[00:00.000 --> 00:00.660]  Awesome job.
[00:01.880 --> 00:07.360]  If you could hack the air conditioning to come on in those things, that'd be awesome because it's like a B.O.
[00:07.360 --> 00:08.420]  box in those mothers.
[00:11.940 --> 00:15.000]  Thanks to everybody for coming to this HOPE conference.
[00:15.280 --> 00:18.360]  These wouldn't happen without the support of you.
[00:20.380 --> 00:25.980]  And Emmanuel Goldstein and the guys at 2600 have worked for months to bring this together.
[00:26.220 --> 00:27.600]  So thank you for attending.
[00:39.380 --> 00:49.620]  Steven Levy is the author of Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which was published in 1984, same year that 2600 The Hacker Quarterly came out.
[00:50.340 --> 00:54.940]  He's written several books on computers, all of which he'll be signing after this discussion.
[00:56.540 --> 01:00.160]  He'll be signing Best of Technology Writing and The Perfect Thing.
[01:00.600 --> 01:06.880]  He was a technology writer for Newsweek and a senior editor at Newsweek.
[01:06.880 --> 01:08.400]  He is now with Wired Magazine.
[01:09.600 --> 01:12.920]  And without further ado, Steven Levy.
[01:18.440 --> 01:19.360]  Thank you.
[01:19.540 --> 01:20.460]  And hello, hackers!
[01:25.280 --> 01:32.720]  You know, it's really fantastic to be able to address a gathering that people proudly call themselves hackers.
[01:33.800 --> 01:37.800]  That word's been over quite a lot over the last 25 years.
[01:38.300 --> 01:40.180]  And it means a lot to me.
[01:40.340 --> 01:45.260]  And it's also great to be speaking to an audience in my adopted hometown New York City.
[01:45.380 --> 01:46.420]  I hope you're all enjoying it there.
[01:47.560 --> 01:50.140]  And also, thanks for getting up so early in the morning.
[01:53.610 --> 01:59.130]  So I want to talk today a bit about what the word hacker means to me.
[01:59.230 --> 02:08.630]  And I want to do something that I've never actually really done before is to talk a bit about the process of how I wrote this book called Hackers.
[02:09.390 --> 02:14.550]  As was mentioned, and I hope some of you know about it, I did write a book called Hackers.
[02:15.010 --> 02:25.310]  It was not the source material for the movie starring Angelina Jolie, which was a circumstance which was bad for my bank account, but good for my dignity.
[02:27.470 --> 02:32.750]  But, you know, I think my writing that book had something to do with my speaking here today.
[02:32.930 --> 02:38.250]  I want to share some things about how I wrote it and what happened to the word hacker since.
[02:39.190 --> 02:43.370]  And, you know, to take a little look at where I was right and where I was wrong.
[02:43.590 --> 02:52.330]  And also, I'm going to have something special also, a little try to figure out after I talk and before I take questions, and I do want to take questions, to run a little contest.
[02:52.330 --> 03:06.530]  I went to my private stash, and I have here a pretty pristine version of the hardback copy of Hackers, which I'd like to give to some person, certainly a person who would consider him or herself lucky to get it.
[03:06.750 --> 03:13.890]  So, I'm trying to figure out a way to run a relatively painless little contest where someone can get this book to take home there.
[03:17.230 --> 03:20.050]  So, how did I come to write that book?
[03:20.750 --> 03:28.690]  A book that changed my life and, you know, amazingly has changed the life of some people who read it, according to what they tell me.
[03:29.770 --> 03:33.350]  So, let's go back to a time long ago.
[03:34.030 --> 03:35.630]  I won't try to hide my age here.
[03:36.030 --> 03:41.530]  And this is around the time that Ronald Reagan was taking the oath of office and mastodons roam the earth.
[03:43.090 --> 03:44.870]  I was a freelance writer.
[03:45.230 --> 03:49.790]  I was writing general subjects, which was what happens when you become an English major.
[03:50.510 --> 03:56.690]  I wrote about sports and music and murders and things like that.
[03:56.990 --> 04:01.370]  I interviewed Bruce Springsteen and Bob Marley and Dr. J.
[04:02.130 --> 04:07.230]  One little digression, if you'll allow me, just because I can't believe I did this.
[04:07.530 --> 04:11.150]  Interviewing Bob Marley, actually, was one of the more amazing things I did.
[04:11.190 --> 04:16.690]  I was writing an article, believe it or not, for the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine about reggae.
[04:16.790 --> 04:20.170]  Trying to explain reggae to the good people in suburban Philadelphia.
[04:21.290 --> 04:27.590]  And there was a guy in my food co-op, I was living in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, who insisted he knew Bob Marley, right?
[04:27.690 --> 04:29.210]  He said, oh, I know Bob, I know Bob.
[04:29.370 --> 04:31.210]  And I'll get you an interview, no problem.
[04:31.630 --> 04:32.910]  And, yeah, sure, sure.
[04:33.110 --> 04:36.170]  And one day he said, hey, Bob is at his mother's house in Wilmington, Delaware.
[04:36.670 --> 04:37.810]  And he'll talk to you.
[04:38.490 --> 04:43.930]  And I got in my Volkswagen and drove down there with Simeon, my host.
[04:44.110 --> 04:46.590]  And believe it or not, there was Bob Marley sitting there.
[04:46.590 --> 04:56.550]  And I always found when doing questions, it wasn't so methodical then, but now it's the way I do things, that sometimes the stupidest question will get the very best answer.
[04:56.750 --> 05:02.710]  So if you're willing to make yourself into sort of an idiot during the interviewing process, it could pay off big time.
[05:02.890 --> 05:13.750]  So I asked Bob Marley, despite a real impulse to prove that I was a hip guy, I said, really, for the readers of the Philadelphia Inquirer there, what is reggae, really?
[05:13.750 --> 05:17.970]  And instead of just brushing me off, he just kind of got all quiet.
[05:18.210 --> 05:21.470]  And he's sitting there in his mom's living room without a shirt on, and it's all dark.
[05:21.730 --> 05:27.070]  He says, you know, you know that quiet before the hurricane comes?
[05:27.810 --> 05:28.650]  That's reggae.
[05:30.390 --> 05:31.170]  Pretty good, huh?
[05:33.070 --> 05:40.250]  So one day I got this assignment to write about these people called hackers.
[05:40.950 --> 05:42.510]  And this is about 1981.
[05:43.470 --> 05:45.250]  I'd never touched a computer before.
[05:46.390 --> 05:48.130]  And, you know, didn't know much about them.
[05:48.230 --> 05:53.450]  Around the time, the big controversy among writers is whether we should get these things called electronic typewriters, right?
[05:53.670 --> 05:55.890]  Which kind of remembered one line of what we did.
[05:56.910 --> 06:01.790]  And, you know, a lot of people thought, you know, boy, you really wouldn't want one of these ugly things with a screen on your desk.
[06:01.870 --> 06:02.810]  That's kind of lunatic.
[06:04.010 --> 06:06.950]  But I thought, you know, this is kind of an interesting idea.
[06:06.950 --> 06:12.990]  And I looked into it, and I checked out the literature, and there wasn't very much about people called hackers.
[06:13.830 --> 06:19.270]  If there was, you know, pretty much the definition would be hacker.
[06:19.830 --> 06:23.610]  Anti-social nerd, by and large a loser who is addicted to computers.
[06:23.970 --> 06:26.970]  Maybe dangerous, but mainly a booger stain curiosity.
[06:28.470 --> 06:30.070]  Okay, I thought, I could do this.
[06:30.870 --> 06:31.790]  Well, there it is.
[06:32.530 --> 06:33.950]  Are you proud of that?
[06:34.110 --> 06:35.590]  Or do you still talk about...
