as </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>trackmos</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">. The name is derived from 
          the fact that new data has to be loaded continuously from disk to keep 
          the demo running (a disk is subdivided into tracks, hence trackmo). 
          Since MIT, demo programmers have had a passion for weaving mathematical 
          image patterns into their creations.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">As the demos 
          appeared, this new cultural expression began spreading from the C64 
          to other computer platforms. First, it migrated to the Atari ST (1984) 
          with groups such as </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>TCB</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> (The Care Bears) and </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Omega</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, 
          and later (1986) to the Commodore Amiga, where (among others) </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Defjam</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, 
          </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Top Swap</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Northstar</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> and </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>TCC/Red 
          Sector</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, and later 
          </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Skid Row</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> and </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Paradox</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, became well-known. In 1988-89, 
          demos started to appear even for the IBM PC, from (among others) the 
          Swedish pioneers </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>TDT</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> (The Dream Team) and </font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Space Pigs</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">. (The Macintosh has, to 
          my knowledge, never nurtured any significant demo activity, but this 
          may change as the Mac has become more of a &quot;personal computer&quot;). 
          The transfer of games, intros, and demos was completely dependent on 
          a network of postal mail and a great number of individuals and BBS's 
          that called cross-nationally and cross-continentally to distribute the 
          programs. During the 80's, the demo groups couldn't afford to connect 
          to the Internet; only a few university hackers had that opportunity, 
          and most of the Commodore hackers were in secondary school. Most of 
          the university hackers were of the &quot;old-fashioned&quot; kind, and 
          completely ignored personal computers in favor of minicomputers (which 
          were the coolest things around in their opinion).</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Since computer 
          programs are often copied through several generations (copies distributed 
          and then copied and distributed.... etc.), they offer an exceptional 
          opportunity for the distribution of names and addresses to help expand 
          the trading market. Fairly quickly, the early hacking groups recruited 
          members whose only purpose was to copy and trade demos with others of 
          similar mind, primarily in order to spread their own group's creations. 
          These members were known as </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>swappers</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">, and a diligent swapper 
          could have around a hundred contacts. Since it wasn't very economical 
          to send dozens of letters a month, many (to the chagrin of the postal 
          service) started spraying liquid Band-Aid on the postage stamps so that 
          they would &quot;last longer&quot;.<br>
          </font> </p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Pure swappers 
          soon discovered that it was possible to trade merchandise other than 
          disks, and two new subcultures emerged: film-swappers and tape-swappers. 
          The former engaged in the exchange of videos of all types, although 
          primarily movies that were banned by some government, or that were exciting 
          for some other reason. The tape-swappers exchanged music cassettes.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Disk swaps 
          among hackers have been extremely important as a contact surface for 
          these subcultures. The word disk-swapper is never used in writing by 
          the hackers, since the word (in its pure form) simply indicates the 
          exchange of disks. Film-swappers in particular are connected to the 
          hacker culture, since the breakthrough of the VCR coincided with the 
          personal computer boom in the mid-80's. Frequently, a swapper trades 
          disks, cassettes, video tapes, or any other media that can be duplicated. 
