# Lifestyles & Discussion > Family, Parenting & Education > Books & Literature >  Liberty hackers

## RCA

In the past, someone on this forum mentioned that the reason the internet is free and hard to control is due to many of the liberty-minded hackers of the 70's and 80's. Does anyone know of a book that delves into this subject in any detail?

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## LATruth

> In the past, someone on this forum mentioned that the reason the internet is free and hard to control is due to many of the liberty-minded hackers of the 70's and 80's. Does anyone know of a book that delves into this subject in any detail?


Unfortunately our "liberty hackers" are now facing military tech that we don't have access to. It would be like trying to hack into IBM BlueGene/L with an Amiga or AppleII. I fear they can clamp down on us and our internets at any point in time they see fit, and there is nothing we can do about it.

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## t0rnado

Tim Berners Lee created the internet in the 90s and the internet isn't hard to control. Censoring the $#@! out of the internet wouldn't be hard for anything country. Even technologically deficient countries like Pakistan censor websites.

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## heavenlyboy34

> Tim Berners Lee created the internet in the 90s and the internet isn't hard to control. Censoring the $#@! out of the internet wouldn't be hard for anything country. Even technologically deficient countries like Pakistan censor websites.


and it will all be done "for national security purposes" or some other jingoistic reason.

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## Icymudpuppy

They cannot shut down the internet anywhere there are enough people with wireless connections.  Every wireless computer can act as a router and a small scale server.  Connections will slow down, but will not go away, and they cannot even hope to monitor all the traffic.

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## LATruth

> They cannot shut down the internet anywhere there are enough people with wireless connections.  Every wireless computer can act as a router and a small scale server.  Connections will slow down, but will not go away, and they cannot even hope to monitor all the traffic.


But those wireless connections go though ISP commercial hubs that route traffic, and yes it can be shut down, filtered, and monitored. ALL internet traffic, and it's coming.

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## torchbearer

How did that english asperger guy hack into those military computers?

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## tangent4ronpaul

> But those wireless connections go though ISP commercial hubs that route traffic, and yes it can be shut down, filtered, and monitored. ALL internet traffic, and it's coming.


Yes, the Internet was designed to route around a nuclear war, but when the big ISP's bought up every mom and pop ISP they could and some central nodes came into existence that went out the window.

As to the Asperger guy - you'd be surprised at how many school district computer systems have passwords like "pencil", I'm sure the military has similar problems and unauthorized modems connected to systems for convenience.  Once he has a .mil address it becomes a lot easier.

At a higher level of skill, the NFS protocol has some design flaws that can't can't be fixed, sniffers are generally not robustly coded and sending certain things in certain fields of a packet can cause them to "forget" about you.  If proprietary, there is no way to patch them either.  They also lack introspection, so if you pick the RIGHT computer to attack...

Then there are "zero day" vulnerabilities.  If you find one and don't tell ANYBODY about it, it will never get patched.  If you get a hold of one before anyone has had a chance to patch their systems, you can get in and set things up so you can get in again.  Stuff like that.

I know one individual that did a penetration analysis of a sub-set of Pentagon systems some years ago.  I believe the exact words he used to describe the level of difficulty to penetrate the network was: "a cake walk".  Presumably things have improved since then.

-t

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## tangent4ronpaul

> In the past, someone on this forum mentioned that the reason the internet is free and hard to control is due to many of the liberty-minded hackers of the 70's and 80's. Does anyone know of a book that delves into this subject in any detail?


Which definition of "hacker" are you referring to?

You would seem to be referring to the ones that wrote the code that makes communications better.  From talk, mail, IRC, gopher, FTP, html, P2P, PGP, TOR, etc. 

There was a really good book on the development of the internet and the programs development that made it up, but I'm not finding it and have spaced on the title.

Look up Richard Stallman, GNU and the Free Software Foundation.

also:
http://catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html
http://www.levenez.com/unix/
http://www.ietf.org/download/rfc-index.txt 

RFC's are kinda fun to read - if your a nerd... historically, you can pick up the development of the Internet as protocols emerged and changed.  There is one early one that's kind of funny, maybe RFC 0018, or 0107 or in that neighborhood.  It seems that when the net was like 30 nodes, each node would send out transmission time to reach other nodes - basically a traffic report so packets could be sent via the fastest path.  Then one day one of the systems hickuped and send a negative transmission time, resulting in every other system in the net routing their traffic through that node and the first ever "Denial of Service" attack, though it wasn't really an attack, just a glitch.  This was way before my time, but funny.

Keep in mind the web as you know it, didn't exist until '93 or '94.  Before that everything was text.

You would probably be interested in the archives of the cypherpunk mailing list.

For the black/white hat world, try looking up TAP, Phrack, 2600, CDC (Cult of the Dead Cow), LoD, 8LGM (8 Legged Grooving Machine), CCC (Chaos Computing Club) and similar.

Also, this paper is very good for historical perspective:
http://cyber.eserver.org/hackers.txt

-t

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## tangent4ronpaul

> Tim Berners Lee created the internet in the 90s and the internet isn't hard to control. Censoring the $#@! out of the internet wouldn't be hard for anything country. Even technologically deficient countries like Pakistan censor websites.


He's considered the Father of the World Wide Web.  The World Wide Web is **NOT** the Internet.  It's been around since 1970, though it wasn't called that back then.

-t

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## iddo

> In the past, someone on this forum mentioned that the reason the internet is free and hard to control is due to many of the liberty-minded hackers of the 70's and 80's. Does anyone know of a book that delves into this subject in any detail?