[06:38.610 --> 06:41.870]  Well, please let me know so I won't sit in your chair afterwards.
[06:43.590 --> 06:44.690]  Go on the other side.
[06:44.810 --> 06:45.550]  Yeah, okay.
[06:46.530 --> 06:52.110]  So I looked for stuff about hackers, and I found an article in Psychology Today.
[06:52.150 --> 06:53.010]  It was a cover story.
[06:53.050 --> 06:58.010]  It was called The Hacker Papers, and had a picture of some really creepy-looking guy on the cover.
[06:58.110 --> 07:09.570]  The article actually was an edited version of some dialogue that had gone on at Stanford University, edited by this psychology professor named Philip Zimbardo.
[07:10.230 --> 07:16.970]  Well, actually, I met relatively recently, and he's been doing some really interesting stuff on Abu Ghraib and the psychology of evil.
[07:17.150 --> 07:26.730]  But back then, you know, he was at Stanford doing these things about hackers, and he wrote, and this is his take on the paper, fascination with the computer becomes an addiction.
[07:26.990 --> 07:32.330]  And as with most social addictions, the substance that gets abused is human relationships.
[07:33.470 --> 07:39.690]  And this was seconded in a book with one of the few passages about hacking that I could find.
[07:39.870 --> 07:43.850]  This book was written by an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum.
[07:43.850 --> 07:49.890]  Now, he's best known for writing that program, Eliza, where it's like a psychiatrist session.
[07:49.990 --> 07:58.190]  You type in something, and the computer flicks back your question at you, and it seems like a session with a psychologist there.
[07:58.330 --> 08:01.830]  But he also wrote a book called Computer Power and Human Reason.
[08:02.050 --> 08:08.030]  And he had very one distinctive passage that became sort of notorious at MIT, and it was not very flattering.
[08:08.130 --> 08:08.810]  Let me read you that.
[08:09.970 --> 08:26.010]  Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be riveted as if a gambler's on the rolling dice.
[08:26.610 --> 08:33.930]  When not so transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pour like possessed students of a kabbalistic text.
[08:34.130 --> 08:37.430]  They work until they nearly drop, 20, 30 hours at a time.
[08:37.430 --> 08:40.470]  Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them.
[08:40.670 --> 08:42.190]  Coffee, Cokes, sandwiches.
[08:42.530 --> 08:45.210]  If possible, they sleep on cots near the printouts.
[08:45.650 --> 08:54.010]  Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshadened faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move.
[08:54.390 --> 08:57.730]  These are computer bums, compulsive programmers.
[08:59.950 --> 09:02.090]  Well, this is straight out of Dostoevsky, right?
[09:03.130 --> 09:06.450]  You couldn't get a more gloomy or more depressing group of people.
[09:06.970 --> 09:10.190]  You know, if Angelina Jolie had seen this, she wouldn't want to portray a hacker.
[09:10.310 --> 09:11.350]  She'd probably want to adopt one.
[09:17.460 --> 09:18.960]  So I figured, okay, cool.
[09:19.180 --> 09:20.500]  I'll do this story.
[09:20.620 --> 09:21.580]  I'll write about these weirdos.
[09:21.580 --> 09:25.100]  And I'll go to Stanford because that's the place that was in the psychology today.
[09:25.100 --> 09:34.180]  But before I left, I tapped a former colleague who had been writing about technology a little and asked him to give me a list of sources I might talk to out there.
[09:34.380 --> 09:42.780]  And he presented me with a list of some key people in the burgeoning PC industry there and some other people involved in some interesting computer stuff.
[09:43.340 --> 09:45.680]  So I get on a plane, fly out to California.
[09:45.840 --> 09:50.020]  I'd only been there once in my life before in a college trip, like a road trip there.
[09:50.560 --> 09:53.840]  And I hadn't done anything about computers there, let me tell you.
[09:53.840 --> 09:56.000]  And got off the plane.
[09:56.060 --> 10:10.880]  Within four hours, I was in a hot tub with this guy, Jim Warren, who founded the computer fair, along with a couple of people who lived in his property who were editing a magazine for him about beaming data on radio sideband.
[10:11.080 --> 10:16.640]  And I was learning about how computers empowered people and were actually exciting.
[10:16.880 --> 10:19.940]  And this is like a tone which set for the entire trip.
[10:19.940 --> 10:28.340]  And I went to Stanford and I talked to other people in the PC industry and entrepreneurs and engineers and other people doing interesting stuff.
[10:28.520 --> 10:31.420]  And I was totally blown away by what I found.
[10:31.640 --> 10:36.200]  These were not anti-social nerds, but adventurers of the mind.
[10:36.440 --> 10:39.120]  And their thought processes to me were utterly fascinating.
[10:39.500 --> 10:41.680]  And what's more, they were on to something.
[10:42.220 --> 10:51.840]  Talking to them, I realized that the things they were doing were things that all of us were going to be doing, everyone was going to be doing in not too long.
[10:52.400 --> 11:00.560]  And, you know, this was a world that I hadn't seen and I got really excited about it and wrote my story and wanted to just continue writing and writing more and more about it.
[11:00.560 --> 11:06.860]  And I also, as soon as I got home, said to my girlfriend, who's not my wife, we've just got to get these things.
[11:06.980 --> 11:09.500]  And we both bought Apple IIs at the time.
[11:09.940 --> 11:16.080]  They cost, for two Apple IIs and one printer, which we shared, we spent $9,500.
[11:19.400 --> 11:19.840]  Yeah.
[11:19.840 --> 11:21.600]  And it was worth it, man.
[11:23.420 --> 11:25.420]  And I started writing about it.
[11:25.480 --> 11:26.060]  It was kind of funny.
[11:26.360 --> 11:31.420]  Back then, again, not too many people who weren't technoids had computers.
[11:31.680 --> 11:43.060]  And I remember about a year after we got the computers, a popular computing magazine, one of the magazines at the time, did a story on women and computing.
[11:43.360 --> 11:51.700]  And they had a full-page picture of my wife, not because she was anything technically proficient, she really didn't know anything about programming or things like that.
[11:51.840 --> 11:53.440]  She just simply used a computer.
[11:53.660 --> 11:55.100]  Wow, a woman using a computer.
[11:55.220 --> 11:55.800]  Imagine that.
[11:56.740 --> 12:00.320]  It would be like now someone doing an article on women and pencils, right?
[12:03.200 --> 12:08.500]  So around that time, a publisher asked me if I was interested in writing a book about hackers.
[12:09.260 --> 12:10.520]  And so I've been writing about it more.
[12:10.800 --> 12:12.980]  And again, I thought, well, gee, this is kind of a good idea.
[12:13.160 --> 12:14.580]  I'd wanted to write a book for a while.
[12:14.740 --> 12:19.180]  I had a proposal circulating, believe it or not, to write a book about cheesy nightclubs.
[12:19.180 --> 12:19.800]  Singers.
[12:20.480 --> 12:21.640]  That wasn't catching on.
[12:21.820 --> 12:22.960]  So I thought, you know, hackers, great.
[12:23.320 --> 12:24.060]  I'll do that.
[12:24.320 --> 12:26.780]  And I thought, it was my first book, I was a little nervous.
[12:27.000 --> 12:30.060]  You know, how am I going to get this done as much longer than anything I've ever done?
[12:30.340 --> 12:33.980]  And I'll maybe write a chapter about this kind of hacker and maybe a chapter about that.
[12:34.140 --> 12:40.600]  And I'll just kind of write chapter after chapter until finally I had a book's worth of stuff and I'll put that up and that will be my book about hackers.
[12:41.360 --> 12:46.520]  But my editor, a guy named James Rames, he was really great.
[12:46.520 --> 12:49.820]  He said to me, listen, I want you to think big, be ambitious.
