mindvox.txt

黑客培训教程

       revolution around us, the state of the universe and everything in
       it, and a general time of catching up on who had done  what.   It
       was  a strange situation, since we really had disappeared, to the
       extent that most of us had not talked with one another in  years,
       it  was almost as if picking up the phone and speaking with some-
       one from back then would bring back all the bad things  you  were
       trying to get rid of.

       Out of this gathering, I found about a  dozen  people  who  I  no
       longer  knew.   People who had become submerged in drugs, and be-
       come lost in different sub-cultures where  they  could  live  out
       reasonable facsimiles of their childhoods forevermore; people who
       had completely lost touch with what they used to be,  and  become
       stereotypical  examples  of  what  people  tend to term "computer
       geeks," the sum total of their interest in life having been  nar-
       rowed  down  to that new bug in X windows client-server architec-
       ture and what it would mean to the future of the OSF; people  who
       hadn't  changed  at all and were still busy "getting over" on so-
       ciety   in   general;  but   perhaps  most  surprising,  I  found
       that about ten people I used to know had gone  through  a  growth
       process very similar to my own, and actually succeeded in solving
       their quest and winning the prize we had all sought so badly.

       The correct solution to the "quest," is of course, that there  is
       no  solution.   There  is nothing you are looking for, except for
       you, and once you realize this, you win the big prize,  you  find
       yourself, and get to live happily ever after.

       After re-discovering that a group of us seemed to thoroughly  en-
       joy  each other's company, we eventually ended up having a weekly
       meeting where we'd  get  together  and  discuss  various  topics.
       Foremost  amongst them was one that sprung up with increasing re-
       gularity as the weeks went by:  getting back  onto  the  frontier
       from  a  completely different angle.  As years went by many of us
       had started completely different lives;  some  were  in  college,
       others  had  started companies or gone to work for companies they
       had once laughed at, and still more had started careers complete-
       ly unrelated to anything they had been doing in the past.  But it
       had became clear that what we really wanted to do  was  take  the
       incredible  promise  that  had  been shown to us during our youth
       when we had walked along the edge of a new reality unfolding, and
       channel  it  into  a positive direction that would benefit every-
       body.

       As we found out, the hacker underground had  continued  with  its
       headlong  dive  into  oblivion.   The  underground  had basically
       ceased to exist after the Operation Sun Devil sweep.  Just  about
       the  only "hacker systems" still in existence were those catering
       to the teenagers whose priorities focused on  ripping  off  phone
       companies, collecting VMB codes and pirating software.

       While this was slightly depressing, it was also a  foregone  con-
       clusion  and  didn't  cause too much surprise.  The main focus of
       our interest was what had become of the mainstream telecommunica-
       tions nets -- given half a decade to evolve, something really ex-
       citing must have happened by now.  The hardware that we ended  up
       sitting  in  front  of,  would have made possible an undreamed of
       variety of possibility when taken  into  context  with  what  was
       available in the past.  We were used to 64K Apple ][+ systems, or
       maybe tricked out //e's with 128K and PC's with 640K, and now  we
       were  sitting  at  a friend's house in front of a NeXT and an SGI
       Indigo.  When you thought about the fact that 7 years ago you had
       paid about $8,500 for a 4.5megabyte Corvus hard disk, and now you
       could buy an entire NeXT with that . . . it was, fantastic.

       Before taking off on our expedition of present-day Cyberspace, we
       had  spoken  with  some of our friends who were familiar with the
       terrain, and received somewhat  tepid  responses  and  a  general
       dismissal  of what was going on right now.  Thinking the attitude
       was one of standard arrogance which we had all gone  through,  we
       didn't  pay  too  much attention to it and set out to explore the
       new electronic nervous system of the world.

       A couple of hours later it became shockingly apparent  that  most
       of  the potential of the bright new technology that now existed .
       . . that could have been used to create and house an infinite ex-
       panse  of  innovation, communication, and pooling of thought, lay
       dormant.  Thus far it had seemingly been  utilized  to  construct
       gigantic file servers that advertised their existence by digitiz-
       ing porno magazines and  editing  their  dialup  lines  into  the
       resulting scan.

       All those wonderful places that we had travelled in the past, and
       had  dominated  the landscape only half a decade before . . . had
       indeed been razed, paved over, and replaced by an  endless  elec-
       tronic  expanse  of  snap-together tract houses that littered the
       landscape with numbingly identical  systems.   The  frontier  had
       packed  up  and moved back into labs where people like our friend
       with the workstations were working on applications that  wouldn't
       see  the light of day for another decade.  And what was out there
       right now, was strikingly similar to a generic suburb of AnyTown,
       USA.

       Objectively a suburb is not a bad thing, it's planned out,  logi-
       cal, it works, it doesn't need to be any different from any other
       suburb . . . in short, it's functional.  It's also very different
       from  the  environment we had grown up in, where everything was a
       new step further out into the unknown, where anything could  hap-
       pen, and nobody had ever been there before.

       From our vantage point it looked as if the explorers  had  indeed
       gone  back to their ivory towers (or haunted dungeons as the case
       may be), and a lot of used car salesmen had set up shop  cranking
       out the snap-together tract houses, when they realized they could
       make more money doing that, than say, selling used cars.

