In the Zeus room, we'll be hacking an NGO, and at 11pm, we'll be a discussion session from Hacking the Mind.
Also, Agent Steele's books are on sale in the DVD area till tomorrow at midnight, which I guess he's doing a discussion starting at midnight tomorrow that goes till Christmas, typically.
The gentleman up here is not from an Alan Moore movie, or comic book.
His name is Jason Scott, and he will be discussing one last time the Hack Freak History Primer.
Is my voice... well, I mean, my voice travels all on its own.
Am I actually coming through the speakers?
Okay, I'm sorry, the hat is covering my head.
Sorry about that.
Anyway, so, before I start, because sometimes people get confused by odd items and glittery items, do you know who this is?
Just so you understand, this is in fact the death vegetable of the Cult of the Dead Cow, who has come by from overseas just for this event.
So , very appreciated to have members of the CDC here.
So he's my good luck charm, he's kind of like my pine freshener.
Kind of.
Okay.
Right, so let's get to the important, or semi-important thing, which is who the hell am I?
My name is Jason Scott.
I am, at this point in life, a digital historian, a computer historian.
I used to think I was a hacker, I'm not quite a hacker, but I was somebody who, when I was very young, used to like to collect everything.
A real pack rat when it came to just computers and magazines and everything else.
And at some point, I discovered that I was basically archiving my own life and the things that interested me.
When I got to be around the age of 28, I felt nostalgic for the times that I had spent when I was young, and so I went on to the intranet, and this is 1998, to say, well, what did they say about my childhood, about bulletin boards and all these phone-freaking things,
and I found there wasn't very much.
Not as much as I would have liked, and not the kind of things I remembered.
So I went back and got my old floppies and started putting them online, and before I knew it, I had something called textfiles.com.
Now, textfiles.com is an archive of just all sorts of crazy information involving computer bulletin board systems.
When I got to be around 30, I discovered that nobody was going to really interview these old people or people who had been involved in computer bulletin boards through my youth, so I started to work on that, and that became something known as the BBS documentary.
And the BBS documentary took me four years, I'm now working on a documentary about text adventures, and I found that what I really enjoy in life is talking about history, talking about things that used to be.
Now, obviously at an event like this, which is kind of a very interesting sandwich of both the old and the new, there's a propensity to both want to refer to old things and new things, but I think we all have very different ideas of what represents old and new.
So one of the reasons that I asked to do a talk at this event was just simply because it occurred to me that those of you who are 18 were born in 1990, a time when a lot of other things that are sometimes referred to in these events had happened long before you were born.
And while there's information out there, some of it is not really directed towards guiding you.
So this primer is basically me just kind of quickly covering a few hacking and freaking events of the past, and some of my thoughts on what this represents, and mostly, if anything else comes of use of this, is that I want to give you some tools to really interpret history and really interpret what was going on,
so that as things happen now and you watch as it happens around you, you'll go, oh, well, this is just happening again, and I should do something about it so that my part of the story gets into it.
So let's start off with Preparation H.
Preparation H is mostly used to remove swelling from tissues.
Now, normally it's meant to be used rectally, but it turns out it works against any kind of tissues.
So even though it smells bad and it has not the greatest feeling, you can actually rub it on yourself, your chest area, and it will remove some of your water weight temporarily, giving you a slightly more ripped look.
Enough to fool somebody, enough for you to convince them you worked out enough, and by the time they figure out that it was you that was smelling bad and not the club, and that you're not really ripped when you wake up the next day, you got them.
This is a very compelling idea if your goal is to get laid at the club.
The idea that using Preparation H against yourself results in getting laid is just this beautiful formula.
The very fundamental great idea.
So simple.
It's been around for a many number of years in the bodybuilding industry, because in bodybuilding, as you, I hope, have figured out, a lot of bodybuilding when it's presented is the result of people artificially getting themselves ready for the show.
So there are chemicals that you can buy that remove body weight that don't go into your ass, and they have them, but what do you do if you can't get that chemical today, or you're in a weird place, and you go grab some Preparation H and rub it on, and just do the best you absolutely can.
Somewhere in 2007, this idea fell into the Long Island club scene.
Now, what's interesting is that the idea had been around since at least 1996.
I found citations of it in 1996.
So for nine years, this thing was dormant enough, but suddenly it's taken over, and then, in March of 2008, it started to show up in the press, that kids in Long Island were putting Preparation H on themselves to look ripped to get laid at the clubs.