          The difference between a swapper and a regular pen-pal is that the content 
          of the swap (the disk, cassette, or whatever) is more important than 
          anything else. If you don't feel like writing a letter, you just send 
          a disk labeled with your own name so that the recipient will know who 
          sent it. Disk swapping is, however, a phenomenon associated with the 
          European personal computer hackers of the 80's. For the IBM PC of the 
          90's, this procedure is relatively uncommon - the standard nowadays 
          is to get the programs you want from a BBS or even the Internet. Swapping 
          has given way to trading, that is, the exchange of information has gone 
          from disks to modems.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">In the beginning, 
          hacker groups consisted of just programmers and swappers, or individuals 
          that were a combination of the two. The most successful groups of this 
          kind have always been those who enjoyed geographic proximity, enabling 
          their members to exchange ideas and knowledge without expensive and 
          troublesome telephone connections. After some time, a need for more 
          specialized hackers arose, and categories like musicians, graphics experts, 
          the previously mentioned crackers, and coders emerged. The difference 
          between a cracker and a coder was that the former specialized in removing 
          copy protection (i.e. modifying existing programs), while the latter 
          was concerned with pure programming (or coding).</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">To destroy 
          copy protection routines is not illegal in itself (actually, you pretty 
          much have the right to do whatever you want to with a product that you 
          have purchased). On the other hand, widespread distribution of the &quot;cracked&quot; 
          program, which the swappers frequently engaged in, is highly illegal 
          (although I should point out that many of the swappers only traded demos, 
          and stayed away from distributing copyrighted software). However, we 
          again run into the similar act of copying music CD's, which is just 
          as illegal. No law enforcement agency in its right mind would ever get 
          the urge to strike against a hobby hacker who copied software for his 
          or her friends, as long as it wasn't not done in a commercial capacity. 
          The crackers and traders did not know this, which made the practice 
          more exciting and &quot;forbidden&quot; (remember that the average hacker 
          was in his or her teens, and that it is very important to rebel against 
          society at that age).</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">In the U.S., 
          there was another category of hackers called fixers. The fixers modified 
          the code generating the signals for European PAL television systems 
          to fit the American NTSC standard. (These hackers did not exist among 
          the PC hackers, because all PC's have their own video systems intended 
          for monitors rather than TVs). Some hackers also had suppliers, who 
          acquired the original programs that the crackers stripped of copy protection 
          routines. It was not unusual for these suppliers to work in software 
          retail stores or even at software companies.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">For social 
          reasons, so-called copy-parties were held, as early as 1984, at which 
          many hackers from different groups got together (in some city) to interact 
          and trade knowledge and experiences. Possibly, the hackers drew inspiration 
          from </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>The Whole 
          Earth Catalog's</i></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> 
          first hacker conference in that year. The event is reminiscent of role-playing 
          conventions in that it is a rather narrow group of interested parties 
          that gather, but it is different in that the mood is rather tumultuous 
          and unrestrained, more like a big party than a regular convention. The 
          term copy-party stems from the fact that a great deal of copying took 
          place at these parties, both legal and illegal. Nowadays, salience has 
          been reduced by calling the events demo-parties or simply parties. A 
          famous series of recurring copy- parties were held during the 80's in 
          the small Dutch town of Venlo. The Party (capital P) is probably Europe's 
          (or even the world's) largest and most frequented copy party. Since 
          1991, it is held annually during December 27-30 in Herning Messecenter, 
          Denmark, and attracted close to 2000 people in 1994.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Not even hackers 
          always get along: confrontations between groups or individuals often 
          escalated into &quot;gang wars&quot;, mostly involving psychological 
          warfare. The objective was to ostracize a person or group by refusing 
          to exchange disks, and encouraging friends to join in the boycott. In 
          this manner, an individual or a group could be &quot;excommunicated&quot; 
          from the community. To reach this goal, lengthy text files containing 
          pointed truths or pure lies were distributed, whereupon the accused 
          retaliated using the same technique. The wars basically never produced 
          any tangible outcomes, and copy-party melees were extremely rare. Conducting 
          psychological warfare against other hackers should be regarded as rather 
          harmless, even though the participants were often fervently committed 
          to the battle. It should be assumed that these schisms taught teenage 
          hackers a great deal about the true nature of war: it rages for a while, 
          then dissipates, only to flare up elsewhere. Some leave the Scene (or 
          die in a real war), but most remain, and some day another disagreement 
          occurs.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">I would like 
          to take the opportunity to mention that among the phreakers, these wars 
          ended much more quickly: you simply reported your enemy to the police. 
          This was the only way to practically interfere with a phreaker's life. 
