Hacker culture

For "phone hacking", see voicemail hacking.

"Hacker ethic" redirects here. For the book, see The Hacker Ethic. For other uses, see Hacker (term).

In various subcultures, hacking is a form of subversion or stretching of the capability or purpose of various systems.

The term originated in the computer programmer subculture of 1960s United States academia, in particular around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The "hacker" community tends to differentiate themselves from "crackers," people who use hacking skills for malicious or criminal purposes.

Definition

The Jargon File, a compendium of hacker slang, defines hacker as "A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary." The Request for Comments (RFC) 1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, amplifies this meaning as "A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular." As documented in the Jargon File, these hackers are disappointed by the mass media and general public's usage of the word hacker to refer to security breakers, calling them "crackers" instead. This includes both "good" crackers ("white hat hackers") who use their computer security related skills and knowledge to learn more about how systems and networks work and to help to discover and fix security holes, as well as those more "evil" crackers ("black hat hackers") who use the same skills to author harmful software (like viruses, trojans and so on) and illegally infiltrate secure systems with the intention of doing harm to the system. The programmer subculture of hackers, in contrast to the cracker community, generally sees computer security related activities as contrary to the ideals of the original and true meaning of the hacker term that instead related to playful cleverness.

The prevalent meaning of hacker meaning security breaker has become so strong, that even within the computer context, many incorrectly believe the programmer subculture to be computer security related, too, and confusing it with white hat hackers. The actual ideals of the programmer subculture hackers have nothing to do with computer security. Rather, they are about the right to have a software system that can be freely studied, modified and shared with other hackers. This implies the rejection of any monopoly on knowledge of such systems. However, it does not, neither in theory, nor in practice, imply breaking into computers or exploiting security holes to achieve these goals.

History

Before communications between computers and computer users was as networked as it is now, there were multiple independent and parallel hacker subcultures, often unaware or only partially aware of each others' existence. All of these had certain important traits in common:

• Creating software and sharing it with each other
• Placing a high value on freedom of inquiry; hostility to secrecy
• Information-sharing as both an ideal and a practical strategy
• Upholding the right to fork
• Emphasis on rationality
• Distaste for authority
• Playful cleverness, taking the serious humorously and their humor seriously

These sorts of subcultures were commonly found at academic settings such as college campuses. The MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University were particularly well-known hotbeds of early hacker culture. They evolved in parallel, and largely unconsciously, until the Internet, where a legendary PDP-10 machine at MIT, called AI, that was running ITS, provided an early meeting point of the hacker community. This and other developments such as the rise of the free software movement drew together a critically large population and encouraged the spread of a conscious, common, and systematic ethos. Symptomatic of this evolution were an increasing adoption of common slang and a shared view of history, similar to the way in which other occupational groups have professionalized themselves but without the formal credentialing process characteristic of most professional groups.

Over time, the academic hacker subculture has tended to become more conscious, more cohesive, and better organized. The most important consciousness-raising moments have included the composition of the first Jargon File in 1973, the promulgation of the GNU Manifesto in 1985, and the publication of The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1997. Correlated with this has been the gradual recognition of a set of shared culture heroes, including: Bill Joy, Donald Knuth, Dennis Ritchie, Alan Kay, Ken Thompson, Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, and Guido Van Rossum.

The concentration of academic hacker subculture has paralleled and partly been driven by the commoditization of computer and networking technology, and has in turn accelerated that process. In 1975, hackerdom was scattered across several different families of operating systems and disparate networks; today it is largely a Unix and TCP/IP phenomenon, and is concentrated around various operating systems based on free and open source software development.

Ethics

Main article: hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The early hacker culture and resulting philosophy originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1950s and 1960s. The term hacker ethic is attributed to journalist Steven Levy as described in his book titled Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, written in 1984. The guidelines of the hacker ethic make it easy to see how computers have evolved into the personal devices we know and rely upon today. The key points within this ethic are access, free information, and improvement to quality of life.

While some tenets of hacker ethic were described in other texts like Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) by Theodor Nelson, Levy appears to have been the first to document and historicize both the philosophy and the founders of the philosophy.

Levy explains that MIT housed an early IBM 704 computer inside the Electronic Accounting Machinery (EAM) room in 1959. This room became the staging grounds for early hackers as MIT students from the Tech Model Railroad Club sneaked inside the EAM room after hours to attempt programming the 30-ton, 9-foot-tall (2.7 m) computer.

The "boys" (the initial group was entirely male) defined a hack as a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfil some constructive goal, but also with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement. The term hack arose from MIT lingo, as the word had long been used to describe college pranks that MIT students would regularly devise.

The Hacker Ethic was a "new way of life, with a philosophy, an ethic and a dream". However, the elements of the Hacker Ethic were not openly debated and discussed, rather they were accepted and silently agreed upon.

Free and open source software (FOSS) is the descendant of the hacker ethics that Levy described. The hackers who hold true to the hacker ethics—especially the Hands-On Imperative—are usually supporters of the free and open source software movement. This is because free and open source software allows hackers to get access to the source code used to create the software, to allow it to be improved or reused in other projects. In effect, the free and open source software movements embody all of the hacker ethics.