Now, the reason I bring up this story, besides that it's weird, is that it's an example of how information on its own can be so compelling just on its own face.
This, to me, is the very fundamental core of a lot of what people call hacking, is that you are presented with ideas, and the idea sometimes seems so simple looking back, but as soon as someone says it, I'm going to attach the crime database to Google Maps,
and I will know where all the crimes are immediately, and see where the bad parts of town are.
And somebody goes, that's... got it!
You know, the passage is complete.
They're done.
And a lot of hacking is ideas that are spread from one person to another in this way, except that they don't get you laid.
But the...
So that flow of history, that flow of information, is something that I have found over and over again.
So what I'm going to do now is, I'm going to quickly just touch on some events.
This is going to be a very quick touch on events.
I do want to make clear now, before people wander away in case they hate me or they're hungry, that tomorrow at 3pm, there is a talk on the history of phone phreaking.
1960 to 1980.
And this will be wonderful.
He's in the audience, I'm sure he's nervous, but my god, I've seen this man's work and it's beautiful.
You think you know phone phreak history, you don't.
And he's been working on getting a history together, and I've been really impressed.
I've been working with him for a while.
Wonderful work.
Nothing makes me happier than to see a historian working on something.
And I have to make that clear.
One of the things that can happen is that you have a version of a story and it becomes yours, or a theory about how things happened and it becomes yours.
And I don't really believe in that.
I think that I come up with some ideas, and I'll tell you some here, and this is my lineage.
We as a people, and by people I mean human race, like to tell stories.
We like legends, we like myths.
Myths are very cool, and when you tell a person a myth that sounds compelling enough, they will live by that myth, even if they start to ironically and sarcastically refer to it later.
There's still that core of believing in it.
For example, just off the top of my head, there's a great myth that rises up in the 1980s, which is that if you hack enough and commit enough crimes, you will eventually get a well-paying job.
And it's a very compelling idea.
It says that if you continue to commit crimes, you'll actually come out the other end into a lawfulness that will actually earn you money.
And it rises up in messages and statements, things like, I broke into it, and they were so impressed, they gave me a job, I've been hired to break into this.
And a lot of that core of the security industry, which we now see, is still kind of beholden to that, with this strange hacker security person situation.
I'm going to go back, I'll get back to that in a moment.
Let me just quickly mention the 1851 World Exposition, which I consider to be the world's first and real biggest hacker con.
This was an event that was held in England, possibly in response to a French exposition that had been smaller, but of course Queen Victoria wanted the best.
So they built a place called the Crystal Palace, and they invited engineers and products from all over the world to come in for a multi-multi-week exposition, which would impress the pants off the world at how far England had come as a center of commerce,
technology, and knowledge.
So what you had there was you had this building that was built, engineered a certain way, it was built in a very short period of time, it had trees inside of it, they had tens of thousands of exhibits, they had so many exhibits you could not hope to see them all.
You could not hope to see them all for the area of the exposition.
And so you had this situation where there were a massive amount of engineers, fabricators, and other types of mechanical folks, all assembling in a strange country where they would drink at night, hang out, share information, put stuff together, and then go back with some pretty good ideas.
Similarly, there's another event called the Last Telegram of Samuel Morse.
Samuel Morse is the inventor of the telegraph.
Upon his retirement in the late 1800s, he was part of a very complicated ceremony that took place that was to basically indicate that he was retiring from being a part of the business life and he was going to go away.
So they went crazy.
They rented a massive hall, they had a parade for him, they brought in so many people to the location.
And then as the extra bit, now you have to understand about telegraphs, a lot of people sometimes think of telegraphs as telegraph wires telegraph.
And in fact, even by the period of Samuel Morse's retirement, they had repeaters, they had abilities to send things along so that you would have a message shop here and then go along further and it would stop there.
So basically, you could send out a message and it would relay out.
So he was too ill to attend the parade during the day, but during the actual ceremony held in this massive ballroom where there were these thousands of engineers who had made their living.
Now keep in mind in the beginning that when you started out doing, when you were a telegraph operator, it was a very esteemed job.
An esteemed job like we sort of hold airline pilots now.
You had to have this skill set, this code knowledge, this ability to transfer things.
It was a really high esteemed job and slowly machines made that until it was kind of a menial kind of watching things position.
You really weren't all that skilled.
You just watched stuff come in, shove it into the other machine, keep going.