          Among both the phreakers and hackers, however, friendship dominated 
          over strife. Through the occasional wars between hacker groups, yet 
          another aspect of human behavior was transferred to cyberspace. Abstractions 
          of war as an advanced chess game in the form of confrontations on the 
          Scene as well as in many different role-playing games, or tangibly as 
          in the movie War Games, have given many hackers a cynical view of human 
          nature.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Those who are 
          (and were) active on the Scene participate because they have a relationship 
          with the computer that is different from that of any previous generation. 
          Where one person only sees a box, a machine with a screen and keyboard, 
          the hobby hacker sees an entire world, filled with its own secrets and 
          social mores. It is these hidden secrets that spellbind and beckon the 
          hacker, and makes him or her forget everything else. The search for 
          more knowledge accelerates toward a critical mass, a sustained level 
          of intensive productivity. This is the state in which a hacker produces 
          a demo in two weeks or cracks one game per day. All social interaction 
          outside the realm of the computer and its users becomes insignificant.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Eventually, 
          most reach a limit at which they grow weary of the Scene and the eternal 
          quest for something newer, bigger, and better. They simply quit. One 
          hacker that I know well once told me: &quot;The only real way to quit 
          is dragging the computer to a swamp and dumping it&quot;. This serves 
          to illustrate the weariness following exaggerated participation on the 
          Scene. Others keep their hacking to moderate levels, and lead normal 
          lives apart from their hobby. These moderates tend to stay on the Scene 
          the longest (personally I've been on the Scene since 1986 and I remain 
          there today, albeit as a somewhat sporadically active member).</font></p>
        <p align="left">T<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">he Scene reveals 
          a great deal about the true nature of hacking culture; it is a roof 
          under which to gather. Hacking is about the exploration of computers, 
          computer systems, and networks, but also an inquiry into the workings 
          of society, and the creation of new and personal things through experimenting 
          with subcultures. That is why hackers break into systems to which they 
          are not authorized, spray fixative on postage stamps, and blatantly 
          disregard any form of copyright. They want to explore and see how things 
          work. Perhaps subconsciously, they want to prepare for the future. The 
          hacker culture emphasizes exploration, not cold-blooded theft, and hackers 
          are not egocentric criminals that only seek destruction</font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><sup><a href="#FTNT3">(3)</a></sup>. 
          </font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">&nbsp;The actual 
          motivation for real hackers is simply exploration, while someone who 
          hacks with theft or sabotage as a motive is a computer criminal and 
          not a hacker.&nbsp;J&#246;rgen Nissens has written a fascinating thesis 
          called Pojkarna Vid Datorn (The Boys at the Computer), which makes it 
          clear how special the hacker culture surrounding personal computing 
          really is. He has interviewed some of the hackers in the groups Fairlight 
          and TCB, and points out how strange it is to hear members speaking of 
          market shares of the Scene, and how the groups are run under something 
          similar to corporate principles, even though they lack a profit motive. 
          He also emphasizes that hackers behave more like bored consumers than 
          criminals or classical youth gangs; they are members of what Douglas 
          Coupland refers to as Generation X.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The personal 
          computer groups are typical of Generation X. They abhor politically 
          correct messages, they run everything like a business, and they are 
          sick of the enormous market. Instead of consuming, they started producing. 
          Instead of manipulating money to achieve status and enjoy the admiration 
          of others, they have created a market where they trade creativity for 
          admiration without any material layers in between. No CD's, promotion 
          tours, or marketing schemes are necessary. There is only a need for 
          pure information products in the form of demos and cracked games, which 
          are traded for pure information in the form of respect and admiration.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The only subcultural 
          hackers to receive any great media attention were those who crossed 
          the line to network hacking or phreaking and got busted. In 1989, parts 
          of the circle surrounding the demo group </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>Agile</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> were arrested after one 
          of their members, </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Erik 
          XIV</b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> (fictitious 
          name), went to the media and exposed how vulnerable credit card transactions 
          really were. At the same time, another of their members, </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Erlang</b></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"> (also a fictitious name), 
          ordered video editing equipment for a quarter of a million crowns (about 
          $35,000) to his own home address using fake credit card numbers. Driven 
          by their slightly elitist attitude from the demo culture, they wanted 
          to be alone in their mastery of credit card technology, and tested the 
          limits of what was possible using artificial codes.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">When the police 
          arrested Erlang after he had ordered the editing equipment, he started 
          telling them everything with an almost pathological obsession with detail. 
