Hacker Culture A to Z: A Fun Guide to the People, Ideas, and Gadgets That Made the Tech World

Hacker culture can be esoteric, but this entertaining reference is here to help. Written by longtime cybersecurity researcher and writer Kim Crawley, this fun reference introduces you to key people and companies, fundamental ideas, and milestone films, games, and magazines in the annals of hacking. From airgapping to phreaking to zombie malware, grasping the terminology is crucial to understanding hacker culture and history. If you're just getting started on your hacker journey, you'll find plenty here to guide your learning and help you understand the references and cultural allusions you come across. More experienced hackers will find historical depth, wry humor, and surprising facts about familiar cultural touchstones. • Understand the relationship between hacker culture and cybersecurity • Get to know the ideas behind the hacker ethos, like "knowledge should be free" • Explore topics and publications central to hacker culture, including 2600 Magazine • Appreciate the history of cybersecurity • Learn about key figures in the history of hacker culture • Understand the difference between hackers and cybercriminals Copyright 4 Table of Contents 7 Preface 9 Conventions Used in This Book 10 O’Reilly Online Learning 10 How to Contact Us 11 Acknowledgments 11 Chapter 1. A 13 Abacus 13 Abandonware 14 Activision 14 Adleman, Leonard 15 Advanced persistent threat (APT) 16 Agile methodology 17 Airgapping 17 Akihabara, Tokyo 18 Alderson, Elliot 19 Alphabet Inc. 20 Amazon Web Services (AWS) 20 AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) 21 Amiga 21 Android operating system 22 Anonymous 23 Apache/Apache License 24 Apple 25 ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) 27 ARPAnet 28 Artificial intelligence (AI) 29 Assange, Julian 29 Assembly 31 Atari 33 Atlus 35 Augmented and virtual reality 36 Autistic 37 AWS 38 Azure 38 Chapter 2. B 41 Babbage, Charles 41 Baer, Ralph 41 bash 42 BASIC 43 BBS 43 Bell Labs 43 Berkeley, University of California 44 Berners-Lee, Tim 45 Binary 47 BitTorrent 48 Blockchain 48 Botnet 48 Bug 48 Bulletin board systems (BBSes) 49 Byte magazine 50 Chapter 3. C 51 Calce, Michael “MafiaBoy” 51 Cama, Amat 52 Captain Crunch (John Draper) 53 Capture the Flag 54 Carnegie Mellon University 55 Carr, Iris 56 The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999 book) 56 Certificates (cryptography) 57 Certificates (professional credentials) 58 ChatGPT 59 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 61 CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity, availability) 61 CISSP 62 C languages 62 Cleartext 62 Closed source software 63 Cloud 63 Comic-Con 64 Commodore 65 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) 67 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 68 Copyleft 69 CPU (Central processing unit) 69 Cray, Seymour 70 Creative Commons licenses 70 Crunch time 71 Cryptocurrency 72 Cryptography 74 Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) 77 Cyberpunk 78 Cybersecurity 79 Chapter 4. D 81 Dark.Fail 81 Dark Web/darknet 81 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) 82 Data 84 Da Vinci, Leonardo 84 Debian 86 DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) 87 Deep Web 88 DEF CON 89 Demoscene 90 Denial-of-service (DoS, DDoS) attacks 91 Developers 92 DevOps 92 Diffie, Whitfield 93 Diffie-Hellman key exchange 94 Disk, disc 95 DOOM (video game) 95 DOS (Disk Operating System) 95 Draper, John 97 Dread forums 97 DRM (Digital Rights Management) 98 Dungeons & Dragons (game franchise) 99 Chapter 5. E 103 Electronic Arts 103 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 104 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) 105 Electronics 105 Emacs 107 Email 108 ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) 108 Enigma 110 “Ethical” hacking 110 Exploit 111 Chapter 6. F 113 Facebook 113 Fairchild Semiconductor 113 Floppy disk 115 Form factor 116 Freenet 116 Free Software Foundation (FSF) 117 Freeware 117 FUD 117 Chapter 7. G 119 Game Developers Conference (GDC) 119 Gates, Bill 119 Gibson, William 122 Git/GitHub 122 GNOME 123 GNU (software collection) 124 Go 124 Goldstein, Emmanuel 124 Google 124 Google Cloud Platform (GCP) 126 Governance 127 Graphical user interface (GUI) 127 Chapter 8. H 129 Hacker 129 Hackers (1995 film) 130 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (2010 book) 131 Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) 132 Hacking Is Not a Crime 132 Hack the Box 133 Hacktivism 133 Hak5 134 Ham radio 134 Hardware 136 Hellman, Martin 136 Hello World 138 Hewlett-Packard (HP) 139 Hexadecimal numbering 141 Hidden Figures (2017 film) 142 Homebrew Computer Club 144 Hopper, Grace 144 HTML (HyperText Markup Language) 146 Chapter 9. I 147 IBM 147 Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST); Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) 149 Industrial control systems 151 Integrated development environment (IDE) 151 Intel 152 Intellectual property 153 Internet 153 Invisible Internet Project (I2P) 154 IRC (Internet Relay Chat) 155 Chapter 10. J 157 Jack, Barnaby 157 Jackson, Mary 158 Java 158 JavaScript 158 Jobs, Steve 158 Johnson, Katherine Coleman 161 Joy, Bill 161 Chapter 11. K 163 Kali Linux 163 Key 164 Keyboard 165 Chapter 12. L 167 Lamarr, Hedy 167 Larsson, Stieg 168 Lawson, Jerry 168 Levy, Steven 169 Linux 169 Lovelace, Ada 172 LulzSec 174 Chapter 13. M 175 Macintosh 175 macOS 175 Malware 175 Manning, Chelsea 176 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 178 Meta 179 Metasploit Framework 181 Microcomputers 181 Microsoft 182 Minicomputers 184 Mitnick, Kevin 184 Miyamoto, Shigeru 186 MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) games 187 Moore’s law 187 Morse code 188 Mr. Robot (TV show) 189 MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) 190 Multics 190 Chapter 14. N 191 Napster 191 National Air and Space Administration (NASA) 191 National Security Agency (NSA) 191 Networking 191 NeXT Computer 192 Nihon Falcom 192 Nintendo 193 Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) 194 NVIDIA 196 Chapter 15. O 197 OpenAI 197 Open source 197 Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) 198 Operating systems 199 Operational security 199 Chapter 16. P 201 Packet switching 201 Page, Larry 202 PEBKAC 203 Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks 203 Penetration testing 204 PGP 204 Personal computers 204 Phishing 206 Phreaking 206 Ping 207 Piracy 208 Pirate Bay/Pirate Party 209 Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999 film) 210 Pizza 211 Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) 211 Programming 212 Proprietary software 212 Proxy networks 213 Python 213 Chapter 17. Q 215 Quantum computing 215 Chapter 18. R 217 Radio 217 RadioShack 217 Ramachandran, Vivek 218 Ransomware 219 Raspberry Pi 219 README files 220 Reddit 220 Red Hat 221 Ritchie, Dennis 222 Rivest, Ron 222 Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) cryptography 223 Robotics 224 Roleplaying games (RPGs) 225 Chapter 19. S 227 Sakura, Futaba 227 Salander, Lisbeth 227 SCADA (Supervisory control and data acquisition) 228 Schneier, Bruce 228 Script kiddie 229 Search engines 229 Sega 229 Semiconductors 231 Shamir, Adi 231 Shareware/freeware/abandonware 231 Signal (messaging app) 232 Silicon Valley 232 Silk Road 233 Smartphone 234 Snowden, Edward 235 Social media 236 Spyware 236 Stallman, Richard 237 Stanford University 238 Startups 239 Steam 239 Stuxnet 240 Sun Microsystems 241 Supercomputers 241 Swartz, Aaron 243 Syntax 244 Chapter 20. T 247 TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) 247 Tech Model Railroad Club 248 Telephones 249 Texas Instruments 250 Thompson, Ken 250 Threat actor 251 Timesharing 251 Tokyo Denki University 253 Tor (The Onion Router) 253 Torvalds, Linus 254 Tramiel, Jack 255 Transistor 255 Tribe of Hackers 255 Turing, Alan 256 2600 (Twenty-Six Hundred): The Hacker Quarterly (magazine) 258 Twitter 260 Chapter 21. U 261 UNIX 261 Unreal Engine 261 Usenet 262 Chapter 22. V 265 Valve 265 Vaughan, Dorothy 265 Version control 265 vi 265 Video games 266 Virtual reality (VR) 266 Virus 266 VisiCalc 268 Chapter 23. W 269 Wardialing 269 Wardriving 269 WarGames (1983 film) 269 Watch_Dogs (video game series) 270 Waterloo, University of 270 Whiteboard interviews 271 Whitehat hackers 271 WiFi 271 WikiLeaks 272 Wikipedia 272 Windows 273 WIRED magazine 273 World War II 273 World Wide Web 273 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 274 Worm 274 Wozniak, Steve 275 WYSIWYG 277 Chapter 24. X 279 Xbox 279 Xerox 279 Xfce 280 Xiao Tian 280 Chapter 25. Y 283 Yahoo! 283 Y Combinator 284 Chapter 26. Z 285 Zero day 285 Zettabyte Era 285 Zork 286 Zuckerberg, Mark 286 About the Author 288 Hacker culture can be esoteric, but this entertaining reference is here to help. Written by a longtime hacker, this fun reference introduces you to key people and companies, fundamental ideas, and milestone films, games, and magazines in the annals of hacking. From phreaking to deepfakes, and from APT (advanced package tool) to zombie malware, grasping the terminology is crucial to understanding hacker culture and history. This book from Kim Crawley ( 8 Steps to Better Security ) is written in a conversational style and organized from A to Z. Read it like a coffee table book or a desk reference. If you're just getting started on your hacker journey, you'll find plenty here to guide your learning and help you understand the references and cultural allusions you come across. More experienced hackers will find historical depth, wry humor, and some perhaps surprising facts about familiar cultural touchstones.