Yet there was still at this point in time a major amount of pride about being a part of the brotherhood, part of the telegraph operators.
So when he sat on stage, aged, tired, hadn't been able to make the rest of the day, messages flowed in from all around the world thanking Morse for his creation, thanking him for his work.
And then he finally was wheeled up to the final telegraph waiting for him and he keyed out and thanked everyone and said goodbye.
And there was a huge uproarious cheer.
I think that was another great hacker con.
Because these engineers, some of them flew from everywhere.
Flew, what am I saying?
Flew.
They came in from all over and were able to hang out, share ideas, drink, build friendships.
Some of them knew each other over online and they were able to do things together.
So this thing that we do here, this bit here, has a very long and varied history.
And has a very big deal.
It does not start with a summer con.
It does not start with a ho-ho con.
It is over a hundred years old as far as I'm concerned.
Skipping forward, there is something called DICUS.
And that is a lot of time to skip.
But let's go with it.
The Digital Equipment Corporation User Society.
Which was created basically to support DEC digital computers.
Things like the VAX, the PDP.
And this was a group that had its own heavy organization.
So it had house organs.
It had people who would come up with new ideas and spread them.
And they would help each other in tech support and everything.
In other words, there was a recognition even back then.
And this is the middle of last century.
That a machine is just a machine.
A person who operates a machine is what it's all about.
And so knowing that instead of just having a bunch of manuals stacked up against a machine.
You really needed a support network.
Friends.
People to talk to.
People to commiserate with.
That fundamental spirit is built into computers.
And it has always been.
So DECUS is also very interesting.
Because one of the things about computers.
And one of the things about technology in general.
Is it doesn't take you that long to figure out that you're really capable of fucking something up royally.
And by that I mean, wow, I'm a laser operator.
I could aim this at something and really cause damage.
This computer that I have.
Well, it turns out if I wire it this way.
It actually does something really freaky and weird.
And that's kind of neat.
But I would never do that to something here.
That fundamental feeling is kind of a theme.
In other words, I'm telling you there's themes that go on.
And this is what you need to recognize.
So when we deal with stuff now.
When people talk about a new piece of technology.
Sometimes there will be almost an abject surprise.
That there's another way to use it.
That it turned out somebody took it and did something with it.
That they weren't supposed to.
And this made other people angry.
And wow, what an interesting new situation we have.
The world is a strange and funny place.
And the fact is, this has existed for a very, very long time.
Well, Decas, besides being computer operators.
Was in its own way a computer network.
This meant that the people who knew each other.
Could actually spread software as they wished.
And so a lot of early software of the 1970s.
When software stops easily being the tool of academics.
And producing output for corporations.
And really honestly starts to spread.
Because many, many predecessors.
In the 50s, in the 40s.
Of people doing computing like work to do entertainment.
But when you look back at the money.
And you realize that these people were essentially taking a moon lander.
Out to do rice boy drifting out in the parking lot.
You realize how much they were playing with.
Whether playing with a million dollar computer.
That is doing this pong game.
Well, that doesn't really spread.
It's neat that they did it.
But when you start to see in the 70s and the 80s.
And technology spreads out.
Well, Deacus was one of the core groups.
That was able to spread new ideas.
New games.
New programs.
And as things like the internet come along later.
They existed before that.
So, when I'm talking about history for people who are younger.
Now, just because I don't want to.
I have to know, right?
Okay.
20 or younger, raise your hand.
All right.
I graduated from college when you were born.
Awesome.
And that's something that's very hard for people sometimes to grip, right?
One of the things about us as people.
Is that, like I said.
We want to find the story.
We want to find out this caused this.
There's a story that exists here.
It's a story that has names like.
Tap.
Yipple.
Pulson.
Optic.
E911.
It's got crunch.
It's got the CDC.
LOD.
MOD.
These are all names.
Talismans.
Facts.
That are relatively easy to find.
In other words, if you do searches for them.
You'll get some of the story.
And it will be portrayed in a certain way.
And stuff.
And so on.
These are all talismans.
And people will remember these basic talismans.
But , you know.
While there are accomplishments and things.
And I don't wish to denigrate them.
I do want to make it clear that these are.
The ones that received.
Or caused the most.
Writing about them.
While there's this interesting balance I see about people talking about.
Okay.
My least favorite phrase is the mainstream press.
It's my least favorite word.
It's a strange phrase that people use.
They hate it.
It's something that hurt them.