As Levy summarized in the preface of Hackers, the general tenets or principles of hacker ethic include:

• Sharing
• Openness
• Decentralization
• Free access to computers
• World Improvement

In addition to those principles, Levy also described more specific hacker ethics and beliefs in chapter 2, The Hacker Ethic: The ethics he described in chapter 2 are:

Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!

Levy is recounting hackers' abilities to learn and build upon pre-existing ideas and systems. He believes that access gives hackers the opportunity to take things apart, fix, or improve upon them and to learn and understand how they work. This gives them the knowledge to create new and even more interesting things. Access aids the expansion of technology.

All information should be free

Linking directly with the principle of access, information needs to be free for hackers to fix, improve, and reinvent systems. A free exchange of information allows for greater overall creativity. In the hacker viewpoint, any system could benefit from an easy flow of information, a concept known as transparency in the social sciences. As Stallman notes, "free" refers to unrestricted access; it does not refer to price.

Mistrust authority — promote decentralization

The best way to promote the free exchange of information is to have an open system that presents no boundaries between a hacker and a piece of information or an item of equipment that he needs in his quest for knowledge, improvement, and time on-line. Hackers believe that bureaucracies, whether corporate, government, or university, are flawed systems.

Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position

Inherent in the hacker ethic is a meritocratic system where superficiality is disregarded in esteem of skill. Levy articulates that criteria such as age, sex, race, position, and qualification are deemed irrelevant within the hacker community. Hacker skill is the ultimate determinant of acceptance. Such a code within the hacker community fosters the advance of hacking and software development. In an example of the hacker ethic of equal opportunity, L. Peter Deutsch, a twelve-year-old hacker, was accepted in the TX-0 community, though he was not recognized by non-hacker graduate students.

You can create art and beauty on a computer

Hackers deeply appreciate innovative techniques which allow programs to perform complicated tasks with few instructions. A program's code was considered to hold a beauty of its own, having been carefully composed and artfully arranged. Learning to create programs which used the least amount of space almost became a game between the early hackers.

Computers can change your life for the better

Hackers felt that computers had enriched their lives, given their lives focus, and made their lives adventurous. Hackers regarded computers as Aladdin's lamps that they could control. They believed that everyone in society could benefit from experiencing such power and that if everyone could interact with computers in the way that hackers did, then the Hacker Ethic might spread through society and computers would improve the world. The hacker succeeded in turning dreams of endless possibilities into realities. The hacker's primary object was to teach society that "the world opened up by the computer was a limitless one" (Levy 230:1984)

Sharing

According to Levy's account, sharing was the norm and expected within the non-corporate hacker culture. The principle of sharing stemmed from the open atmosphere and informal access to resources at MIT. During the early days of computers and programming, the hackers at MIT would develop a program and share it with other computer users.

If the hack was particularly good, then the program might be posted on a board somewhere near one of the computers. Other programs that could be built upon it and improved it were saved to tapes and added to a drawer of programs, readily accessible to all the other hackers. At any time, a fellow hacker might reach into the drawer, pick out the program, and begin adding to it or "bumming" it to make it better. Bumming referred to the process of making the code more concise so that more can be done in fewer instructions, saving precious memory for further enhancements.

In the second generation of hackers, sharing was about sharing with the general public in addition to sharing with other hackers. A particular organization of hackers that was concerned with sharing computers with the general public was a group called Community Memory. This group of hackers and idealists put computers in public places for anyone to use. The first community computer was placed outside of Leopold's Records in Berkeley, California.

Another sharing of resources occurred when Bob Albrecht provided considerable resources for a non-profit organization called People's Computer Company (PCC). PCC opened a computer center where anyone could use the computers there for fifty cents per hour.

This second generation practice of sharing contributed to the battles of free and open software. In fact, when Bill Gates' version of BASIC for the Altair was shared among the hacker community, Gates claimed to have lost a considerable sum of money because few users paid for the software. As a result, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists. This letter was published by several computer magazines and newsletters, most notably that of the Homebrew Computer Club where much of the sharing occurred.

Hands-On Imperative

Many of the principles and tenets of Hacker Ethic contribute to a common goal: the Hands-On Imperative. As Levy described in Chapter 2, "Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and more interesting things."

Employing the Hands-On Imperative requires free access, open information, and the sharing of knowledge. To a true hacker, if the Hands-On Imperative is restricted, then the ends justify the means to make it unrestricted so that improvements can be made. When these principles are not present, hackers tend to work around them. For example, when the computers at MIT were protected either by physical locks or login programs, the hackers there systematically worked around them in order to have access to the machines. Hackers assumed a "wilful blindness" in the pursuit of perfection.

This behavior was not malicious in nature: the MIT hackers did not seek to harm the systems or their users (although occasional practical jokes were played using the computer systems). This deeply contrasts with the modern, media-encouraged image of hackers who crack secure systems in order to steal information or complete an act of cybervandalism.

Community and collaboration

Throughout writings about hackers and their work processes, a common value of community and collaboration is present. For example, in Levy's Hackers, each generation of hackers had geographically based communities where collaboration and sharing occurred. For the hackers at MIT, it was the labs where the computers were running. For the hardware hackers (second generation) and the game hackers (third generation) the geographic area was centered in Silicon Valley where the Homebrew Computer Club and the People's Computer Company helped hackers network, collaborate, and share their work.

