Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

On the other hand, Noftsker was in charge, dammit, and part of his job waskeeping people out of locked areas and keeping confidential information private.He would bluster, he would threaten, he would upgrade locks and order safes, buthe knew that ultimately he could not prevail by force. Naive as the thought was inthe Real World, hackers believed that property rights were nonexistent. As far asthe ninth floor was concerned, that was indeed the case. The hackers could get intoanything, as Noftsker graphically saw one day when a new safe with a twenty-fourhourpick-proof lock arrived and someone inadvertently closed the safe and spunthe dial before Noftsker got the combination from the manufacturer. One of thehackers who was a registered locksmith volunteered to help out, and had the safeopen in twenty minutes.So what was Noftsker to do?"Erecting barriers [would raise] the level of the challenge," Noftsker would laterexplain. "So the trick was to sort of have an unspoken agreement that. This line,imaginary as it may be, is off limits' to give the people who felt they had to havesome privacy and security the sense that they really had some privacy and security.And if someone violated those limits, the violation would be tolerated as long asno one knew about it. Therefore if you gained something by crawling over the wallto get into my office, you had to never say anything about it."Unilateral disarmament. Give the hackers free rein to go where they wanted in theirexplorations, take what they wanted to aid them in their electronic meanderingsand computer-science jam sessions ... as long as they didn't go around boastinghow the bureaucratic emperor had no clothes. That way, Noftsker and theadministration he represented could maintain some dignity while the hackers couldpretend the administration did not exist. They went wherever they wanted, enteringoffices by traveling in the crawl space created by the low-hanging artificial ceiling,removing a ceiling tile, and dropping into their destinations commandos withpencil-pals in their shirt pockets. One hacker hurt his back one night when theceiling collapsed and he fell into Minsky's office. But more often, the onlyevidence Noftsker would find was the occasional footprint on his wall. And, ofcourse, sometimes he would enter his locked office and discover a hacker dozingon the sofa.Some people, though, never could tolerate the Hacker Ethic. Apparently, one ofthese was the machine shop craftsman Bill Bennett. Though he was a TMRCmember, he was by no means a hacker: his allegiance was not to the Signals &Power faction, but to what Gosper called the "Let's-Build-Precise-Little-Miniature-Physical-Devices Subculture." He was a good old boy from Marietta, Georgia, andhad a near-religious respect for his tools. His homeland tradition thought of tools as