It's something that lurks in the night.
And tells your story wrong.
And then leaves you hurt.
And it's a strange meaning.
In a world where I could go out.
And well actually to that point.
There's currently six cameras aimed at me.
Right?
I mean there's so much ability to produce media.
And there's so many ways to spread it.
Maybe not all of them are as big as others.
But this idea of being able to assemble things and present them is not in the hands of the elite anymore.
And hasn't been for some time.
What ends up happening is that people end up using whatever is left.
The artifacts to derive the history of that which came before them.
I was born a while ago.
And the times that I know best are the 1980s and the 1990s.
This was the time that was my peak.
When I was doing computer stuff and people I met and stuff.
And there's a real need on my part to know a little bit about what's gone before.
But I will never really truly know what it was like to live in those times.
I can be given some intent of it.
But living in that time is very, very difficult to do if you're not born then.
And I mean that to sound as dumb as it does.
I've always said the hardest part of history is to be there when it happens.
Because it's true.
We can look at the things that were and the things that were left.
And what happens is that whatever ended up being in our lore...
And by our lore I mean our hacker lore.
And by our hacker lore I have to say hacker.
And in doing so I end up in the quicksand of what's a hacker.
Now, I only have an hour so I'm not going to do that to you.
But I will say that an easier way to get around a problem when you try to understand it is to go look for an equivalent problem.
There is a very equivalent problem with bikers.
Bikers have the same problem that hackers do.
That is to say two utterly disparate groups wish to claim the term because it's cool.
So you have the guys who don't shower for nine days because they are driving straight on through for a beer bash.
And then you have the guys who roll out their brand new bike and go tooling around the neighborhood for the weekend and come back.
And those two will never meet.
And they even have the exploitation, right?
I mean, it's not that very hard to see lots of shows of people fabricating bikes and driving them around near celebrities while they have scripted battles with each other.
Well, I can tell you, I don't think bikers are so happy about all of that, about that use.
And so you say, well, what are they dealing with?
And the problem is hackers have the same problem, right?
Because there are people for whom hacking and hackering is their job.
And you have people for whom hacking is their passion.
And you have people for whom their hacking is their passion and their job.
And they're not compatible, looking back.
And they're not compatible when you try to figure things out.
And this is really, my observation of it is really something, there's a man named Don Parker.
I'll use a name to remember.
Don Parker.
Don Parker was probably one of the first guys to really go, there is computer crime.
People can cause crime using computers.
We should do something about this because there's a lot of crime and it's a machine.
So the fact that people can commit crime through machines is really dangerous and something should be done.
And he's this lone piping note in the wilderness in the late 1970s and proceeds to speak up through.
And most people should know about him because he was one of the first sounding echoing chamber notes for one of the other myths.
Which is that children hackers are murderous.
And that's just another classic theme.
Because it's really awesome to think that people are being killed by a clever nine-year-old.
It's just a fascinating concept.
A child is nine.
Children are traditionally pasty and weak and this one has murdered somebody using technology and abilities.
And that's a very simple one.
And there's the belief system that says, well, it is possible, I guess, for a nine-year-old to kill somebody using technology.
But that's the sign of a massive cascading failure of situations that really shouldn't have existed in the first place.
So that story is part of this story that ends up being one about computer security jobs are the natural middle age of the hacker.
It's a kind of a thing.
I'm a murderous child.
I'm a really clever 20-year-old.
Now I work for them.
It's a myth.
It's just because there's this little historical issue that we will never quite work out as long as both groups want that same term.
It's very important to them.
Because it's a great term, isn't it?
I mean, hacking has this beautiful 50-year history.
It's a beautiful term and it implies so much that's great.
But it's also been used.
And I tracked this.
There's a site I have called hacker.textfiles.com.
And I've wasted some time trying to track this term back.
And you can see the turn in Time magazine when it goes from computer enthusiasts to hackers to crimes by hackers.
It's a specific editorial decision made between 1981 and 1983.
And the way I know that is by reading that old articles.
And as more become online, we start to get some idea of where that goes from.
These declarations are my declarations.
I fully encourage people to know or think that I'm full of crap if they don't agree with me.
The only way either of us are going to resolve it is with primary sources.
Primary sources are the gold to a historian.
And the way that you get a primary source is to save a primary source.
And I mention this now because as you are now going into what will be from the 2000s to the 2010s and onward, people will even now look back at 2000 and say, well, this happened.
And you will go, that is not true.