The concept of community and collaboration is still relevant today, although hackers are no longer limited to collaboration in geographic regions. Now collaboration takes place via the Internet. Eric S. Raymond identifies and explains this conceptual shift in The Cathedral and the Bazaar:

Before cheap Internet, there were some geographically compact communities where the culture encouraged Weinberg's egoless programming, and a developer could easily attract a lot of skilled kibitzers and co-developers. Bell Labs, the MIT AI and LCS labs, UC Berkeley: these became the home of innovations that are legendary and still potent.

Raymond also notes that the success of Linux coincided with the wide availability of the World Wide Web. The value of community is still in high practice and use today.

Levy's "true hackers"

Levy identifies several "true hackers" who significantly influenced the hacker ethic. Some well-known "true hackers" include:

• John McCarthy: Co-founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Stanford AI Laboratory
• Bill Gosper: Mathematician and hacker
• Richard Greenblatt: Programmer and early designer of LISP machines
• Richard Stallman: Programmer and political activist who is well-known for GNU, Emacs and the Free Software Movement

Levy also identified the "hardware hackers" (the "second generation", mostly centered in Silicon Valley) and the "game hackers" (or the "third generation"). All three generations of hackers, according to Levy, embodied the principles of the hacker ethic. Some of Levy's "second-generation" hackers include:

• Steve Wozniak: One of the founders of Apple Computer
• Bob Marsh: A designer of the Sol-20 computer
• Fred Moore: Activist and founder of the Homebrew Computer Club
• Steve Dompier: Homebrew Computer Club member and hacker who worked with the early Altair 8800
• Lee Felsenstein: A hardware hacker and co-founder of Community Memory and Homebrew Computer Club; a designer of the Sol-20 computer

Levy's "third generation" practitioners of hacker ethic include:

• John Harris: One of the first programmers hired at On-Line Systems (which later became Sierra Entertainment)
• Ken Williams: Along with wife Roberta, founded On-Line Systems after working at IBM

Comparison to "cracker" ethics

Steven Mizrach, who identifies himself with CyberAnthropologist studies, compared Levy's "Old Hacker Ethic" with the "New Hacker Ethic" prevalent in the computer security hacking community. In his essay titled "Is there a Hacker Ethic for 90s Hackers?" he makes the controversial claim that the "New Hacker Ethic" has continuously evolved out of the older one, though having undergone a radical shift. Still, while the nature of hacker activity has evolved due to the availability of new technologies (for example, the mainstreaming of the personal computer, or the social connectivity of the internet), parts of the hacker ethics—particularly those of access, sharing, and community—remain the same.

Other descriptions

In 2001, Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen promoted the hacker ethic in opposition to the Protestant work ethic. In Himanen's opinion, the hacker ethic is more closely related to the virtue ethics found in the writings of Plato and of Aristotle. Himanen explained these ideas in a book, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, with a prologue contributed by Linus Torvalds and an epilogue by Manuel Castells.

In this manifesto, the authors wrote about a hacker ethic centering around passion, hard work, creativity and joy in creating software. Both Himanen and Torvalds were inspired by the Sampo in Finnish mythology. The Sampo, described in the Kalevala saga, was a magical artifact constructed by Ilmarinen, the blacksmith god, that brought good fortune to its holder; nobody knows exactly what it was supposed to be. The Sampo has been interpreted in many ways: a world pillar or world tree, a compass or astrolabe, a chest containing a treasure, a Byzantine coin die, a decorated Vendel period shield, a Christian relic, etc. Kalevala saga compiler Lönnrot interpreted it to be a "quern" or mill of some sort that made flour, salt, and gold out of thin air.

Influential works

The Jargon File has had a special role in acculturating hackers since its origins in the early 1970s. These academic and literary works help shaped the academic hacker subculture. Influential are:

• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy
• Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter
• The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), by Donald Knuth
• The Mythical Man-Month, by Fred Brooks
• Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools ("the Dragon Book"), by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi and Jeffrey D. Ullman
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman
• The C Programming Language (K&R), by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
• The Tao of Programming, by Geoffrey James
• The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
• Principia Discordia, by Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley
• The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder
• The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll
• The Unix System, by Stephen R. Bourne
• Hackers & Painters, by Paul Graham
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond
• The essays of Richard M. Stallman (many published in Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman)

Use outside of computing

While the word hacker to refer to someone who enjoys playful cleverness is most often applied to computer programmers, it is sometimes used for people who apply the same attitude to other fields. For example, Richard Stallman describes the silent composition 4′33″ by John Cage and the 14th century palindromic three-part piece "Ma Fin Est Mon Commencement" by Guillaume de Machaut as hacks. According to the Jargon File, the word hacker was used in a similar sense among radio amateurs in the 1950s, predating the software hacking community.