Here are a few relevant books/movies that are available online (if someone knows some more then please let us know):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS
http://www.faifzilla.org/

Here's an excerpt from a talk by Richard Stallman that I transcribed on wikiquote:



> ...lots of businesses use computers, only a tiny fraction of them are in the business of developing software. So the result is, in general, free software is very good for businesses, because businesses appreciate the four freedoms, just as individuals do in their leisure time ... support for a proprietary program is typically a monopoly. Only the developer has the source code, so only the developer can make a change, and if a user wants a change, the user has to beg the developer, or even pray to the developer: "Oh, mighty developer, please make this change for me". Sometimes the developer says: "Pay us and we'll listen to your problem". If the user pays, the developer says: "Thank you very much. In six months there will be an upgrade, buy the upgrade and you will see if we have fixed your problem, and you will see what new problems we have in store for you". But with free software anyone that has a copy, can read the source codes, master it and begin offering support, so it's a free market and pretty easy to enter. As a result, all those companies and organizations and agencies that say they really need good support, and say that they think that free market generally provides better things to the buyer, rationally speaking, they should insist on using free software so they can get their support through the free market instead of from a monopoly. Isn't it ironic that the proprietary software developers call us communists? We are the ones who have provided for a free market, where they allow only monopoly. More than that, we are the ones that respect private property, and they don't. Companies like Microsoft and Apple, and so many others, they don't respect your private property, in fact they say that your "copy" is their property. They say everything is their property, their idea of private property is: everything belongs to them, like the tzars. So, by contrast, your copy of a free program is your property, and you are free to use it in all the ethical ways. But it goes beyond that, because in the free software community we have a decentralized society in which everybody can basically decide what he wants to do, and do it. Whereas with proprietary software it's a command-based system, the executives decide: we want this feature, we do not want that feature, the programmers put it in, and all the users are stuck with it just the same. So, which one is a Soviet-style system? And this leads to another paradox. Usually when there is a choice of products to do a job, we say there is no monopoly. But, when there is a choice between proprietary software products, yes, there is monopoly. Because if the users chooses this proprietary software package, he then falls into this monopoly for support, but if he chooses this proprietary product, he falls into this monopoly for support, so it's a choice between monopolies. And the only way to escape from monopoly is to escape from proprietary software, and that is what the free software movement is all about. We want you to escape and our work is to help you escape. We hope you will escape to the free world. The free world is the new continent in cyberspace that we have built so we can live here in freedom. It's impossible to live in freedom in the old world of cyberspace, where every program has its feudal lord that bullies and mistreats the users. So, to live in freedom we have to build a new continent. Because this is a virtual continent, it has room for everyone, and there are no immigration restrictions. And because there were never indigenous peoples in cyberspace, there is also no issue of taking away their land. So everyone is welcome in the free world, come to the free world, live with us in freedom. The free software movement aims for the liberation of cyberspace and everyone in it.

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## tangent4ronpaul

Yeah - UNIX started out as open source and did a split.  BSD was the academic version and remained open source, AT&T went on the SysV route, making it a commercial and proprietary product.  Up through version 6, source code was available in a book called Lions that was half code and have explanation / commentary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%2...th_Source_Code

With version 7, source code was no longer available and Lions became widely xeroxed and shared.  This resulted in a OS called Minix being written based on it, and that later turned into Linux.  Both open source.

As Stallman noted above, having source code is a BIG DEAL!  Business systems went with SysV, and academic systems went with BSD because of this.  Somewhere along the the way Sun Microsystems which was the hottest selling workstation and OS (SunOS), which was BSD based, but oddly proprietary, though very solid, switched course and came out with Solaris which is SysV based.  It was a disaster, and Sun lost massive market share which it never recovered.  The OS is better now, but many left Sun and never came back to it.

Business largely went with SysV because they could buy support contracts for it, but all the college grads coming to work for these companies grew up on BSD, because of the source code availability.  It made for interesting times.  Now support is available for "free" OS's, that have source, but SysV based systems have generally taken over.  Linux is gaining a lot of market share, as it offers the best of both worlds.

Someone recently wrote and published a LINUX version of Lions and AT&T finally agreed to let the version 6 version of Lions get republished, also.

btw: UNIX's ancestor was Multics which is a really cool OS, had an account on one once.  There is a project to write an open source Multics OS that will run on modern hardware, but it's unfortunately not doing well.

-t

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## muzzled dogg

> Unfortunately our "liberty hackers" are now facing military tech that we don't have access to. It would be like trying to hack into IBM BlueGene/L with an Amiga or AppleII. I fear they can clamp down on us and our internets at any point in time they see fit, and there is nothing we can do about it.


yeah but aren't they the ones that programmed all that military tech?

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## LATruth

> yeah but aren't they the ones that programmed all that military tech?


Maybe, unfortunately most, if not all, "sniffing" etc is now automated. I also firmly believe that the most complex sections of code and military programs are worked on in "cells" so no one has a complete grasp on the sheer size and intrusiveness of the apparatus watching your every move online.

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## tron paul

> In the past, someone on this forum mentioned that the reason the internet is free and hard to control is due to many of the liberty-minded hackers of the 70's and 80's. Does anyone know of a book that delves into this subject in any detail?


Not a book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_...mer_subculture)

Steve Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is the canonical treatise on the subject.  It's very good read.

The key primary source is The Hacker Manifesto as published in Phrack.  It's short enough to quote in full




> File: archives/7/p7_0x03_Hacker's Manifesto_by_The Mentor.txt
>                                ==Phrack Inc.==
> 
>                     Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3 of 10
> 
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
> The following was written shortly after my arrest...
> 
>                        \/\The Conscience of a Hacker/\/
> ...

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## jake

I don't think the public will stand for internet Censorship.. I sure as hell hope not. I would protest till death! the internet is my livelihood and a huge part of my entertainment and information source as well.

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