[12:50.500 --> 12:59.680]  And Tim O'Reilly, who, you know, runs the food camps and O'Reilly Publishing, has a saying that you should always try big, hairy, audacious goals.
[13:00.260 --> 13:02.420]  And, of course, I didn't know Tim O'Reilly then.
[13:02.940 --> 13:04.540]  And maybe he wasn't even saying that then.
[13:04.660 --> 13:08.460]  But that's essentially what my editor told me to try to do.
[13:08.460 --> 13:10.400]  And I think, let me try to do this.
[13:10.480 --> 13:11.240]  Let me go for it.
[13:11.420 --> 13:11.840]  Why not?
[13:11.960 --> 13:12.520]  Now's the time.
[13:12.720 --> 13:17.720]  So I decided instead of just kind of piling chapter upon chapter, I would try to write this thing like a narrative.
[13:17.980 --> 13:22.240]  It would be an epic story about how these rebels changed the world.
[13:22.940 --> 13:27.140]  And that's how I got the idea of hackers, heroes of the computer revolution.
[13:28.420 --> 13:35.760]  So I ventured off doing this with, you know, sort of a miserable little advance from my miserable little contract there.
[13:35.900 --> 13:39.660]  And I eventually thought, well, I guess there will be two pieces to this book.
[13:40.040 --> 13:43.280]  The first will be the Homebrew Computer Club.
[13:43.440 --> 13:51.560]  The people who gathered in March 1975 after they heard about the Altair computer, the first personal computer being released.
[13:51.560 --> 13:53.620]  Of course, it's a kit you had to put together yourself.
[13:54.220 --> 13:59.120]  And from this little group that met in a garage, all these companies sprang, including Apple computers.
[13:59.320 --> 14:01.900]  Steve Wozniak went to the Homebrew Computer Club.
[14:02.060 --> 14:04.700]  And to impress his friends, he built the Apple One.
[14:04.840 --> 14:09.420]  And, you know, showed it to them as the first really cool color computer.
[14:09.800 --> 14:12.120]  And he met Steve Jobs and he made it the Apple Two.
[14:12.280 --> 14:13.440]  And that's history.
[14:13.600 --> 14:15.680]  But there was just a lot of interesting things happening there.
[14:15.740 --> 14:21.260]  And I saw how those hardware hackers in the 1970s really created the personal computer revolution.
[14:21.560 --> 14:23.260]  And then I wanted to do something in real time.
[14:23.520 --> 14:27.000]  And I had been hanging out with these people in the game hacking world.
[14:27.180 --> 14:36.460]  And I thought I would hang out at this company near the Sierras, near Yosemite, called Sierra Online in Coarse Gold, California.
[14:36.760 --> 14:44.240]  And they allowed me total access to the company so I could hang out and talk about people who actually learned to hack on personal computers.
[14:44.500 --> 14:48.340]  And it was interesting because money for the first time was coming into the equation.
[14:48.340 --> 14:51.900]  So I would do these two pieces and that would be my book.
[14:52.480 --> 14:58.820]  But as I went on and talked to people, I realized that actually there was a third part of it.
[14:58.920 --> 14:59.680]  An earlier part.
[14:59.840 --> 15:05.440]  Because all roads seemed to lead to what happened in the late 50s and early 60s.
[15:05.560 --> 15:07.740]  And in one place specifically, which was MIT.
[15:08.180 --> 15:14.780]  And as I talked to other people, I realized, you know, it actually feels like hacker culture began there at MIT.
[15:14.780 --> 15:17.520]  So I really have to add a third section to my book.
[15:17.640 --> 15:20.120]  And that will be the lead section, the opening section.
[15:20.300 --> 15:27.200]  And when I did that, it was called True Hackers, in which I wrote about MIT in the late 50s and early 60s.
[15:27.320 --> 15:30.200]  And to me, it turned out my favorite part of the book.
[15:30.440 --> 15:33.740]  And the part which really resonates to this day.
[15:34.320 --> 15:38.640]  And, you know, it was just thrilling to be able to talk to these people.
[15:38.640 --> 15:40.440]  No journalist had ever gone near them before.
[15:40.960 --> 15:42.140]  And to tell their story there.
[15:44.080 --> 15:50.140]  So, even before I did that, you know, of course, I met a lot of interesting people during the course of interviewing there.
[15:50.260 --> 15:52.280]  Steve Wozniak, of course, was great.
[15:52.400 --> 15:53.800]  He was super generous with his time.
[15:54.320 --> 15:58.140]  And, you know, really shared with me what goes on inside a hacker's head.
[15:58.300 --> 16:01.280]  I didn't talk to Steve Jobs during the course of doing Hackers.
[16:02.140 --> 16:06.080]  Right after I finished the book, the Macintosh was about to come out.
[16:06.200 --> 16:11.500]  And I did get an assignment for Rolling Stone to write about the Mac, which hadn't come out yet.
[16:11.520 --> 16:16.360]  And I got Apple to let me in a couple months before they released it.
[16:16.460 --> 16:17.860]  And that's when I first met Steve.
[16:18.580 --> 16:24.040]  It was kind of interesting because, you know, it was the end of a day that just, again, blew my mind.
[16:24.160 --> 16:27.420]  It was sort of akin to the first day I was researching hackers.
[16:27.820 --> 16:29.280]  And I met all these amazing people.
[16:29.280 --> 16:30.840]  And, of course, saw this amazing computer.
[16:31.180 --> 16:37.480]  The people I met that day, people like Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson and Susan Kerr, the Macintosh artists, are my friends to this day.
[16:37.640 --> 16:40.360]  And, of course, the computer I met that day is my computer to this day.
[16:40.460 --> 16:41.980]  So it was a big deal for me.
[16:42.040 --> 16:44.320]  At the end of the day, I was supposed to meet Steve Jobs.
[16:44.380 --> 16:45.500]  We were going to go out to dinner there.
[16:46.180 --> 16:48.120]  And, you know, I heard a lot about him.
[16:48.200 --> 16:49.380]  And I thought, what is this guy really like?
[16:49.700 --> 16:54.900]  So, you know, we meet out in the lobby of this Bandley 3, the building where they did the Macintosh.
[16:55.100 --> 16:57.370]  And immediately he launches into this tirade.
[16:57.910 --> 16:59.570]  You know, so I was doing this story for Rolling Stone.
[16:59.690 --> 17:00.990]  He said, you know, I was just on an airplane.
[17:01.670 --> 17:03.330]  And I was reading a copy of Rolling Stone.
[17:03.470 --> 17:05.110]  And there was this cover story about MTV.
[17:05.470 --> 17:06.530]  And it was awful.
[17:06.690 --> 17:14.530]  And he started proceeding, just trashing the story left and right, and using horrible analogies to body functions, gross body functions, to talk about this story.
[17:14.710 --> 17:15.770]  And he kept talking and talking.
[17:15.850 --> 17:19.390]  And I wondered, when is he going to take a breath so I could tell him that I wrote that story?
[17:22.360 --> 17:23.340]  And I finally did.
[17:23.500 --> 17:25.100]  And he just kind of changed the subject.
[17:25.540 --> 17:27.820]  And we ended up giving a great interview.
[17:28.300 --> 17:31.900]  You know, and Steve is not really a hacker.
[17:32.120 --> 17:33.580]  He's more of an artist mentality.
[17:33.900 --> 17:41.040]  You know, you would never have a hacker whose obsession is to have fewer and fewer and fewer buttons on a device, which is sort of Steve's goal.
[17:41.040 --> 17:43.620]  You know, the iPhone, he's got it down to one button.
[17:43.800 --> 17:45.800]  And eventually, it's just going to be no buttons.
[17:46.020 --> 17:50.320]  Like, you know, there's just going to be a sort of head meld with the device, whatever it is.