Hardware modification

Another type of hacker is one who creates novel hardware modifications. Hardware hackers are those who modify hardware (not limited to computers) to expand capabilities; this group blurs into the culture of hobbyist inventors and professional electronics engineering. A sample of such modification includes the addition of TCP/IP capabilities to a number of vending machines and coffee makers during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Hackers who have the ability to write circuit-level code, device drivers, firmware, low-level networking, (and even more impressively, using these techniques to make devices do things outside of their spec sheets), are typically in very high regard among hacker communities. This is primarily due to the difficulty and enormous complexity of this type of work, and the electrical engineering knowledge required to do so.

Hardware hacking can consist of either making new hardware, or simply modifying existing hardware (known as "modding"). Real hardware hackers perform novel and perhaps dangerous modifications to hardware, to make it suit their needs or simply to test the limits of what can be done with certain hardware.

Media hacking

Media hacking refers to the usage of various electronic media in an innovative or otherwise abnormal fashion for the purpose of conveying a message to as large a number of people as possible, primarily achieved via the World Wide Web. A popular and effective means of media hacking is posting on a blog, as one is usually controlled by one or more independent individuals, uninfluenced by outside parties. The concept of social bookmarking, as well as Web-based Internet forums, may cause such a message to be seen by users of other sites as well, increasing its total reach.

Media hacking is commonly employed for political purposes, by both political parties and political dissidents. A good example of this is the 2008 US Election, in which both the Democratic and Republican parties used a wide variety of different media in order to convey relevant messages to an increasingly Internet-oriented audience. At the same time, political dissidents used blogs and other social media like Twitter in order to reply on an individual basis to the Presidential candidates. In particular, sites like Twitter are proving important means in gauging popular support for the candidates, though the site is often used for dissident purposes rather than a show of positive support.

Mobile technology has also become subject to media hacking for political purposes. SMS has been widely used by political dissidents as a means of quickly and effectively organising smart mobs for political action. This has been most effective in the Philippines, where SMS media hacking has twice had a significant impact on whether or not the country's Presidents are elected or removed from office.

Reality hacking

Reality hacking is a term used to describe any phenomenon which emerges from the nonviolent use of illegal or legally ambiguous digital tools in pursuit of politically, socially or culturally subversive ends. These tools include website defacements, URL redirections, denial-of-service attacks, information theft, web-site parodies, virtual sit-ins, and virtual sabotage.

Art movements such as Fluxus and Happenings in the 1970s created a climate of receptibility in regard to loose-knit organizations and group activities where spontaneity, a return to primitivist behavior, and an ethics where activities and socially-engaged art practices became tantamount to aesthetic concerns.

The conflation of these two histories in the mid-to-late 1990s resulted in cross-overs between virtual sit-ins, electronic civil disobedience, denial-of-service attacks, as well as mass protests in relation to groups like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The rise of collectivies, net.art groups, and those concerned with the fluid interchange of technology and real life (often from an environmental concern) gave birth to the practice of "reality hacking".

The 1999 science fiction-action film The Matrix is most responsible for popularizing the simulation hypothesis—the suggestion that reality is in fact a simulation of which those affected by the simulants are generally unaware—and "reality hacking" as reading and understanding the code which represents the activity of the simulated reality environment but also modifying it in order to bend the laws of physics within simulated reality.

Reality hacking as a mystical practice is explored in the Gothic-Punk aesthetics-inspired White Wolf urban fantasy role-playing game Mage: The Ascension. In this game, the Reality Coders (also known as Reality Hackers or Reality Crackers) are a faction within the Virtual Adepts, a secret society of mages whose magick revolves around digital technology. They are dedicated to bringing the benefits of cyberspace to real space. To do this, they had to identify, for lack of a better term, the "source code" that allows our Universe to function. And that is what they have been doing ever since. Coders infiltrated a number of levels of society in order to gather the greatest compilation of knowledge ever seen. One of the Coders' more overt agendas is to acclimate the masses to the world that is to come. They spread Virtual Adept ideas through video games and a whole spate of "reality shows" that mimic virtual reality far more than "real" reality. The Reality Coders consider themselves the future of the Virtual Adepts, creating a world in the image of visionaries like Grant Morrison or Terence McKenna.

In a location-based game (also known as a pervasive game), reality hacking refers to tapping into phenomena that exist in the real world, and tying them into the game story universe.

Reality hacking relies on tweaking the every-day communications most easily available to individuals with the purpose of awakening the political and community conscience of the larger population. The term first came into use among New York and San Francisco artists, but has since been adopted by a school of political activists centered around culture jamming.

Hacktivism

The term hacktivism (a portmanteau of hack and activism) was first used by designer/author Jason Sack in a 1995 InfoNation article about the media artist Shu Lea Cheang. Much as hacking can mean both constructive and destructive activitites, activism similarly includes both explicitly non-violent action (from the models of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi) and violent revolutionary activities (Che Guevara). If hacking as "illegally breaking into computers" is assumed, then hacktivism could be defined as "the nonviolent use of illegal or legally ambiguous digital tools in pursuit of political ends". These tools include web site defacements, redirects, denial-of-service attacks, information theft, web site parodies, virtual sit-ins, and virtual sabotage. If hacking as "clever computer usage/programming" is assumed, then hacktivism could be understood as the writing of code to promote political ideology: promoting expressive politics, free speech, human rights, and information ethics through software development. Acts of hacktivism are carried out in the belief that proper use of code will be able to produce similar results to those produced by regular activism or civil disobedience.

