The Hacker Manifesto (1986)

The Conscience of a Hacker, also called the Hacker Manifesto, was published in 1986. Loyd Blankenship aka The Mentor wrote it after his arrest and it got picked up by Phrack, and achieved fame since then. (Text republished here courtesy of Phrack.)

Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”...
Damn kids. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms. Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head...”
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I’m a smart ass...
Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found.

“This is it... this is where I belong...”
I know everyone here... even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike...

You bet your ass we’re all alike... we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all... after all, we’re all alike.

The Corporation : le premier film diffusé librement sur le p2p

The Corporation - Partie 1

The Corporation - Partie 2

The Corporation - Partie 3

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Atlas Internet Search infrastructure

This is a brief overview of a large vision: enabling search to become
a part of the Internet's infrastructure. Building on Atlas as an
open protocol, search can become a fully distributed and
interoperable world-wide community. All of the participants can
interact openly and in any role where they believe they can add value
to the network.

A search engine can be constructed from many independent entities
serving different roles instead of one monolithic system. These
entities are exchanging aggregate information, or knowledge, and can
decide with whom they want to work with. To design this working
economy based on knowledge, there must be balance between these
various entities. Each actor must have incentive to act both for
their own benefit and for the benefit of the whole, and enough
information to make and validate those decisions. Reputations and
relationships are the essential fabric of Atlas, just as they are in
a real-world free market.

There are three primary roles within Atlas:

Factory - Responsible to the content.
Collector - Responsible to the keyword.
Broker - Responsible to the searcher.

Each of these actors must interact with the others to complete any
search request. Any two roles could be performed by a single entity
(whereas if all three are performed by one entity, the result would
be a traditional, monolithic search engine).

A Factory is akin to a crawler in today's search engines. An Atlas
Factory must fetch and process the content as intelligently as
possible, performing analysis (such as Natural Language Processing)
and normalizing it into distinct units. A Factory shares its highly
refined and processed output with one or more Collectors based on who
they believe is best utilizing it.

A Collector absorbs and indexes output from one or more Factories,
with one primary goal: ranking. An Atlas Collector must provide the
most intelligent ranking and relationship analysis possible. A
Collector has to compete for the output of a Factory, as well as
compete to provide the best ranking quality for Brokers.

A Broker must provide a searcher with the best possible results. It
does so by combining diverse ranking results from Collectors and also
by retrieving content from the original Factories. This last step, a
Broker interacting with a Factory, is critical to maintaining a
balanced ecosystem. All Factories must be aware of and approve how
their results are being used and by whom.

Reputation and reward is bi-directional between all parties (Factory-
Collector, Collector-Broker, and Broker-Factory). Each entity may
choose to interact on principle (free, Commons), attribution (results
provided by), or commercially (as a paid service), the Atlas protocol
is purely a facilitator and does not restrict how the relationships
between any entities are formed. In considering these motives for
the various entities, it's likely that the free-based networks will
tend to become more specialized, commercial ones will compete on
quality, and attribution based networks will mature in both directions.

This simple yet powerful division of roles, responsibilities, and
relationships will result in a distributed economic foundation for an
Internet Search Infrastructure. The wire protocol and further
definition of the interactions between these entities is openly
evolving, anyone interested is welcomed to join the discussions and
see the initial proposals at http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/
atlas-l over the coming weeks.

Thanks, looking forward to a radically different search ecosystem in
the coming years :)

Jer