[17:50.640 --> 17:55.760]  But it is pretty cool, I guess, to be a hacker, to try to implement those ideas, to put one button on there.
[17:55.960 --> 17:58.200]  So, you know, he certainly deserves to be in this discussion.
[17:58.500 --> 18:01.440]  I also met Bill Gates when I was researching hackers.
[18:02.880 --> 18:04.560]  And I set up an interview with him.
[18:04.580 --> 18:05.500]  It was around 1983.
[18:05.920 --> 18:07.800]  He looked like he was about 12 years old at the time.
[18:08.080 --> 18:10.860]  And I had my first...
[18:10.860 --> 18:13.620]  what would turn out to be like many interviews with Bill Gates.
[18:13.820 --> 18:16.420]  And I think Bill Gates really is a hacker.
[18:16.560 --> 18:18.380]  He really has a total hacker's mentality.
[18:18.580 --> 18:25.880]  And for many years, after he founded Microsoft, he would look at a project and just go, you know, really be critical of it.
[18:25.900 --> 18:27.480]  He'd say, I could code that up in a weekend.
[18:27.600 --> 18:28.640]  What do you want to give me that?
[18:28.840 --> 18:31.560]  And, you know, the thing was, he really could code that up in a weekend.
[18:31.640 --> 18:32.480]  He was really good at it.
[18:32.600 --> 18:35.060]  He hasn't done any coding in quite a long time.
[18:35.780 --> 18:44.180]  But still, to this day, when he talks about business, you know, you know, he'll talk about it and he'll talk about Microsoft and other things.
[18:44.240 --> 18:54.860]  When you talk about some technical issue, he'll just light up and go wild and maybe tell you that if you venture an opinion, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard, which is a big expression of his.
[18:54.860 --> 19:03.120]  And once we were actually having a conversation about antitrust during a very tender time in Microsoft's history, and he threw a pencil at me.
[19:05.440 --> 19:06.420]  He was so livid.
[19:09.060 --> 19:10.240]  But now it's funny.
[19:10.520 --> 19:14.060]  He can't... in later years, he couldn't say, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard.
[19:14.680 --> 19:20.220]  And he threw an expletive somewhere in that sentence, usually, because people will just start laughing when he said it.
[19:20.220 --> 19:22.440]  It was such a self-parody.
[19:23.200 --> 19:40.200]  So anyway, I got to MIT and I found something really interesting, which was these early hackers, the true pioneers of hacking, have the same way of looking at things that those hardware hackers and other ones did.
[19:40.660 --> 19:43.500]  And it was really remarkable what I found there.
[19:43.560 --> 19:47.580]  I think I found sort of like the Rift Valley of computer culture there.
[19:47.580 --> 20:01.200]  And, you know, I can say, I've been downstairs and looked around, that the culture which we have in this room, downstairs, the booths, the other sessions that you have here, just would not have existed had it not been for MIT.
[20:01.560 --> 20:03.680]  That's where things really got started there.
[20:03.800 --> 20:08.040]  And specifically, it started, strangely enough, in this building called Building 20.
[20:08.260 --> 20:11.180]  A structure was put up during World War II.
[20:11.180 --> 20:12.740]  It was meant to be a temporary structure.
[20:12.740 --> 20:15.020]  It wasn't knocked down until 1998.
[20:15.520 --> 20:21.740]  And it was replaced by this really complicated Frank Gehry, you know, giant building, which is falling apart now, incidentally.
[20:22.900 --> 20:25.280]  And I don't know if it's going to last as long as Building 20.
[20:25.480 --> 20:36.520]  But if you ventured back in the late 50s into Building 20, and you'd go to all sorts of things, there were little nuclear reactors and other kinds of strange things there, you would stumble upon a room with a model railroad layout.
[20:36.520 --> 20:37.700]  And you'd think, this is odd.
[20:37.820 --> 20:40.860]  And this was the Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT.
[20:40.880 --> 20:42.060]  They called it Tumurk.
[20:42.480 --> 20:51.120]  And on top of the big, you know, elaborate train layout, with little painted hills and little conductor figures with little painted mustaches on them.
[20:51.340 --> 20:54.380]  And, you know, little trains going on there, beautifully painted.
[20:54.860 --> 20:56.580]  That would be on top of the layout.
[20:56.740 --> 21:05.060]  And underneath the layout, there would be this really complicated tangle of switches and, you know, diodes and all kinds of strange stuff.
[21:05.060 --> 21:07.040]  And that was called, like, the system.
[21:07.340 --> 21:13.780]  And the people who worked underneath it all the time were the S&P group of the Model Railroad Club, Signals and Processing.
[21:13.880 --> 21:16.360]  And they were really, like, the first hackers.
[21:16.600 --> 21:20.720]  You know, they ran that thing like an intricate computer system.
[21:20.820 --> 21:29.100]  And they actually referred to it as hacking in that system, which is, like, the first thing I found that people using that term for that kind of thing.
[21:29.300 --> 21:32.860]  Now, at MIT, they had this term called hack, which is like a prank.
[21:32.860 --> 21:39.260]  When you would cover the big dome there on Massachusetts Avenue with aluminum foil, they'd say, oh, that's a great hack.
[21:39.480 --> 21:52.280]  And I think it was partly that and partly the way a golfer uses the term hacker, just hacking away at something, you know, in terms of maybe a non-methodical but, you know, persistent and sometimes, you know, clever way of doing things.
[21:52.420 --> 21:53.240]  And they used that.
[21:53.380 --> 21:58.180]  And I actually came across some of the newsletters of the Tech Model Railroad Club.
[21:58.660 --> 22:00.280]  And they would sing songs of hacking.
[22:00.800 --> 22:02.300]  And, you know, let me actually read one.
[22:02.440 --> 22:09.300]  A poem that this guy, Peter Sampson, who was a key figure in the railroad club and in early computing, wrote.
[22:09.580 --> 22:11.600]  It's sort of in the spirit of Walt Whitman.
[22:12.940 --> 22:14.480]  ''Switch-thrower for the world?
[22:14.760 --> 22:24.420]  "-Fuse-tester, maker-of-routes, player-with-the-Railroads in the-System- loses advice-for-the-Rouge, Grunge-y, Herring, sprawling-machine of the point-function erase-linolite.
[22:24.800 --> 22:26.820]  They tell me you are wicked and I believe them.
[22:27.040 --> 22:41.360]  For I have seen your painted light bulbs under the loose sight, luring the system suplernde the towers, dust all over the place, hacking with b 8 Forgated springs, hacking himself that ignorant refreshment ax who never lost occupancy, is dropped out.
[23:00.740 --> 23:11.340]  Well, in the spring of 1959, these people who worked on this virtual computer, underneath the layout board of the Model Railroad Club, actually got to use it.
[23:11.340 --> 23:13.080]  They had to use a real computer.
[23:13.940 --> 23:25.020]  MIT moved on, this interactive computer that was sort of given by the Defense Department, called the TX0, to a building next to the Model Railroad Club.
[23:25.220 --> 23:27.680]  No one had written system software for it, and they got to use it.
[23:28.000 --> 23:33.240]  Previously, the only access to computers they had, someone had taken a course, the first computer course at MIT.
[23:34.000 --> 23:36.040]  It was operated by John McCarthy.
[23:36.840 --> 23:41.020]  And it was very frustrating, because back then they had to give paper cards to...
[23:41.540 --> 23:44.800]  you know, the priests around the computer, you had to wait for days to get your output.
[23:44.980 --> 23:46.000]  But this was interactive.
[23:46.240 --> 23:47.200]  And they went crazy.
[23:47.340 --> 23:52.380]  They built all the system software, and they also did things that you weren't supposed to do on a computer.