Hacktivist activities span many political ideals and issues. Freenet is a prime example of translating political thought (anyone should be able to speak) into code. Hacktivismo is an offshoot of Cult of the Dead Cow; its beliefs include access to information as a basic human right. The loose network of programmers, artists and radical militants 1984 network liberty alliance is more concerned with issues of free speech, surveillance and privacy in an era of increased technological surveillance.

Hacktivism is a controversial term, and since it covers a range of passive to active and non-violent to violent activities, it can often be construed as cyberterrorism. It was coined to describe how electronic direct action might work toward social change by combining programming skills with critical thinking. Others use it as practically synonymous with malicious, destructive acts that undermine the security of the Internet as a technical, economic, and political platform.

Essentially, the controversy reflects two divergent philosophical strands within the hacktivist movement. One strand thinks that malicious cyber-attacks are an acceptable form of direct action. The other strand thinks that all protest should be peaceful, refraining from destruction.

As a principle of political activism, reality hacking takes advantage of the insight of linguists and sociologists who argue that post-twentieth-century popular culture in the advanced world has become particularly impervious to either positive or negative rethinking of community. Negative assertions about community—in the form of negative news stories and mass political protests—tend to fall on ears overloaded by daily tragedy in the news, even when the causes and facts they relate are valid and deserving. Positive reimaginings of community—in the form of utopian havens, alternative religious or political structures, or idealistic protest against the status quo—equally tend to fall upon unbelieving ears of busy individuals who have already accepted the standards, sacrifices, and limits of the reality in which they normally operate.

As an alternative to these dead ends of twentieth-century political activism, reality hacking tries to capture the attention of individuals in their normal course of regular information consumption. It may involve attracting mass media attention to an attention-getting fringe political issue more liable to generate rethinking of cultural norms than standard debates to which the public has already become jaded. Or it may involve harnessing the means of information dissemination itself, using online information sources to disseminate alternative definitions of commonly accepted facts.

Elements of hacktivism

A Haction usually has the following elements.

• Political motivation
• A premium on humor, and often resembles a digital form of clowning
• Has a moderate "outlaw orientation" as opposed to severe
• Result of aggressive policy circumvention, rather than a gradual attempt to change a policy
• Always non-violent: a haction never places another in direct danger
• Capacity for solo activity: while most forms of political activism require the strength of masses, hacktivism is most often the result of the power of one, or small group.
• Most often carried out anonymously, and can take place over transnational borders.

Forms of hacktivism

In order to carry out their operations, hacktivists use a variety of software tools readily available on the Internet. In many cases the software can be downloaded from a popular website, or launched from a website with click of a button. Some of the more well-known hacktivist tools are below:

1. Defacing Web Pages: Between 1995-1999 Attrition.org reported 5,000 website defacements. In such a scenario, the hacktivist will significantly alter the front page of a company's or governmental agency's website.
2. Web Sit-ins: In this form of hacktivism, hackers attempt to send so much traffic to the site that the overwhelmed site becomes inaccessible to other users in a variation on a denial of service. With the advent of geotagging and the ability to geo-bomb Google Earth with YouTube videos, an alternative definition of a web sit-in can be targeting a particular locale such as a government building with an overwhelming amount of geo-tagged videos.
3. E-mail Bombing: Hacktivists send scores of e-mails with large file attachments to their target's e-mail address.
4. Code: Software and websites can achieve political purposes. For example, the encryption software PGP can be used to secure communications; PGP's author, Phil Zimmermann said he distributed it first to the peace movement. Jim Warren suggests PGP's wide dissemination was in response to Senate Bill 266, authored by Senators Biden and DeConcini, which demanded that "...communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications...". WikiLeaks is an example of a politically motivated website: it seeks to "keep governments open".
5. Website Mirroring: is used as a circumvention tool to bypass censorship blocks on websites. It is a technique that copies the content of a censored website and posts it to other domains and subdomains that are not censored.
6. Geo-bombing: a technique in which netizens add a geo-tag while editing YouTube videos so that the location of the video can be displayed in Google Earth.
7. Anonymous blogging: a method of speaking out to a wide audience about human rights issues, government oppression, etc. that utilizes various web tools such as free email accounts, IP masking, and blogging software to preserve a high level of anonymity.

Notable hacktivist events

• The earliest known instance of hacktivism as documented by Julian Assange is as follows:

  Hacktivism is at least as old as October 1989 when DOE, HEPNET and SPAN (NASA) connected VMS machines world wide were penetrated by the anti-nuclear WANK worm. [...] WANK penetrated machines had their login screens altered to:

     W O R M S    A G A I N S T    N U C L E A R    K I L L E R S
   _______________________________________________________________
   \__  ____________  _____    ________    ____  ____   __  _____/
    \ \ \    /\    / /    / /\ \       | \ \  | |    | | / /    /
     \ \ \  /  \  / /    / /__\ \      | |\ \ | |    | |/ /    /
      \ \ \/ /\ \/ /    / ______ \     | | \ \| |    | |\ \   /
       \_\  /__\  /____/ /______\ \____| |__\ | |____| |_\ \_/
        \___________________________________________________/
         \                                                 /
          \    Your System Has Been Officially WANKed     /
           \_____________________________________________/

    You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.

