This is incredible to read n many years later. I was a per-pubescent adolescent around the time of the publication of the "last great zines", and was only ever really exposed to a small subsection (HTP5, the MIT.edu and Linode incidents) through several mutual friends of mine who were, at the time, enthusiasts of and in the scene.
That era and community was without a doubt the foundation for who I am today as a young adult, and who I strive to be in all aspects of life. I have and no doubt will continue to consume all of this content I may have missed out on since then.
P.S. If I may call your attention to volume 0x0f, 0x45, part A of section 6 (Notes); wow. This, along with everything else, is enormously prophetic, profound, and intriguin:
"--[ 6 - Notes
A) In respect to social networks, while they are a valid community-building
mechanism in nature, selfishness prevails in common usage, by means of the
indulgent pleasure that fuels chronic "pluggedness", at times voyeur, at
times exhibitionist and needy."
Money killed hacker groups, I suppose the rise of cryptocurrency is to blame for dealing the final blow.
Almost all of us involved in the creation of HTP5 were children, few of us cared about money. It didn’t seem attainable at the time anyway, just something fraudsters from third world countries dealt with.
I think bitcoin changed this, now there’s a clear mechanism that enables anyone to profit from their crimes without having real life contacts or dealing with insecure services like liberty reserve.
If I were to get root@Linode again I’d certainly have far more lucrative targets in mind than rival IRC networks.
The great blackhats from groups like Ac1db1tch3z became billionaires by hacking bitcoin exchanges. It’s obvious why nobody is making zines anymore. The hackers claiming to not care about money were almost without exception children or just pretending to not care because they didn’t have the answer to “how?”.
You didn't have anything to contribute to HTP5, and you also didn't have root at Linode. My contention is that hacking groups were killed because of informants, such as the one we mentioned at the end of the Linode section. Thoughts?
I think you are not who you claim to be. If you are, you should know better.
I never said I got root at Linode, but I did have root at Linode.
FWIW I dumped all the MIT, nmap and Sucuri data in HTP5 and popped the shells on swiftircd boxes (who IIRC ended up being the first ones to alert linode to our presence). It’s not any kind of an achievement, but hard to claim I wasn’t deeply involved.
As far as I know none of the stuff about informants in the Linode section was true. I don’t think anyone got hacked and had their handler standing behind them, at least I never heard more of that story. Ryan King and Rory Guidry continued their involvement with HTP long after the Linode stuff.
Did informants kill hacker groups? I don’t think so. FBI infiltration of hacker groups predates the death of hacker groups by well over a decade, it never stopped anyone.
You were given logins to accounts, never Linode. Then you leaked zine material and were banned. I do know better. Bet you still don't even patch your bots, scrublord. Cancel your internet service before you get yourself locked up again.
Also if you didn't care about money, what do you call "Lizard Stresser"? Or a short trip through your comment history: "There’s me, a frequent traveller who uses UberLUX 4+ times a day, spending more than 5000GBP/mo.".
I had fuZe on the linode control panel, I dumped all their web sources and db. You can confirm as much from the public #linode logs.
>Also if you didn't care about money
I’ve never pretended to not care about money. Those who claimed to not care were either just children or unable to answer “how?”.
Take XiX for example, someone who always claimed to not give a fuck about money seems to be working on his second(?) startup now. In the end, everyone cares about money.
That era and community was without a doubt the foundation for who I am today as a young adult, and who I strive to be in all aspects of life. I have and no doubt will continue to consume all of this content I may have missed out on since then.
P.S. If I may call your attention to volume 0x0f, 0x45, part A of section 6 (Notes); wow. This, along with everything else, is enormously prophetic, profound, and intriguin:
"--[ 6 - Notes
A) In respect to social networks, while they are a valid community-building mechanism in nature, selfishness prevails in common usage, by means of the indulgent pleasure that fuels chronic "pluggedness", at times voyeur, at times exhibitionist and needy."
- http://phrack.org/issues/69/6.html