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Hacker culture(s)-- lecture notes, February 23, 2000 -- |
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Introduction |
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| Selected sources |
This is a short list of what I see as some essential resources. Each of them contains large numbers of pointers and references for further exploration. Attrition. A collection of resources from and for the hacker cultures. Note in particular the large mirror archive of defaced web sites (sites being modified by crackers). Free Software Foundation. Describes the foundations and status of the GNU project, launched by Richard Stallman in 1984 to develop a free version of Unix. GNU components are now being widely used together with the more famous Linux kernel. Katie Hafner and John Markoff: Cyberpunk. Corgi Books, 1993. The stories of three famous hackers: Kevin Mitnick, Pengo and Robert Tappan Morris. Written in journalistic style with a human interest angle, highly readable. Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach. An eternal golden braid. A cult classic among computer scientists (and hackers). Hofstadter connects mathematics, music and imagery with basic AI issues. Tracy Kidder: The soul of a new machine. 1981. The story of how Data General developed their first minicomputer. Conveys the "Dead Poets Society" feeling of intense collaborative hacking. New
Hacker's Dictionary, maintained
by Eric S. Raymond. Language is a strong component of any culture. No
exception for hacker culture(s). This dictionary is definitive. Jörgen Nissen: Pojkarna vid datorn. Symposion Graduale, 1993. A sociological PhD thesis in Swedish about the hobby hacker culture in Sweden. Phrack. A classic hacker magazine, published for free since 1985 through BBS and more recently the Internet. Eric S. Raymond: The
cathedral and the bazaar. An analysis of why Linux and the
concept of open source works. Howard Rheingold: Tools for thought, 1985. A good piece on the history of the hacker culture(s), with an emphasis on academic hacking in the US. Bruce Sterling: The hacker crackdown. Bantam Books, 1992. The story of Operation Sundevil, a massive attempt by US authorities to "fight computer crime" and apprehend hackers. The book is available in various file formats from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Clifford Stoll: The cuckoo's egg. 1989. Describes Stoll's hunt for a hacker in his system at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, a hunt that takes him to Eastern Europe. The conspiracy angle of Stoll's book is well balanced by Hafner and Markoff's account of the same story (above). Sherry Turkle: The second self. 1984. A psychological study of hackers (among other groups) and their relations to computers. Linus Walleij: Copyright finns inte, version 3.0. The best text I have seen in Swedish on hacker cultures. Fairly comprehensive and some of the material on the history of hacker cultures in Sweden is quite unique.
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