• The first public use of DDoS as a form of protest was the Intervasion of the UK orchestrated by a group called the Zippies on Guy Fawkes Day, 1994.
• One of the earliest documented hacktivist events was the "Strano Network sit-in", defined "Netstrike", a strike action directed against French government computers in 1995.
• The term itself was coined by techno-culture writer Jason Sack in a piece about media artist Shu Lea Cheang published in InfoNation in 1995.
• On the night of Monday, 30 June 1997, at 4:30am the Portuguese hacking group UrBaN Ka0s hacked the site of the Republic of Indonesia and 25 other military and government sites as part of the hacking community campaign against the Indonesian government and the state of affairs in East Timor. This was one of the first mass hacks and the biggest in history.
• The hacking group milw0rm hacked into the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in 1998, replacing the center's website with an anti-nuclear message; the same message reappeared later that year in what was then an unprecedented mass hack by milw0rm of over 300 websites on the server of hosting company Easyspace.
• In 1998, the Electronic Disturbance Theater conducted "virtual sit-ins" on the Web sites of the Pentagon and the Mexican government to bring the world's attention to the plight of Indian rights in the Mexican state of Chiapas. A Mexican hacking group took over Mexico's finance department website in support of the same cause.
• Another one of the more notorious examples of hacktivism, and the continuation of the 1997 attacks, was the modification of more Indonesian web sites with appeals to "Free East Timor" in 1998 by Portuguese hackers.
• On December 29, 1998, the Legions of the Underground (LoU) declared cyberwar on Iraq and China with the intention of disrupting and disabling internet infrastructure. On January 7, 1999, an international coalition of hackers (including Cult of the Dead Cow, 2600's staff, Phrack's staff, L0pht, and the Chaos Computer Club) issued a joint statement condemning the LoU's declaration of war. The LoU responded by withdrawing its declaration.
• Hacktivists attempted to disrupt ECHELON (an international electronic communications surveillance network filtering any and all satellite, microwave, cellular, and fiber-optic traffic) by holding "Jam Echelon Day" (JED) on October 21, 1999. On the day, hacktivists attached large keyword lists to many messages, taking advantage of listservers and newsgroups to spread their keywords further. The idea was to give the Echelon computers so many "hits" they overloaded. It is not known whether JED was successful in actually jamming Echelon, although NSA computers were reported to have crashed "inexplicably" in early March, 2000. A second Jam Echelon Day (JEDII) was held in October 2000, however the idea never regained its initial popularity. JED was partly denial-of-service attack and partly agitprop.
• The Federation of Random Action calls for a virtual sit-in on Occidental Petroleum in support of the U’wa’s protest against drilling on indigenous land during 2001.
• The Electronic Disturbance Theater and others staged a week of disruption during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, conducting sit-ins against Republican web sites and flooding web sites and communication systems identified with conservative causes. This received mixed reviews from the hacktivist community.
• The Hackbloc collective started publishing Hack This Zine, a hacktivist research journal
• Hacktivists worked to slow, block, or reroute traffic for web servers associated with the World Trade Organization, the World Economic Forum, and the World Bank.
• Throughout 2006, Electronic Disturbance Theater joined the borderlands Hacklab for a number of virtual sit-ins, against the massacre in Atenco, in solidarity with striking French students and against the Minutemen and immigration laws.
• On March 25, 2007, hacktivists organized the event freEtech in response to the O'Reilly Etech conference, and started a series of West coast hackmeetings.
• Electronic Disturbance Theater stages a virtual sit-in against the Michigan Legislature against cuts to Medicaid.
• On January 21, 2008, a message appeared on YouTube from a group calling itself 'Anonymous'. The group declared "Project Chanology", essentially a war on The Church of Scientology, and promised to systematically expel The Church from the internet. Over the following week, Scientology websites were intermittently knocked offline, and the Church of Scientology moved its website to a host that specializes in protection from denial-of-service attacks.
• A computer hacker leaks the personal data of 6 million Chileans (including ID card numbers, addresses, telephone numbers and academic records) from government and military servers to the internet, to protest Chile's poor data protection.
• Throughout early 2008, Chinese hackers have hacked the CNN website on numerous occasions in response to the protests during the 2008 Olympic Torch Relay and claims of biased reporting from western media. The majority of the DDoS attacks took place between March and August, at a time where Chinese nationalistic pride was at an all time high due to the 2008 Olympic Games.
• Electronic Disturbance Theater and the Hacklab stage a virtual sit-in against the war on Iraq and biotech and nanotech war profiteers, on the 5 year anniversary of the war, in solidarity with widespread street actions.
• Intruders hacked the website of commentator Bill O'Reilly and posted personal details of more than 200 of its subscribers, in retaliation for remarks O'Reilly made on Fox News condemning the attack on Palin's Yahoo email account.
• In 2008 hacktivists developed a communications and monitoring system for the 2008 RNC protests called Tapatio.
• In early 2009, the Israeli invasion of Gaza motivated a number of website defacements, denial-of-service attacks, and domain name and account hijackings, from both sides. These attacks are notable in being amongst the first ever politically-motivated domain name hijackings.
• During the 2009 Iranian election protests, Anonymous played a role in disseminating information to and from Iran by setting up the website Anonymous Iran; they also released a video manifesto to the Iranian government.
• On August 1, 2009, the Melbourne International Film Festival was forced to shut down its website after DDoS attacks by Chinese vigilantes, in response to Rebiya Kadeer's planned guest appearance, the screening of a film about her which is deemed "anti-China" by Chinese state media, and strong sentiments following the July 2009 Ürümqi riots. The hackers booked out all film sessions on its website, and replaced festival information with the Chinese flag and anti-Kadeer slogans.
• August 24, 2009, New Hacktivism: From Electronic Civil Disobedience to Mixed Reality Performance workshop at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics led by Micha Cárdenas in Bogotá, Colombia.
• In November 2009, computers of the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University were hacked, and email purporting to expose a conspiracy by scientists to suppress data that contradicted their conclusions regarding global warming was made available on a Russian FTP server.
• On February 10, 2010, Anonymous DDoS-attacked Australian government websites against the Australian governments attempt to filter the Internet.
• On July 23, 2010, European Climate Exchange's website was targeted by hacktivists operating under the name of decocidio #ϴ. The website showed a spoof homepage for around 22 hours in an effort to promote the contention that carbon trading is a false solution to the climate crisis.
• On December 8, 2010, the websites of both Mastercard and Visa were the subject of an attack by hacktivist group Anonymous, reacting to the two companies' decision to stop processing payments to the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, following a series of leaks by the site. Mastercard said the attack had no impact on people's ability to use their cards, though there were claims by an unnamed payment firm that their customers had experience a complete loss of service. Anonymous was later blamed for the DDoS attacks on om.nl and politie.nl (Dutch government websites).
• In January 2011, the websites of the government of Zimbabwe were targeted by anonymous due to censorship of the Wikileaks documents.
• In January 2011, Anonymous launches DDOS attacks against the Tunisian government websites due to censorship of the Wikileaks documents and the 2010–2011 Tunisian protests. Tunisians were reported to be assisting in these denial-of-service attacks launched by Anonymous. Anonymous released an online message denouncing the government clampdown on recent protests. Anonymous has named their attacks as "Operation Tunisia". Anonymous successfully ddossed eight Tunisian government websites. They plan attacks in Internet Relay Chat networks. Someone attacked Anonymous's website with a ddos on January 5.
• In January 2011, Anonymous, in response to the 2011 Egyptian protests, attacked Egyptian government websites and voiced support for the people of Egypt.
• Google worked with engineers from SayNow and Twitter to provide communications for the Egyptian people in response to the government sanctioned internet blackout during the 2011 protests. The result, Speak To Tweet, was a service in which voicemail left by phone was then tweeted via Twitter with a link to the voice message on Google's SayNow.
• During the Egyptian internet black out, Jan 28- Feb 2 of 2011, Telecomix provided dial up services, and technical support for the Egyptian people.
• On April 20 2011, hackers took down Sony's PlayStation Network. Anonymous was suspected of hacking PSN for their previous threats to Sony for suing Geohotz, who jailbroke the PlayStation 3 but they later claimed that they didn't. Afterwards, a group of hackers claimed to have 2.2 million credit card numbers from PSN users for sale.