And then you will drink another beer.
But it would be nice if you could go, that is not true, look at this.
And that's why I always implore you, implore everyone, as I collect my primary sources, to collect your primary sources.
Even if you end up giving them away to somebody else.
Because that is how a true story is told.
It's such a waste to hear people stand up and go, we've been misquoted, we've been misstated, they're saying we did things that we didn't.
And you made no effort to prove otherwise, to even save evidence otherwise.
I run a site called cd.textfiles.com.
People are aware of what shareware CDs were.
20-year-olds, maybe not.
Let's go very quickly.
Shareware CDs were this rape of bulletin board systems that occurred from about 1989 to about 1997.
And what happened was that there were these things called computer bulletin boards that people had collections of files and messages that they allowed people to read.
Think web forum, but one person at a time.
That's what USA told me to say.
And they would collect files.
Well, there were other companies that would go in, collect all of the files, burn them to a CD-ROM, and then put them out for sale.
Because they were meant to be freely distributed, well, we're just making you pay for the CD.
Well, they're bastard necrophiliac fucks, but they also turned out to be really, really good archivists.
Because it was in their best interest to have new stuff all the time.
So I have 300 CDs up on cd.textfiles.com.
And you would think, well, that's awesome, Jason, good, you have Commander Keen in the original.
That's just goddamn great, you've really changed the world there, good job.
But the fact is, here's an example.
I talked to a man who was crazy.
He had made $30 million selling his bulletin board system.
Part of the reason he was crazy was because his cohorts didn't make $30 million.
And we're talking, and bear in mind, he owns his own island off the coast of Florida now.
And he wouldn't be interviewed for my documentary, but he would call me occasionally, or send me rambling emails.
Full of guilt, and wine, and semen, and whatever the hell else he was doing that day.
And so, at one point, he said, you know, because I kind of invented the term zip.
And I was like, okay, nutty.
And he's like, you know, just go back and check version, you know, some of the first versions, it'll credit me.
And I went back, and they credited him.
He's the inventor of the term zip.
He said it was because it meant fast, and because it was sexy, because it implied a zipper.
All right, that's a real fact.
And because I had this saved piece of plastic from 15 years earlier, I was able to prove it.
Otherwise, he was just kind of nutty.
Because the man who invented the zip, the zip archive, died.
So he's gone, and his buddy's nutty.
So, you get back to that stuff, because over time, people, you know, for instance, apparently, we could fill another hall of people that War Games is based on.
Because I've heard of at least nine people that it's based on.
And the screenwriter has claimed he didn't really kind of base it on most anybody.
But maybe he's lying, but, you know, it's kind of one of those things where now people just go, oh yeah, we just had a guy die in Honolulu.
He had previously been arrested running naked through the neighborhood, which should have been a sign, but then he traveled to Honolulu and drowned and died.
And it was mentioned, you know, among other things, he was the guy that they based War Games on.
And he was 28?
And I'm like, that is one awesome four-year-old.
You know, it has...
The upcoming War Games 2, it was based on him.
There you go.
That would make sense, wouldn't it?
Did you know there's a War Games 2 coming out?
Oh, you're not supposed to.
Ah, that sucks.
That means the marketing's working.
It's not coming out.
It's been cancelled, like DEF CON.
They sent it out.
It didn't work.
The print burned.
They overexposed it.
It's out.
Sorry.
Yeah, yeah, it's whatever.
It's called Code Fuck Me or whatever the hell.
It's vaguely exploitative.
And it's direct-to-DVD.
Anyway, so...
But, you know, it's funny because a lot of people built up their knowledge of hackerdom from War Games.
And a lot of people built their knowledge up from hackers.
Now, the people who think of War Games as being like, well, it's vaguely...
Up until the point he almost starts nuclear war, it's pretty good.
Sort of captures it.
But then now people are going, well, hackers is my thing that I will base it on.
And you can speak to a lot of people who are much younger.
They'll say, like, I saw hackers and I was inspired.
And... awesome.
But...
The fact is that when people try to come back to look at what these things are, they will look at press reports, they will look at text written by hackers that have made it large, like the conscience of a hacker, or they will look at movies.
This is one of those most disturbing aspects.
I would say American culture, but that's lying.
The BBC does it too.
Which is, they say, we want to portray on television or through radio something that happened.
Let's play a movie in which it happens.
Somewhere this decision was made within a journalistic decision-making process and has been picked up and is now so under the radar, it hardly garners the blink of an eye.