       It was truly a mind blowing experience to witness for  the  first
       time,  systems that actually advertised themselves based upon how
       many lines they had, or how much storage.  Attitudes  that  would
       have  garnered  a great deal of scorn and derision -- and in gen-
       eral made your advertisement the brunt of a lot of jokes --  were
       suddenly the accepted way in which systems chose to differentiate
       themselves from one another.  Looking at them, it  came  down  to
       the  fact  that the only difference between system (A) and system
       (B) was that one might have 16 lines while the other had 24,  and
       system (C) was inherently superior to both (a) and (b) because it
       had 32 lines and 4 gigabytes of storage  (used  to  house  10,000
       programs,  out of which the same 200 are downloaded over and over
       again, as the rest of the junk sits there gathering dust).

       Even more frightening, on a system that had  10,000  messages  on
       it,  an  average  of  9,800  will be echoes of FidoNet or RIME or
       whatever-net, leaving a grand total of about  200  messages  from
       the  actual members.  And frequently those 200 messages date back
       a year and a half . . . a couple of years ago a BAD one line sys-
       tem  had that many messages in a week.  A good one in a couple of
       hours.

       To a lot of people Cyberspace has become one big file server .  .
       .  strikingly  similar  to what television has devolved into.  An
       entirely passive place where you press  buttons  and  get  enter-
       tained, no thought required, no input necessary.

       Realizing that we were merely skimming the surface, and might not
       know  the  whole story, we spent a couple of weeks becoming fami-
       liar with what had happened, and what the situation  really  was.
       Based  upon several hundred conversations with various people who
       were involved with the current scene, we arrived at a  couple  of
       very basic conclusions.

       In order to run a system in the  present  environment,  and  have
       users,  you  needed to have a pile of hardware, many phone lines,
       some sort of marketing and bookkeeping ability, a  lot  of  spare
       time, coupled with infinite patience to put up with people, since
       they are now your customers, not just your friends, and  if  they
       call  you  up asking the same goofy questions you cannot take the
       phone off the hook or tell them to go away.

       Where running a system in the  past  had  meant  giving  up  your
       second phone line, it presently involved a great deal of interac-
       tion with the department of Red Tape, and  Bureau  of  Tasks  You
       Really  Aren't Interested In.  This opened the door to the "used-
       car salesmen" people, since these were things they were  used  to
       doing  every day.  Conversely, it has almost universally been our
       experience that the guy who is a Unix wizard and can  work  magic
       with networking and programming, lives in deathly fear of signing
       paperwork, filling out his tax returns, or figuring out where  he
       parked  his car.  And finally, the creative person whose main in-
       terest is making fantastic places, lacks the time and patience to
       write  the  code, and certainly has no interest in administrative
       duties.

       In effect, most people with the desire to  do  something  better,
       did  not  have  the  necessary $25-30k laying around, and even if
       they did, they would never act on it because they'd be forced  to
       spend  a great deal of their time doing a hundred things they had
       no interest in doing.  So the online world had begun to  be  dom-
       inated by the file servers, who didn't really have much of an in-
       terest in being anything other than file servers, since that made
       the  most  money  with the least effort, and anybody with $25,000
       could toss up a snap-together MeSsyDOS  based  system  with  very
       little technical ability required.

       Thus began the era of the "tract-houses"  where  advertising  and
       atmosphere  consisted  of  rattling  off  hardware statistics and
       number of phone lines, along with the number  of  shareware  pro-
       grams  available  for  downloading (an extremely amusing concept,
       considering that there are literally TERABYTES of  free  software
       available  for  the  taking  on  ftp sites all over the Internet,
       which cost NOTHING to download from).

       With the exception of two of three bright  lights  that  had  the
       right idea and were trying to do something different, most of the
       electronic frontier had indeed vanished.  And it isn't so hard to
       see  where  a couple of years from now the same advertising agen-
       cies that sell brain-dead ads designed to induce you to crave one
       brand  of beer over another, will be pushing SYSTEM X, because IT
       HAS 10,000 phone lines!  Call now and  leave  your  mind  at  the
       door!


       Transcendence
       -------------

       It has generally been our experience that people are neither stu-
       pid,  nor shallow.  Everyone has the potential to think for them-
       selves, to overcome adverse situations, and contribute  something
       to this world.  When placed in situations that offer these possi-
       bilities, people tend to come through with surprising regularity.
       In  a fairly short amount of time you end up with a group of peo-
       ple doing something they themselves would have deemed improbable,
       if  not  downright impossible, if you had asked them at any other
       point in their lives.

       Virtual Reality has the potential to become the single  most  im-
       portant  development  in the history of human evolution.  It is a
       technology that holds the promise  of  absolute  liberation.   It
       also  holds  the possibility of turning the world into the rather
       grim one that is the basis of  much  Cyberpunk  fiction,  a  dark
       place where technology is used to oppress and suppress people.

       By its very nature, it is very  difficult  to  ever  imagine  the
       latter.   In  order  to  have a police state, you need to amass a
       certain amount of power, yet Cyberspace is the ultimate  equaliz-
       er.   It  is  a place where one person can wield as much power as
       100, 1,000, or 100,000 people.   Physical  limitations  are  cast