Controversy

Some people describing themselves as hacktivists have taken to defacing websites for political reasons, such as attacking and defacing government websites as well as web sites of groups who oppose their ideology. Others, such as Oxblood Ruffin (the "foreign affairs minister" of Hacktivismo), have argued forcefully against definitions of hacktivism that include web defacements or denial-of-service attacks. Within the hacking community, those who carry out automated attacks are generally known as script kiddies.

Critics suggest that DoS attacks are an attack on free speech; that they have unintended consequences; that they waste resources; and that they could lead to a "DoS war" that nobody will win. In 2006, Blue Security attempted to automate a DoS attack against spammers; this led to a massive DoS attack against Blue Security which knocked them, their old ISP and their DNS provider off the internet, destroying their business.

Following denial-of-service attacks by Anonymous on multiple sites, in reprisal for the apparent suppression of Wikileaks, John Perry Barlow, a founding member of the EFF, said "I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target... they're the poison gas of cyberspace...".

Depending on who is using the term, hacktivism can be a politically constructive form of anarchic civil disobedience or an undefined anti-systemic gesture; it can signal anticapitalist or political protest; it can denote anti-spam activists, security experts, or open source advocates. Critics of hacktivism fear that the lack of a clear agenda makes it a politically immature gesture, while those given to conspiracy theory hope to see in hacktivism an attempt to precipitate a crisis situation online.

Art

Hacker artists create art by hacking on technology as an artistic medium. Such artists may work with graphics, computer hardware, sculpture, music and other audio, animation, video, software, simulations, mathematics, reactive sensory systems, text, poetry, literature, or any combination thereof.