[23:52.620 --> 23:54.400]  Things that no one had thought of doing.
[23:54.580 --> 24:00.860]  Like one of them wrote a program called Expensive Typewriter, which turned out to be the first word processing program that you could process things.
[24:01.060 --> 24:03.800]  Another one did a spreadsheet-like math program.
[24:03.960 --> 24:09.480]  He handed in his homework using it, and the teacher gave him a zero, saying, this is stuff... you can't do this on a computer.
[24:09.480 --> 24:10.980]  I'm rejecting that.
[24:11.860 --> 24:21.380]  So, what's more, the things they did on the TX0, they shared, they believed that every line of code should be visible to everyone else.
[24:21.580 --> 24:26.820]  They had no concept of intellectual property or proprietary information.
[24:27.060 --> 24:30.640]  Since they were so desperate to find out how to do things...
[24:34.880 --> 24:43.480]  They were so desperate to find out how to do things that they felt that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to deny someone the access to do this.
[24:43.640 --> 24:45.360]  So, they wrote the programs on paper tapes.
[24:45.440 --> 24:47.420]  They put the paper tapes in a drawer by the computer.
[24:47.860 --> 24:52.980]  Anyone could pick up that paper tape, look at the code, improve it, then put the thing back there.
[24:53.080 --> 24:55.440]  There wasn't an idea of who owned a program.
[24:55.640 --> 24:57.520]  It was a ridiculous concept to begin with.
[24:58.280 --> 25:06.680]  And as I talked and heard about this, and I realized that that same impulse was present, really, in the Homebrew Computer Club.
[25:06.980 --> 25:10.420]  And, you know, even among a lot of people who were hacking contemporaneously.
[25:10.780 --> 25:14.720]  And I sort of tried to codify that, and I called that the hacker ethic.
[25:15.000 --> 25:16.960]  Now, there's a lot of different parts to the hacker ethic.
[25:17.720 --> 25:19.920]  One of them is something I called the hands-on imperative.
[25:20.180 --> 25:23.000]  And I found that hackers just are desperate to get their hands on things.
[25:23.000 --> 25:26.940]  When they see something wrong with the world, they have this drive to fix it, fix it, fix it.
[25:27.140 --> 25:33.100]  And even if there's a sign saying, don't touch, that isn't quite as important as fix it, fix it, fix it.
[25:33.220 --> 25:35.340]  So, the hands-on imperative really works there.
[25:35.800 --> 25:42.040]  And I also had things in there like saying, you can create art and beauty on a computer, or computers can change your life for the better.
[25:42.380 --> 25:46.680]  And now it seems kind of quaint to say that, but back then, people really didn't think about those things.
[25:46.840 --> 25:53.460]  They thought the computers were something that was reserved for the impersonal, and had nothing to do with art or beauty or improving your life.
[25:53.700 --> 25:58.940]  Maybe, you know, when I went to college, we hated computers in my cohort because we thought they made you into a number.
[25:59.560 --> 26:01.260]  But these hackers had a different idea.
[26:01.460 --> 26:09.860]  But the most important part, the most important precept of the hacker ethic to me was one that I said that all information should be free.
[26:11.160 --> 26:21.300]  Now, it was... I'm not really talking about the idea of you shouldn't charge for it, because back then, that concept that computers, you know, software was a commodity, wasn't even around.
[26:21.940 --> 26:37.100]  But in a sense, as I talked about, in sharing code and, you know, when later, the new company, Digital Equipment Corporation, put their new computer, the PDP-1, in the same room where the TX-0 was, they started to use the same principle, the paper tapes,
[26:37.240 --> 26:43.380]  and they actually hacked by collaboration the first computer game, Space War, and, you know, built it up that way.
[26:43.380 --> 26:44.820]  And it was in that sense.
[26:44.940 --> 26:54.780]  And that's why there's a precept of the hacker ethic called mistrust authority, promote decentralization, because bureaucracies separate you from information.
[26:54.780 --> 27:00.980]  They're about coordinating off information and codifying it and, you know, keeping you away from it.
[27:01.060 --> 27:04.660]  And that's why hackers hate authority, because authority keeps them away from information.
[27:05.640 --> 27:12.260]  So, you know, I felt that, I guess, maybe my key contribution in the book really is to try to codify that.
[27:12.620 --> 27:17.440]  And, you know, and it really came out in every single way that you looked at that culture at MIT.
[27:17.880 --> 27:23.260]  I was downstairs a few minutes ago and I saw, you know, a pretty big contingent of lock hacking groups.
[27:23.500 --> 27:26.780]  And lock hacking really got its start, I think, at MIT there.
[27:27.480 --> 27:32.200]  You know, because just as hackers hated locks on computers, you know, they hated physical locks.
[27:32.320 --> 27:33.900]  They thought you should be able to get information everywhere.
[27:34.160 --> 27:40.360]  So there was this constant war going on between administrators who wanted to keep things locked up and the hackers who wanted to open things up.
[27:40.860 --> 27:43.960]  A hacker named David Silver kind of laid it out for me.
[27:44.100 --> 27:46.140]  And, you know, this is the last thing I'll read.
[27:46.220 --> 27:51.900]  There's just a great passage there where he talks about it was ultra-highly clever warfare.
[27:52.100 --> 27:58.340]  There were administrators who have high security locks and have vaults where they would store the keys and have sign-out cards to issue keys.
[27:58.460 --> 28:05.680]  And they felt secure, like they were locking everything up and controlling things and preventing information from flowing the wrong way and things from being stolen.
[28:06.080 --> 28:10.240]  And then there was another side of the world where people felt that everything should be available to everyone.
[28:10.520 --> 28:14.900]  And these hackers had pounds and pounds and pounds of keys that would get into every conceivable place.
[28:15.160 --> 28:17.200]  The people who did this were very ethical and honest.
[28:17.360 --> 28:19.860]  And they weren't using this power to steal or injure.
[28:20.020 --> 28:23.860]  It was kind of a game, partly out of necessity and partly out of ego and fun.
[28:24.120 --> 28:30.360]  At the absolute height of it, if you were in the right-hand side circle, you can get the combination to any safe and you get access to anything.
[28:31.360 --> 28:32.340]  And this is really true.
[28:32.520 --> 28:43.180]  I mean, at one point, the administrators got so frustrated that they took this class 2 safe, which is qualified to hold government-classified material, and they felt, well, now, you know, we're protected there.
[28:43.340 --> 28:53.300]  But, of course, the hackers found one in a junkyard in Taunton a few miles away and took it apart with acetylene torch and learned how it worked, and they were able to crack that safe.
[28:53.440 --> 29:00.980]  And, of course, all of them took locksmith courses, as I guess some of the people downstairs have too, and they had the licenses to make the proper keys.
[29:01.380 --> 29:06.600]  And then there were some keys that the blanks were so secure that even licensed locksmiths couldn't do this.
[29:06.720 --> 29:10.440]  And in that case, they would, like, go into the machine shop and they would forge their own keys there.
[29:10.660 --> 29:21.600]  And, you know, this poor guy who had to watch and protect the information at the AI lab where this was going on at the time, this is in the 60s, this guy named Russell Nofsker.
[29:22.040 --> 29:25.100]  And I really felt for this guy because he was sort of a hacker himself.
[29:25.640 --> 29:29.940]  He had a prelediction shared with a lot of hackers and said he loved explosives.
[29:30.540 --> 29:31.400]  You know, it's interesting.
[29:32.180 --> 29:38.240]  You know, I don't know why it is, but in talking to hackers over the years, there really seems to be like a fondness for blowing things up.
[29:39.580 --> 29:44.740]  So this guy, Nofsker, one of the first jobs he had was work for a company that made explosives.