That one would go, well, how was the Wild West?
Let's see this John Wayne film.
Everybody's lit and well made up.
That's awesome.
And then they'll see something like Back to the Future 3, and they'll say, well, they're more dirty, so it's much more realistic.
But they're still well lit and following a plot.
But, okay, fine.
All right.
The point I'm trying to say there is just basically, you know, we create our own lore, we create our own story, we create our own history.
And the best thing we can do is collect, put that together, and make sure that later generations see it.
Because one of the big mistakes we make is we think none of it's really kind of important.
Let me give you an example of something that's important.
Back in the wild woolly days of bulletin board systems, an easy way to get money would be to scan pornographic magazines and put them up on your bulletin board and then charge money for people to look at them.
I don't know what they did with them when they looked at them, but they did.
And they paid really well, so people were encouraged to do more of those.
And adult bulletin board systems became a very easy way to make money.
Here's the problem.
They didn't tend to shoot the pornography themselves.
They tended to use other pornography.
Among the groups that used this was Rusty and Edie's BBS.
Created by... sometimes it's called Rusty and Edie's.
That's wrong.
It's Rusty and Edie's.
It was a multi-line bulletin board system.
Certainly one of the top ten largest bulletin board systems ever to exist.
An unbelievable mishmash of 40 separate PCs that were all wired together using networked hard drives.
And had an enormous amount of pornography.
And also had a large amount of pirated software because they would have what were called upload sections.
Upload sections would allow anybody in the world to upload something.
Well, somebody uploaded a version of Word Perfect, which used to be a word processing program before it disappeared.
It's disturbing to people who are over 20 that I am talking like this.
But I have to make it clear that this is exactly the problem you face.
You look back at the founding of 2600.
And you realize that 2600 was founded six years before the 18-year-olds were born.
Which is why I give props to Emanuel.
You know, I don't agree with everything in 2600.
But there's a 2600!
There's a lot of other things in life that didn't make it to 24.
And are going to make it to 25.
So kudos for doing that, dude.
I find the average life of a project, and by a project I mean a goal-set idea to be accomplished, is about three months.
Most people, after about three months, have to make a decision.
Am I doing this or am I not doing this?
And sometimes they go into what I call a six-month apology process.
Whereby they don't do it for six months and apologize until they stop telling you they're apologizing.
You'll see this again and again in all sorts of software projects and magazines.
And to go on for 24 years is quite a...
I was actually at one of the first 2600 meetings, actually.
Somewhere in the City Corps Center.
And I was very young back then.
And I had a great time.
Anyway, at that time, to me, 2600 was this bizarre, kind of overly-too-well-formatted upstart taking over TAP's crown, now that TAP had fallen over.
And TAP was the Technological Assistance Program, part of the Technological Assistance Party, which had previously been called the Youth International Party Line, which was involved with Abby Hoffman.
And there's an enormous amount of story there.
It's one of the stories.
There's also a thing called TEL.
T-E-L.
It was out at the same time as TAP.
It doesn't have as much fame, because it was shut down after about four issues.
I've scanned a few and put them up.
Same story and same stuff, but they were eventually shut down.
So, the...
What am I...
Where was I?
No, before 2600 meetings.
Oh, that was it.
Okay.
I got kind of lonely there for a moment.
No, that's the problem.
The problem is that your own emotional stories kind of coalesce.
I had some great fucking times when I was a teenager, thanks to computers.
What a great time I had.
I had a wonderful fucking time.
You know, you can focus on the fact that Bob forgot to give you your fucking wares tonight, and Jesus Christ, we were supposed to do this, and you get very angry, and you look back and you're like, you know what, that was awesome.
Fuck it, that's awesome.
Now I'm fat.
I used to run because I wanted to.
Anyway, so...
Rusty and Edie's bulletin board system had somebody upload a version of WordPerfect, and that's piracy.
And so they were busted for that.
And they were rated for that.
And it wasn't very nice when they were rated.
In fact, there are off-the-hook shows with Rusty on them.
Rusty's real name is Russ Hardenberg.
Don't worry, everyone knows his docs.
Because he was sued then, during this period, by Playboy Enterprises.
And Hardenberg versus Playboy is a critical court case because it said that you are responsible for what's put on your computer if you make any effort to collate or curate it.