Dartmouth College musician Larry Polansky states: "Technology and art are inextricably related. Many musicians, video artists, graphic artists, and even poets who work with technology—whether designing it or using it—consider themselves to be part of the 'hacker community.' Computer artists, like non-art hackers, often find themselves on society’s fringes, developing strange, innovative uses of existing technology. There is an empathetic relationship between those, for example, who design experimental music software and hackers who write communications freeware."

Another description is offered by Jenny Marketou: "Hacker artists operate as culture hackers who manipulate existing techno-semiotic structures towards a different end, to get inside cultural systems on the net and make them do things they were never intended to do."

A successful software and hardware hacker artist is Mark Lottor (mkl), who has created the 3-D light art projects entitled the Cubatron, and the Big Round Cubatron. This art is made using custom computer technology, with specially designed circuit boards and programming for microprocessor chips to manipulate the LED lights.

Don Hopkins is a software hacker artist well-known for his artistic cellular automata. This art, created by a cellular automata computer program, generates objects which randomly bump into each other and in turn create more objects and designs, similar to a lava lamp, except that the parts change color and form through interaction. Says Hopkins, "Cellular automata are simple rules that are applied to a grid of cells, or the pixel values of an image. The same rule is applied to every cell, to determine its next state, based on the previous state of that cell and its neighboring cells. There are many interesting cellular automata rules, and they all look very different, with amazing animated dynamic effects. 'Life' is a widely known cellular automata rule, but many other lesser known rules are much more interesting."

Some hacker artists create art by writing computer code, and others, by developing hardware. Some create with existing software tools such as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP.

The creative process of hacker artists can be more abstract than artists using non-technological media. For example, mathematicians have produced visually stunning graphic presentations of fractals, which hackers have further enhanced, often producing detailed and intricate graphics and animations from simple mathematical formulas.

Media

• 
  Bubbles was created using watercolors, then scanned into a computer. Colors were then manipulated using a software imaging tool
• 
  Sunrise was created using pen and ink, then scanned into a computer and colored with a software imaging tool
• 
  Rolling Golden Hills of California was created using pencil, scanned, and then painted with a software imaging tool
• 
  Barnsley's fern, a fractal fern computed using an iterated function system
• 
  A fractal that models the surface of a mountain

See also

• Blue box
• Brad Templeton
• Burning Man Festival
• Case modding
• Citizen Lab
• Crypto-anarchism
• Cypherpunk
• Demoscene
• E-democracy
• Experiments in Art and Technology
• Firmware upgrading
• Generative art
• HackThisSite
• History of free software
• Internet activism
• Internet art
• Karl Sims
• Leonard H. Tower Jr.
• LulzSec
• Make (magazine)
• Open source government
• Overclocking
• Pamela Z
• Patriot hacking
• Robotic art
• SITO
• Software art
• Steve Mann
• Tactical media
• The Jester (hacktivist)
• Unix philosophy

Further reading

• Bohan, S. (2005). "Media Hacking". SeanBohan.com. Retrieved February 9, 2007.
• Heavens, A. (2005). "Hacking Baby Cheetahs and Hunger Strikes". Meskel Square. Retrieved February 9, 2007.
• Himanen, Pekka (2001). The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. ISBN 0-375-50566-0. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |publihser= ignored (|publisher= suggested) (help)
• Levy, Steven (1984, 2001). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (updated edition ed.). Penguin. ISBN 0141000511. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help); Check date values in: |year= (help)
• Weinberg, Gerald M. (1998, 2001). The psychology of computer programming (Silver anniversary ed.). New York, NY: Dorset House Publ. ISBN 978-0932633422. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)

External links

• A Brief History of Hackerdom
• The Reality Hacker
• realityhacking.com
• Fravia's Reality Cracking Lab
• Hacktivismo's Projects Page
• Hacktivism and the Future of Political Participation
• What is Hacktivism?
• Hacktivism and Politically Motivated Computer Crime
• Wikileaks defended by Anonymous hacktivists BBC News, 7 December 2010
• Tom Chance's essay on The Hacker Ethic and Meaningful Work
• Hacker ethic from the Jargon file
• ITERATIVE DISCOURSE AND THE FORMATION OF NEW SUBCULTURES by Steve Mizrach
• Is there a Hacker Ethic for 90s Hackers? by Steven Mizrach
• The Hacker's Ethics by the Cyberpunk Project
• Cellular Automata by Don Hopkins
• Evolved Virtual Creatures
• Hacker Artists Studios on Art.Net
• "Vector in Open Space" by Gerfried Stocker 1996
• Switch|Journal Jun 14 1998
• Eye Weekly "Tag -- who's it?" by Ingrid Hein, July 16, 1998
• Linux Today "Playing the Open Source Game" by Shawn Hargreaves, Jul 5, 1999
• Canterbury Christ Church University Library Resources by Subject: Art & Design, 2001
• SuperCollider Workshop / Seminar
• Anthony Barker's Weblog on Linux, Technology and the Economy "Why Geeks Love Linux", Sept 2003
• Live Art Research Gesture and Response in Field-Based Performance
• Cool Web Page Tools "Color Sequencer" by Paul Slocum, July 2005