[29:45.100 --> 29:52.000]  And he actually arranged to have part of his salary in Premacord, which was sort of an explosive device.
[29:52.120 --> 29:58.820]  And he had this idea that, you know, this is Boston in the winter, that he could, like, set this up on his sidewalk and blow the snow off.
[30:01.000 --> 30:03.620]  And his wife got wind of it.
[30:03.700 --> 30:06.400]  And, you know, so he had to shuffle the stuff anyway.
[30:06.900 --> 30:12.640]  But, you know, he tried and tried and tried to stop the hackers until finally he just gave up.
[30:12.800 --> 30:16.380]  He threw his hands up and said, you know, and made a deal with the hackers.
[30:16.520 --> 30:22.960]  He said, okay, I'll stop putting up the roadblocks if you'll stop flaunting how you break into it.
[30:23.080 --> 30:26.140]  Let's at least preserve the illusion that things are safe.
[30:27.400 --> 30:32.260]  And this is sort of a precursor years, years in advance of Scott McNeely's statement that privacy is an illusion.
[30:32.660 --> 30:34.440]  They really had it at MIT.
[30:34.760 --> 30:37.000]  And it actually worked pretty well after that.
[30:37.680 --> 30:41.120]  And one of the last people, I talked to doing hackers.
[30:41.280 --> 30:44.600]  And it turned out to be sort of a postscript at the end of the book was this guy I found.
[30:44.820 --> 30:47.140]  And I'm sure I was the first journalist to ever speak to him.
[30:47.280 --> 30:48.460]  This guy named Richard Stallman.
[30:50.540 --> 30:51.240]  You know him.
[30:52.200 --> 30:53.800]  But, you know, he looks...
[30:53.800 --> 30:55.440]  I look different too, I guess.
[30:55.560 --> 30:57.440]  But he looked really different back then.
[30:57.820 --> 30:58.860]  And, you know, he was this guy.
[30:58.980 --> 31:03.120]  I don't think sunlight had his face for years before I talked to him.
[31:03.180 --> 31:05.260]  He, like, literally lived in the AI lab.
[31:05.460 --> 31:08.040]  And at that point, the AI lab was splitting apart.
[31:08.280 --> 31:10.060]  You know, I get into this in the book.
[31:10.420 --> 31:14.600]  Because, you know, there were these companies that started competing list companies.
[31:14.860 --> 31:17.200]  And one of them, you know, run by Nofsker actually.
[31:17.920 --> 31:18.940]  Stallman thought it was evil.
[31:19.040 --> 31:21.640]  And he was single-handedly trying to match the output of that other company.
[31:22.240 --> 31:24.740]  And, you know, his heart was broken.
[31:24.740 --> 31:31.560]  Because the AI lab was being ruined by proprietary information and software for money.
[31:33.040 --> 31:34.040]  And passwords.
[31:34.420 --> 31:35.440]  He hated passwords.
[31:35.640 --> 31:39.960]  And he had this movement within the AI lab to use a carriage return as a password.
[31:40.720 --> 31:43.420]  And about a third of the people actually kind of used that.
[31:43.580 --> 31:46.960]  You know, as proudly saying, you know, we don't want your stinking passwords.
[31:47.200 --> 31:49.080]  And they used a carriage return there.
[31:49.300 --> 31:53.340]  And, you know, he described himself in California and he was the last of his kind.
[31:53.440 --> 31:54.500]  And he thought he was that.
[31:54.680 --> 31:58.200]  And I wrote a chapter about him called The Last True Hacker there.
[31:59.440 --> 32:06.440]  And, you know, little realizing that Richard, you know, years from now, would still be, you know, a true hacker.
[32:06.620 --> 32:12.400]  But quite joyfully, you know, I feel, and to all the people in this room, certainly not the last of them.
[32:12.560 --> 32:13.520]  And it was kind of funny.
[32:13.560 --> 32:22.900]  Because when I finished Hackers, I had somewhat of a pessimistic view of how mammon, how commerce, how greed was going to affect the hacker ethic.
[32:23.460 --> 32:26.100]  And I, you know, I worried a lot about how that would turn out.
[32:26.220 --> 32:36.400]  But as it turned out, not only did the hacker spirit infuse everything, you know, by, you know, being built in to every computer.
[32:36.600 --> 32:40.200]  And then the people who designed the Internet, you know, were, again, true hackers.
[32:40.380 --> 32:44.420]  And that permeated the whole Internet and spread the hacker ethic everywhere.
[32:45.000 --> 32:49.760]  You know, but, you know, now the idea of hacking in the classic sense, I think, is making a comeback.
[32:49.980 --> 33:00.640]  And I really feel that all the benefits we have of the digital age and the whole evolution that came from that, all the things we enjoy now, really came from the hackers.
[33:00.860 --> 33:02.660]  We owe it all to the hackers.
[33:10.690 --> 33:15.550]  So I handed in my book, you know, on my Apple II, just to think how different things are.
[33:15.750 --> 33:20.030]  Some chapters of the book were so long, they didn't fit on a single floppy disk.
[33:20.030 --> 33:22.530]  I had to split it out there.
[33:22.710 --> 33:25.670]  And then, of course, my publisher wouldn't take a book in digital form.
[33:25.670 --> 33:25.930]  What?
[33:26.410 --> 33:29.590]  And in fact, they wouldn't even take it in a dot matrix printout.
[33:29.790 --> 33:32.690]  They demanded I make it look like a typewritten manuscript.
[33:32.870 --> 33:37.690]  I had to hire to rent a daisy wheel printer and kind of print out like one line at a time.
[33:37.830 --> 33:39.970]  It was like 13 characters a second at that time.
[33:40.910 --> 33:44.530]  And, you know, the book came out in, you know, late 1984.
[33:45.390 --> 33:47.190]  It came out in this version.
[33:47.290 --> 33:48.290]  They didn't print too many of them.
[33:48.390 --> 33:48.870]  Sold out.
[33:48.870 --> 33:52.610]  But the publisher said, well, that's good.
[33:52.690 --> 33:53.370]  Just leave it at that.
[33:53.650 --> 33:57.910]  And it wasn't really until the paperback that it really found its audience.
[33:58.030 --> 34:01.190]  And I'm just so happy to say that it's been in print ever since.
[34:01.570 --> 34:05.910]  And, you know, I just get great feedback to this day there.
[34:07.370 --> 34:10.870]  Just today, I ran into Matt Blaze, who's a legend in his own right.
[34:11.030 --> 34:18.550]  And he told me that he was asked by the people at Penn, where he works, to pick a book which had an influence on him the most.
[34:18.630 --> 34:19.790]  And he picked hackers.
[34:19.970 --> 34:20.870]  And thanks, Matt.
[34:20.970 --> 34:21.690]  That means a lot.
[34:23.110 --> 34:36.350]  Now, after I wrote the book, I had hoped that that term that I used, the way I used the word hackers, in the positive sense, in the adventurous sense, in the sense that people, you know, who see freedom and liberation in what they do would stick.
[34:36.350 --> 34:47.690]  But, of course, soon after that, the word became degraded and became used to be synonymous with people who break into computers, whether they have technical expertise or not.
[34:49.450 --> 35:01.970]  And there was a conference that started, you know, just when the book started, Stuart Brand and Kevin Kelly, some people at Whole Earth Review, decided it would be a great idea to get together some of the people who were in the different generations of hackers and put them all together.
[35:02.090 --> 35:06.050]  And we had a fantastic gathering called the First Hacker Conference.
[35:06.050 --> 35:08.070]  And it still goes on to this day.
[35:08.210 --> 35:09.250]  It's picked up by some other people.
[35:09.970 --> 35:14.510]  And in subsequent hacker conferences, there was a lot of hand-wringing about the way this word was used.