In other words, if you have just an open area and you don't care and nothing ever gets done, it's unmoderated, nobody bothers you, but if it's obvious, you're going in, you're putting in descriptions, and you're changing stuff, you are maintaining it.
This was the court case that was cited in the Napster case.
So a bulletin board program issue became a Napster problem.
So I'm going to say a little bit about how fucked up law is.
Because it's critical to understand that.
Let me give you an example of how fucked up law is.
I received, I ran an ISP for a while, and by I mean, I ran an ISP, I ran an ISP like you push a piano off a building, so let's not go there too much.
But, during the time I was running an ISP, there was a letter that I got from an assistant attorney general of, I believe it was Pennsylvania.
And it was a letter explaining to me my legal liability for any material that I sent to Philadelphia, to Pennsylvania over the internet.
To show that he was serious, he cited relevant law from the 1800s.
Here's what happened.
Guy shoots other guy.
Other guy dies.
They arrest shooty guy, because he killed the guy.
Shooty guy says, oh, I may have killed someone there, but I was standing on an Indian reservation when I shot him.
And he died over there on the hill.
So, your law doesn't apply to me, because I was in another place.
The court said, wow, nice try!
But, because you caused a crime to occur within the confines of our state, you are responsible for that crime.
And then, Bucky McLaughluck decided in 1996 to cite that law to me as examples of why I could not allow illegal things from my ISP to enter into that state.
That's the law in a nutshell.
There is a lot about the law that is this kind of organic, I said this, this said happened, I'm thinking this is like this.
And the horror, the horror that Mitnick faced, the horror that Crunch faced, the horror that Optic faced, that a lot of people don't really understand is just that it's like this big, dumb, clown machine that has your foot, and it is going to crush you!
And it is going slowly, and it's big and dumb, but you're gonna die!
It's one of those things that doesn't always come out as the pure, unmeasurable pain.
Whenever you have something happen, and this is again proven by history, that when the fundamental aspects of an industry change, there is this bizarre period where everything kind of goes willy-go-nilly, and it just starts to have people making up what they think law is,
because the law doesn't work that way yet, and let's do this.
And we're experiencing that right now to some extension, for instance, with peer-to-peer, and DRM, and all these horrible acronyms people throw out to be cool, but they are all problems that have occurred for many decades before, problems where the law comes in and says,
wow, we really don't have anything to handle this, let's start hitting.
Because hitting works, it slows things down for a bit, and so bulletin board systems experienced all this, all this and more.
Does anyone know, you knew Rusty and Edie's, you know NixPix, by the way?
I met Nix once.
Anyway, oh, dirty old man, but Amateur Action BBS.
The youngins need to know about Amateur Action BBS.
They don't necessarily need to know about Amateur Action, but they do need to know about the BBS.
Amateur Action was a somewhat controversial bulletin board system.
It certainly had what was called at the time a nudist section, whereby nude people of all shapes, sizes and ages were located.
Fine, whatever, hate, dishate, whatever.
Amateur Action had that.
Amateur Action had a number of...
They, however, did grow their own porn.
They did not copyright violate.
They were not affected by Playboy, they were not affected by these other places.
I was actually told by one of the largest BBS's exec PC that when this ruling came down saying you scan Playboy, they had no idea where most of their pornography had come from.
They went through for two weeks and found every picture where the models looked too good and deleted them.
They filtered for ugly as a life-saving maneuver.
The steps you have to do, but what are you going to do?
Well, anyway, Amateur Action grew its own porn.
They encouraged their members who were swingers to send them photos and everything else.
Awesome!
They were located in California.
One day, the postmaster of Tennessee sent them child pornography in the mail, which they proceeded to mark, return to center, and put right back in the mail again.
He then went and got an account on the Amateur Action BBS, which was done by sending in a payment or making a credit card payment to the Amateur Action and mailing it to them.
The way they would verify your age is they would have you scan your ID and send it in.
They knew you were over 18 and they would have you do this, and this was what was considered good practice at the time.
He then arrests them.
Because , he says, you should have known that the content located on your BBS was outside the law in Tennessee.
Now, nowadays, in the days of the cease and desist coming every other day, and the person going, look, another one.
It's somewhat sobering to realize that they were then extradited from California to Tennessee and stood trial.
And lost.
She was sentenced to three years, he was sentenced to seven.
For obscenity.
He appealed.
He was not able to win.
He spent seven years in jail.
Now, this is a period of the mid-90s.
So at a time when we're all going, woohoo, Netscape is kind of neat.