          Phreakers and hackers often do this; it seems as if they believe the 
          police will be impressed by their feats. The people involved in the 
          Agile case were all given suspended sentences, high fines, and probation. 
          All of them, save Erlang, now work in the computer industry (surprise?).</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Attitudes<br>
          </b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The first hackers 
          at MIT always made use of all the technological resources they could 
          lay their hands on. It wasn't always the case that the &quot;authorities&quot;, 
          the professors and custodians responsible for the equipment, approved 
          of this behavior. Most teachers thought that instruction in computer 
          science should be of the classical authoritarian kind, where the professor 
          stood at the lectern and lectured. If the students were to have access 
          to the computers it should be through explicit assignments to be turned 
          in for grading, not through the learning by doing that the hackers practiced. 
          They loved the computers, and couldn't for the life of them imagine 
          why they would be kept away from the machines. They sneaked in at night 
          and used the machines unbeknownst to the instructors.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">After several 
          personal confrontations with computer professors, and especially after 
          having worked as a computer instructor myself, I have realized that 
          this classical emphasis on utility is all too common among Swedish computer 
          teachers. It is simply not possible to get people to think that &quot;computers 
          are fun&quot; if you at the same time force them to adhere to rules 
          for what they are allowed and not allowed to do with the computer. Many 
          computer instructors throw a fit when they discover that the students 
          have installed their own programs on the computers, or have programmed 
          something that wasn't the subject of an assignment. Common reasons for 
          this behavior are a paranoid fear of viruses, the view that computer 
          games are just a waste of time, and so on. One teacher at my old gymnasium 
          (secondary school), which we will call X, installed a program on his 
          computers which triggered a screeching alarm as soon as someone tried 
          to change any of the machines' configurations (the machine configuration, 
          in this case, is a couple of files with information that allows the 
          computer to use different accessories). Of course, an exploring hacker 
          will feel like changing the configurations, and the school's own binary 
          geniuses naturally ignored the large posters all over the computer room 
          proclaiming that this activity was absolutely prohibited. Central to 
          this story is the fact that the teacher was a foreign language instructor, 
          who could not under any circumstances accept that &quot;his&quot; computers 
          would be used for anything else than language programs, word processing, 
          or other authorized activities. Some students that triggered the alarm 
          were banned from the linguistics computer lab, while the more skillful 
          students (who knew how to change the configuration without setting off 
          the alarm) were still permitted in the computer room, despite having 
          changed the configuration many times.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">These students, 
          who possessed some of the true hacker mentality that says that you shouldn't 
          accept a monopoly on knowledge or computing power, wrote an amusing 
          little program. Besides completely circumventing X's little security 
          system, the program also randomly displayed a requester, a small text 
          window which said: X IS A MORON. Below this text was an &quot;OK&quot;-button 
          that had to be pressed in order to proceed. The program was a classical 
          hack: it wasn't very useful, but it didn't do any real harm, and it 
          was funny. The first hackers at MIT would surely have appreciated this 
          prank (personally, I find it exquisite!). It was completely impossible 
          for the teacher in question to find and remove the program. In the end, 
          he had to format all the hard drives on the computers and reinstall 
          all the software from scratch. To face the music and ask the hacking 
          students to remove the program, or even apologize to them, never occurred 
          to him. Doing this would not only mean recognizing the students' right 
          to use the computers, it would also mean confessing the truth - that 
          some of the students were more adept in computer science than himself.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The fact is: 
          the parents of these students had paid taxes to enable their children 
          to use computers at school. The students, like hackers in general, were 
          therefore of the opinion that the natural thing would be to let them 
          use the computers to do whatever they wanted, and as much as they wanted 
          (outside regular class hours, of course). This obvious right has been 
          known since the time of the MIT hackers as the hands-on imperative.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Computer instructors 
          frequently do not understand hackers. They think that if the hackers 
          have to mess around with the computers all the time, why can't they 
          do something useful and authorized, such as figuring out a repayment 
          plan, or writing a summary of African history, or something along those 
          lines? The predominant attitude seems to be that the students should 
          only use the machines, not explore them, and definitely not hack them. 