[35:14.770 --> 35:18.590]  That especially that people were upset, the people who might just use scripts.
[35:18.630 --> 35:21.050]  They had no expertise of hacking whatsoever.
[35:21.390 --> 35:22.890]  But people said, oh, these are hackers.
[35:23.010 --> 35:23.510]  These are hackers.
[35:23.890 --> 35:29.490]  And, you know, some of the people, people at MIT in particular, it broke their heart to hear that word used that way.
[35:29.710 --> 35:35.930]  Now, I have to say, I can't get that worked up about it because, you know, language sort of has its own course.
[35:35.930 --> 35:36.630]  It's like a river.
[35:36.790 --> 35:38.990]  You really can't stop a river that way.
[35:39.130 --> 35:53.990]  And I think, while it's a shame and it's unfortunate, but I am just so encouraged that now the word is coming back in the positive sense in terms of, you know, people talk about hacking the brain or you've got the Make Magazine movement, you know, or even gatherings like this,
[35:54.010 --> 36:01.890]  I think, are breaking away from the strictly negative connotation and seeing it in the terms, you know, that was closer to the original.
[36:02.090 --> 36:04.250]  So I think that's just terrific there.
[36:04.550 --> 36:08.330]  And, you know, it's been, you know, great to see that evolution.
[36:08.630 --> 36:16.510]  And happier, you know, I'm just happier than ever that this movement is thriving and that you're here and that you've read me and listened to me.
[36:16.610 --> 36:19.110]  So I just say, go forth and hack, please.
[36:19.270 --> 36:20.310]  And thanks very much.
[36:31.370 --> 36:32.250]  So, a couple of things.
[36:32.350 --> 36:33.150]  I want to take questions.
[36:33.330 --> 36:34.390]  So you can kind of go to the mic for questions.
[36:34.510 --> 36:35.770]  But first, can we have the house lights on?
[36:35.830 --> 36:37.330]  We're going to figure out how to give out this book here.
[36:39.810 --> 36:43.010]  Okay, I'm going to do a little raffle hack without any kind of raffle.
[36:43.490 --> 36:45.070]  Can I have the house lights on?
[36:47.510 --> 36:49.190]  Can someone hack the house lights, please?
[36:51.530 --> 36:53.370]  Maybe from your chair some of you can do this.
[36:57.300 --> 36:58.760]  This is a hard one, huh?
[36:59.900 --> 37:02.660]  We'll get a long distance 3G battery for this is on.
[37:02.880 --> 37:02.900]  Okay.
[37:03.860 --> 37:04.480]  There we go.
[37:04.640 --> 37:04.780]  Okay.
[37:05.580 --> 37:06.760]  So here's the way I'm going to do it.
[37:06.860 --> 37:08.160]  I've got a couple of trivia questions.
[37:08.880 --> 37:11.720]  And there's going to be partly speed and partly who can answer this.
[37:12.740 --> 37:20.180]  So anyone who knows who is the inventor of the cellular automata game life?
[37:24.540 --> 37:25.960]  I didn't say yell it out.
[37:28.300 --> 37:30.060]  I was going to ask you again.
[37:30.060 --> 37:33.660]  So maybe I should get the ground rules of the game before I start here.
[37:34.380 --> 37:36.460]  I see working with hackers is going to be a little complicated.
[37:36.700 --> 37:36.800]  Okay.
[37:37.420 --> 37:41.700]  So what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask the people who know something to stand up.
[37:42.060 --> 37:42.440]  Okay.
[37:42.700 --> 37:47.300]  And if you don't want the book, don't stand up because you might wind up with a book if you win this trivia contest.
[37:48.460 --> 37:52.560]  So we all know, of course, that the inventor of life was John Conway, right?
[37:53.220 --> 37:54.920]  So we're not going to use that question.
[37:56.120 --> 37:56.720]  Okay.
[37:57.500 --> 38:00.220]  So stand up if you want this book.
[38:00.960 --> 38:02.200]  You can sell it on eBay.
[38:02.560 --> 38:03.460]  I'll sign it.
[38:04.500 --> 38:10.940]  What month was the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club?
[38:11.400 --> 38:12.480]  Anyone stand up?
[38:12.580 --> 38:12.840]  Who knows?
[38:17.660 --> 38:18.100]  Okay.
[38:18.460 --> 38:19.200]  We only have two people.
[38:20.160 --> 38:20.280]  Great.
[38:20.560 --> 38:21.480]  So it's between you guys.
[38:22.240 --> 38:22.700]  All right.
[38:23.860 --> 38:26.220]  Do either of you know Richard Stallman's middle initial?
[38:35.470 --> 38:37.230]  And the reason he knows... what's your name?
[38:38.350 --> 38:38.790]  Rohit.
[38:38.870 --> 38:42.950]  The reason Rohit knows is because, you know, his handle was RMS.
[38:43.370 --> 38:43.810]  Right?
[38:43.970 --> 38:45.090]  And that was kind of well known.
[38:45.090 --> 38:46.310]  So come back afterwards.
[38:46.470 --> 38:47.310]  I'll sign this book there.
[38:48.650 --> 38:50.210]  Oh, March 1975.
[38:51.270 --> 38:52.170]  Did you know that?
[38:56.510 --> 38:58.170]  So he hacked his way into that.
[38:59.570 --> 39:05.310]  So, please, questions on hackers or anything I've written about?
[39:05.990 --> 39:06.730]  Crypto, anything?
[39:09.310 --> 39:09.830]  Yeah.
[39:10.350 --> 39:12.390]  Steven, I'm actually reading Crypto right now.
[39:12.590 --> 39:13.210]  It's a great book.
[39:13.210 --> 39:14.670]  I have a question for you.
[39:14.890 --> 39:17.950]  You were talking about the information should be free.
[39:18.230 --> 39:22.030]  And that being a prime thing.
[39:22.730 --> 39:25.470]  But then you have to reconcile it with privacy.
[39:26.490 --> 39:30.710]  And I think, you know, these days privacy is very important.
[39:31.010 --> 39:37.050]  And, you know, we have a lot going on to try to make that very publicly available to people.
[39:37.270 --> 39:39.050]  How do you reconcile the two things?
[39:39.150 --> 39:42.010]  Information needs to be free, but you've got to have privacy.
[39:42.770 --> 39:44.790]  Well, that's tough.
[39:45.010 --> 39:57.230]  I mean, so on one hand, you know, the thing about crypto, it was sort of, you know, the flip side, really, of what happened at the AI lab was actually had its origin in the AI lab.
[39:57.230 --> 40:00.070]  On one hand, they had this ethic of total openness.
[40:00.370 --> 40:10.490]  And on the other hand, some of the people, and one person in particular, this guy, Whit Diffie, who was a hacker at the AI lab, had this obsession with how do you protect the secret.
[40:10.490 --> 40:25.770]  And he wound up to be the co-inventor of public key cryptography, which I think gives us a way to deal with the idea of free information in terms of protecting it with cryptography.
[40:25.770 --> 40:45.810]  I think that, you know, clearly there's a value to privacy, but, you know, there is also a huge value in making public information that has no, you know, justification to be held in private there.
[40:46.970 --> 40:54.930]  The nature of digital technology, like it or not, brings a lot of our personal information out into the open.
[40:55.150 --> 40:59.470]  And there is a trade-off to what we do, I think, by and large, by our actions.
[40:59.610 --> 41:00.390]  We vote with our feet.
[41:00.690 --> 41:06.990]  Just as young people, in a sense, vote on this issue with their feet when they post private information on Facebook.
[41:07.290 --> 41:17.990]  I think that, you know, you have to be, you know, pretty dumb not to have any expectation at all that when you post something semi-publicly, it might not come out in the future there.
[41:18.830 --> 41:20.070]  You know, I'm not going to pretty it up.