Let's all invest in nothing.
He's stumbling back into the light because of something that happened on a computer bulletin board system at 2400 that they bought in early 1990s.
There are a number of these time warp cases where they stumble out of what they were doing and realizing, wow, things got different.
And when you now have a situation where pornography is almost the black fly of the internet, where you stumble upon pornography as you would stumble upon laundry going to your bathroom, you almost can't think of a time that people would consider pornography so inherently toxic that they would extradite a person.
There's a number of people whose lives have been radically changed.
Another gentleman who has begged me never to give his name or where he was, but I will say he was a Medal of Honor recipient, sold CD-ROMs.
Some of these CD-ROMs had swimsuits.
Some of these CD-ROMs had adult images.
And he was arrested for obscenity for selling CD-ROMs with the images.
And he was busted.
And Mr.
Medal of Honor went away for four years at the age of 50 for selling CD-ROMs with porn on them to adults who were sending an ID.
This was just a few years ago.
So it's funny when we have things now, people are being shocked at the innovations in law, where this whole idea of, like, how do we share...
the kind of what the most recent interesting innovations in law, where they're saying things like having something on your server available is the same as copying it to somebody.
Like, those kind of, like, how do we get this guy stuff has been going on for a very long time.
One other one, just because it pisses me off.
I do have one, it didn't get into my documentary because I couldn't get other people into it, but basically there was a case of somebody who had his computer raided in 1992.
It was his, you know, at a time when computers were everything if you had one.
They were these multi-thousand dollar things that could often contain not just your home but your business and everything else.
And they seized his in a piracy accusation case.
And he wanted it back.
Traditionally this doesn't happen, really.
And he asked the police chief to take care of the computer because he was hoping to win it back and the police chief said, oh, it is utterly safe on my desk.
There are cases I have of law enforcement using computer raids on trumped up charges to increase IT budgets.
It happened.
It happened back in the 90s.
It will probably happen again in other realms of horror and badness.
But we can do two things about this.
We can share it like I'm sharing it because like I said, there are events that have occurred all through time.
Or we can say to ourselves, okay, we're going to store it.
We're going to keep the real.
When I have an idea of what the story was, I'm going to write it out.
I'm going to make it available.
I'm going to do the research or at least make the original materials.
I have so many cases where people would mail me things like, oh, this thing you were talking about in your previous talk?
Yeah, I was there.
Here's some photos.
And I go, well, thank you.
And the photos tell us so much.
There was a phone freak conference in the early 1970s held in association with Tap Magazine where they had a ballroom in New York City where you could play with switching systems and get talks about how to build things and how to do stuff.
And it was all happening.
And you were given a lone ranger mask so that you couldn't be photographed.
Wonderful!
Time!
Well, somebody just sent me pictures of it.
Out of nowhere.
Like, oh, you want this, huh?
I was like, well, thank you.
I'm four stars out of five.
What I encourage people to do, because I really don't think a talk really can parlay that much information, is to browse some of the sites that I run.
textfiles.com web.textfiles.com cd.textfiles.com hacker.textfiles.com places where I've tried to collect primary sources if this sort of subject interests you.
Collections of scanned items that I hope give you some insight into those times.
But I also need something from you.
What I need from you are tour guides.
The number one job of the 21st century will be being a tour guide.
We don't have a problem with random information.
We sometimes have a problem with covering information completely.
But what we really have is somebody who looks down and says, here's all this stuff and maybe you should look at this and look at this.
Because when you put up a new image gallery and it's got 7,000 images, no one's going to browse that.
But the one guy who does who really puts it in context and I consider those guys historians, those are the heroes.
If you think there's a story that hasn't been told and you think no one's going to tell it, you should tell it.
You shouldn't just go to bed that night.
Even if it sucks.
Even if it's poorly written, it's more than we had.
When I interviewed people for the BBS documentary, I interviewed 205 people.
Four of them are dead.
One died of cancer.
One died of old age.
One died, I don't even know what his parents said.
And one of them was Rat Fun, who I interviewed here in 2004.
I interviewed him and then he died.
And his family was delighted to have 20 minutes of him talking about himself because there wasn't any others.
So, this is the kind of stuff you have to kind of think about when you say, well, there'll always be somebody who understands this happened.
They won't.
They don't always.
We don't stick around forever.
I'm going to leave it at that because that's right in theme.
I like that.
So, anyway.
Thank you so much for your time and for listening to me.