          The machine should only be a tool, and the user should preferably know 
          as little as possible about the processes that take place behind the 
          screen. The hacker is the one who, in spite of these authoritarian attitudes, 
          actually wants to know.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Hackers don't 
          want to do &quot;useful&quot; things. They want to do fun things, like 
          exploring the computer's operating system, installing their own programs, 
          and trying out different technological features. This is what makes 
          it fun to use a computer. I have tried to mention this to several computer 
          instructors of my acquaintance, but alas, mostly with no results. I 
          personally believe that this kind of exploration is beneficial, and 
          wouldn't for the life of me want to prohibit students from engaging 
          in it. It is the foundation for the enthusiasm that makes some people 
          think that &quot;computers are so much fun&quot;. If a student, after 
          all, manages to screw up the computer, I consider it my responsibility 
          as a teacher to restore the machine to full functionality again. If 
          I can't do this, I'm incompetent. If I don't have time to do this, the 
          school is short-staffed. I have never had any significant problems with 
          my own students; in fact, I have invariably had positive experiences 
          with them. The fact is that I encourage my students to explore the operating 
          system even if it is not the subject matter of the course. If the computers 
          I'm responsible for are infected by viruses or crash, then it is my 
          problem rather than the students'.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">At MIT in 1960, 
          the possibilities that opened up when students were allowed to freely 
          access the equipment were quickly discovered. Professor Marvin Minsky 
          would walk into the computer room, put down some electronic device and 
          then let the students try to develop a control program for it on their 
          own. This was not instruction - it was high-level research, and it was 
          the students, the hackers, that conducted it. If it hadn't been for 
          this attitude towards learning, computers would never have become what 
          they are today. After MIT became the first computer school in the world 
          to allow the students unlimited access to the computers, this new pedagogy 
          spread to all universities that were engaged in computer research, including 
          the Swedish ones. No self-respecting university today bans their students 
          from the computer rooms. They often have their own keys or keycards, 
          and can come and go as they please. The Swedish primary and secondary 
          schools have a lot to learn from the universities in this respect.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The fact is 
          that the network hackers' mayhem in the university computers divide 
          the computer staff into two camps: those who fly off the handle when 
          they discover that someone has hacked their computer, and those who 
          find it interesting and exciting if someone hacks their computer. The 
          latter group, however, is not nearly as vocal as the first, which has 
          led to the popular view that all computer professors or information 
          officers hate hackers. This is far from the truth.&nbsp;The hacker is 
          engaged in exploration. Not just of single computers, but also of computer 
          systems, computer networks, the telephone network, or anything electronic. 
          They condemn and/or ignore the authority that wants to prevent them 
          from exploring. They are not motivated by theft. Period.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Mentality<br>
          </b></font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">What keeps hackers 
          going from a psychological perspective is a sensitive subject. MIT's 
          hackers could stay up and work a 30-hour shift, then crash for about 
          12 hours, only to get up and complete another 30-hour shift. Sometimes, 
          hackers neglect everything but the computer, including nutrition, hygiene, 
          and normal social interaction. We see this as unhealthy, although we 
          may accept it among persons working on corporate boards, committees, 
          or other professions with a high degree of responsibility. It should 
          be made clear that virtually every hacker goes through such a period 
          of intense concentration at some point in his/her career, and it would 
          be hasty to condemn such behavior in general.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">In some cases, 
          the computer is actually a means of escape from an intolerable existence. 