[41:20.190 --> 41:22.030]  There's no perfect solution to this.
[41:22.210 --> 41:26.910]  But, you know, I do feel that, you know, things should be more open.
[41:27.650 --> 41:28.630]  No DRM.
[41:28.710 --> 41:30.850]  DRM turns out to be real counterproductive.
[41:32.670 --> 41:43.090]  But in terms of your privacy, one should be, you know, careful about how much you indulge in the pleasures of the digital age if you're super concerned with that.
[41:44.330 --> 41:45.390]  Or use strong crypto.
[41:47.130 --> 41:47.910]  Other questions?
[41:50.670 --> 41:51.790]  Come on, you're shot at me.
[41:53.030 --> 41:54.750]  The last hope?
[41:55.030 --> 41:55.450]  All right.
[41:55.570 --> 41:59.070]  Well, I'll finish off because I have a couple minutes with one more story here.
[41:59.610 --> 42:01.410]  It has nothing to do with hacking.
[42:02.130 --> 42:09.850]  But, you know, it is before when I was through this general freelance writer, I had an interesting story, which is sort of a hack in and of itself.
[42:10.410 --> 42:14.890]  My editor, I was working for a magazine called New Jersey Monthly, a regional magazine.
[42:15.230 --> 42:22.530]  And we tried to stretch any interesting story with a link to New Jersey as we could, because a lot of stuff happened in New Jersey wasn't too interesting.
[42:23.230 --> 42:27.070]  So Einstein lived in New Jersey.
[42:27.330 --> 42:31.610]  And my editor always had this fascination about what happened to Einstein's brain.
[42:32.630 --> 42:39.130]  It had been taken out of his head after he died, fortunately, in 1955, and then sort of disappeared.
[42:39.530 --> 42:46.470]  You know, the editor I had had tried to find it some years before and ran into a total brick wall in the Einstein estate.
[42:46.690 --> 42:47.670]  They didn't know what happened.
[42:47.890 --> 42:56.390]  The last he heard it was an article in the New York Times in 1955 saying that it was taken out of his head at the autopsy and sent off for study, but no one knew what happened to it.
[42:56.450 --> 42:58.510]  My editor said to me, I want you to find Einstein's brain.
[43:00.030 --> 43:00.690]  So, okay.
[43:01.510 --> 43:04.330]  So I, you know, just like the hackers, I could try that.
[43:04.570 --> 43:11.750]  So I figured out, I guess, what happened, who took it out of his head, the guy, and, you know, tried to trace the fellow down.
[43:12.010 --> 43:15.070]  I heard some rumors that the pieces of it had come out here and there.
[43:15.490 --> 43:18.430]  And finally, I figured out where this guy was.
[43:18.590 --> 43:21.450]  And, you know, I was pretty sure this guy had the brain.
[43:21.650 --> 43:22.510]  He was a doctor.
[43:22.650 --> 43:25.030]  He was a pathologist who did the autopsy.
[43:25.170 --> 43:29.670]  And he was living in Wichita, Kansas, and working for some medical testing lab.
[43:30.490 --> 43:31.350]  So I called him up.
[43:31.990 --> 43:33.790]  I said, I'm doing this story about Einstein's brain.
[43:34.010 --> 43:34.910]  And there was a silence.
[43:35.490 --> 43:36.790]  I said, what do you want to talk to me about?
[43:36.950 --> 43:38.670]  I said, well, I just wanted to talk to you about it.
[43:38.710 --> 43:39.790]  You knew Einstein, didn't you?
[43:40.490 --> 43:41.830]  And he said, well, I did.
[43:41.970 --> 43:42.590]  And he seemed reluctant.
[43:42.850 --> 43:44.810]  And I thought this might be a hangup any minute.
[43:44.930 --> 43:45.930]  I said, let me come out and talk to you.
[43:46.270 --> 43:47.730]  So I flew to Wichita, Kansas.
[43:48.510 --> 43:52.250]  And I met in his lab, which was, you know, this testing lab.
[43:52.370 --> 44:01.590]  This guy, I guess who had once been a fairly renowned pathologist at Princeton Hospital, was now working in this sort of nondescript medical lab where they, you know, take your blood and, you know, let you know what happens there.
[44:01.730 --> 44:03.370]  And he was in this cubicle there.
[44:04.030 --> 44:04.710]  And I met him.
[44:04.770 --> 44:05.270]  It was a Saturday.
[44:05.370 --> 44:06.070]  There was no one else there.
[44:06.650 --> 44:08.010]  And I'm asking about Einstein.
[44:08.550 --> 44:12.350]  And he admitted, yes, well, I took the brain out.
[44:12.510 --> 44:14.450]  And, you know, I was in charge of a study.
[44:14.470 --> 44:15.790]  And we talked about this a little.
[44:16.010 --> 44:20.010]  And, you know, kind of, it turned out that nothing was published.
[44:20.290 --> 44:22.090]  And, you know, the study was going on.
[44:22.170 --> 44:23.010]  He couldn't say too much.
[44:23.130 --> 44:25.430]  And we just went on and on to try to get more and more.
[44:25.630 --> 44:27.970]  And finally, I said, do you have any pictures of it, anything?
[44:28.350 --> 44:31.350]  And I come all the way from Wichita to Wichita from New Jersey.
[44:31.550 --> 44:34.170]  And he finally said, well, yeah, it's here.
[44:37.950 --> 44:38.650]  I said, here?
[44:38.850 --> 44:39.750]  In this room?
[44:40.110 --> 44:40.890]  And he said, yeah.
[44:40.890 --> 44:42.650]  So he walks behind me.
[44:42.790 --> 44:45.310]  And in the back of my chair, there's a cardboard box.
[44:46.370 --> 44:48.470]  And it says, Costa Cider.
[44:48.790 --> 44:50.570]  It's like the apple cider box.
[44:51.050 --> 44:51.910]  So the cardboard box.
[44:51.970 --> 44:52.690]  And he takes this thing.
[44:52.810 --> 44:56.710]  And he pulls out two big kind of mason jar kind of things.
[44:57.250 --> 45:06.310]  And, like, there, in these mason, two mason jars split between them, bobbing up and down, is Einstein's brain.
[45:07.150 --> 45:08.790]  And it's, like, cut up in, like, pieces.
[45:08.910 --> 45:11.050]  I describe them as the size of Goldenberg's peanut chews.
[45:13.030 --> 45:14.770]  And it was, like, an awesome moment.
[45:15.310 --> 45:17.210]  You know, there it was.
[45:17.390 --> 45:18.890]  Like, the brain that changed the world.
[45:19.130 --> 45:19.630]  And, you know.
[45:19.990 --> 45:22.550]  So that was my earlier coup.
[45:22.730 --> 45:24.450]  And I published the article.
[45:24.530 --> 45:25.850]  And it got picked up everywhere.
[45:26.050 --> 45:27.550]  Johnny Carson made a joke about it.
[45:28.430 --> 45:32.030]  You know, so that was, like, the high point of my career before hackers.
[45:32.390 --> 45:33.730]  My Einstein's brain hack.
[45:34.450 --> 45:36.290]  So, again, keep hacking out.
[45:36.290 --> 45:36.990]  And we have a great conference.
[45:47.070 --> 45:48.070]  Just a reminder.
[45:48.450 --> 45:52.210]  Steven Levy will be signing books right in the back of the room there.
[45:53.130 --> 46:03.890]  In our next discussion, if you are into keys, picking locks, that kind of thing, some of the top lock picking experts from around the world have flown in for this conference.
[46:04.170 --> 46:08.790]  And they are going to be giving an in-depth discussion called Methods of Copying High Security Keys.
[46:09.610 --> 46:11.130]  Barry Wells is one of those gentlemen.