          A youth in the ages of 14 to 19 is subject to many harsh demands from 
          his or her environment. It is demanded that they should be able to handle 
          school, socialize with their friends, and (implicitly) connect with 
          the opposite sex.&nbsp;At the same time, one should not forget that 
          hacking is often conducted in a group environment, and it is based on 
          a friendship that goes far beyond the limited area of computing (For 
          the uninitiated: friendship is the phenomenon that makes someone get 
          the idea of lending a room to someone else for a few days, copy a computer 
          program, share knowledge, etc., without demanding payment).</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The computer 
          offers a convenient escape from the demands of growing up. In earlier 
          stages of history, many men (and some women) have distanced themselves 
          from difficult emotions by whole-heartedly dedicating themselves to 
          some science, and becoming so totally wrapped up in their research that 
          they &quot;forget&quot; their troublesome social &quot;duties&quot; 
          such as friends, marriage, and all that the entail. Computing, in our 
          time, is a largely unexplored territory. Everyone with access to a computer 
          is instantly drawn into a world in which much is strange and unknown, 
          but which at the same time possesses an underlying logic. A computer 
          begs to be explored. In this way, the computer can almost become a drug 
          that replaces a more &quot;natural&quot; urge to explore social behavior 
          patterns. The excursions into the computer do not become a substitute 
          for sexual relations; it becomes something that you occupy yourself 
          with so you don't have to think about sexual relations. This is why 
          so many so-called &quot;nerds&quot; spend most of their time with computers. 
          Society has given them a thankless role from the beginning, and instead 
          of playing along with it, they escape it.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Many hackers 
          are fully aware of this escape. At the same time, they see the hard 
          life, ruled by the laws of the jungle, lurking outside cyberspace, and 
          they finally make a conscious decision to either change everything or 
          stay where they are. Some old hackers have, through the years, developed 
          an incredible cynicism because of this. They condemn the real world 
          and are committed to creating a world in which they can rule for themselves, 
          inside the computers. They observe technological advances in virtual 
          reality and artificial intelligence with excitement, and tell themselves 
          that </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>one day</i></font> 
          <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">...</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">If they could 
          go into the computer forever, they would. They already hate the &quot;real&quot; 
          world in which they have to feel restrained by their physical or social 
          disabilities, and where their fate as losers has already been determined. 
          The human sexual identity consists of a social as well as physical side, 
          and if you lack one or the other, you're destined to be a loser. It 
          happens that hackers become aware of this, and instead say: &quot;We 
          don't want to be part of it&quot;, and then retreat to cyberspace. There 
          is nothing we can do about this, except possibly tone down our social 
          attitudes towards those who are different, if even that would help. 
          Maybe it is undesirable to have hackers adjust to a &quot;normal&quot; 
          life. Maybe we want them where they are, where they feed their brains 
          with so many practical problems that they don't have to think about 
          social dilemmas, so that we can keep track of them and keep them under 
          control. They are contained in a subculture where the weird is normal. 
          Their condition can, at worst, develop into mild or severe escapism, 
          i. e. escaping from reality. This condition is usually called computer 
          sickness.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">In addition, 
          we can observe that illegal hackers possess a somewhat different pattern 
          of behavior compared to the subcultural hackers, depending on which 
          way they have entered the culture. Some phreakers come from an environment 
          consisting of party lines, amateur societies, etc. They are driven by 
          a desire to communicate, rather than exploration through the formation 
          of groups and internal competition. They are often considerably more 
          arrogant and practice phreaking simply because they are bored, and have 
          nothing better to do (it's the same motivational factor as for people 
          who dial various party lines on 900-numbers). They don't take hacking 
          to be a deadly serious business, and often make fun of hackers, since 
          deep down they think the hackers are complete geeks.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Hackers, who 
          would rather spend time with computers than with telephones, generally 
          identify with their group and possess more group loyalty. A pure phreaker, 
          of the kind I just discussed, would have no problem at all turning his/her 
          friends in to the police if he/she got busted, while a real hacker would 
          never turn in even his/her enemies.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Network hackers, 
          as well as phreakers, virus hackers, and some crackers, suffer from 
          a hopelessly negative self-image. They see themselves as mean, cruel, 
          and dominant badasses. They have assumed a role in which they identify 
          themselves with a desire for destruction, hate of society, anarchism 
          and general mischief, mainly to feel a sense of belonging. For most, 
          this is only a temporary stage. If they have assumed yippie ideals, 
          however, it is not temporary.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">The most dangerous 
          hackers (from the perspective of society at large) are invariably bitter. 
          They consider themselves misunderstood and misjudged by the educational 
          system. They think that the schools have been unsuccessful in harnessing 
          their intelligence and talent, and consider themselves to have a right 
          to exact revenge on a society that shut them out of a world of knowledge, 
          simply because they didn't act the right way, and lacked the proper 
          social code. They have been forced into vocational schools by a grading 
          system that has been unable to distinguish them among those who are 
          truly suited towards higher education.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">What makes 
          matters worse is that they are <i>right</i>. With the hate of a society 
          that couldn't or wouldn't appreciate their qualities, they return with 
          computers and electronic equipment to saw through the pillars of the 
          same society's entire socioeconomic system, often with a nearly psychopathic 
          lust for destruction.</font></p>
      </div>
      <blockquote> 
        <div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><b>Carceres 
          Ex Novum</b><br>
          </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><i>&quot;There was 
          an alternative to normal life. I was sick of the normal, sick of always 
          being last. I found friends that I never had to meet face-to-face, and 
          so my teenage years passed, and I became an interesting person. </i></font><i><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">When 
          I started at university the gigantic Internet came to my room, and the 
          world &nbsp;was beamed to me. I had millions of people close by, without 
          ever having to look them in the face. I sat there all the time, only 
          pausing to eat and go to class. I didn't &nbsp;meet anyone, no one knew 
          me. And I was comfortable. Thanks to the attention of the anonymous 
          people on the other side of the screen, I did not feel lonely. But time 
          ran out, and the real world crept closer. Of course, I knew I could 
          run away forever, but I would never be able to hide from them, the ones 
          whose values transformed me into a lonely, asocial rat, who spent all 
          of his time with the computer. And I hated them.&quot;</font></i></div>
      </blockquote>
      <div align="center"> 
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Certainly some 
          of the activities engaged in by hackers are illegal, and certainly this 
          is wrong from the viewpoint of society. Nevertheless, it would be to 
          severely underestimate hackers to say that they commit these acts in 
          a routine fashion, for &quot;lack of something better to do&quot;, or 
          for their own profit. There has been too much judgment and too little 
          understanding in the hacker debate.</font></p>
        <p align="left"><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">But now for 
          something completely different.</font></p>
      </div>
      <hr align="left">
      <div align="left"><font color="#999999" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif"><a name="FTNT1"></a> 
        1. </font> <font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" color="#999999"> 
        I am here deeply indebted to Christer Ericson, who shared his knowledge 
        of the Apple II movement in Sweden; this information had hitherto not 
        been written down, and therefore difficult to retrieve.<br>
        <br>
        <a name="FTNT2"></a> 2. Currently, even CD-ROMs are copied to a great 
        extent. Especially MP3 (or MPEG Layer 3), a system for sound compression, 
        has become popular as it provides a means for the mass distribution of 
        music CDs (which I personally believed to be pure fantasy until about 
        a year ago). This compact music format compresses a sound CD at a ratio 
        of 1:12, and a normal pop song is transformed into a 3-4 Mb file, which 
        can easily be transferred across the Internet. In five years, I'm sure 
        videos will be distributed across the Net!<br>
        <br>
        <a name="FTNT3"></a> 3. I'm sure you notice that I'm getting personal 
        now.</font><font face="Times New Roman" color="#999999"></font></div>
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