 Hello, hackers. Hello, people who chase hackers. Hello, people who are hackers who don't want to be called hackers. And hello, people who aren't hackers who want to be called hackers. Thanks a lot for DEF CON, for inviting me to come here. I've never been to a DEF CON before. And you folks are amazing. Thanks for inviting me. So I've spent a lot of time over the years with hackers. And it really has been one of the joys of my life. And as I just heard, and some of you probably know, I did a book about hackers. It was called Hackers. It is not the basis of the Angelina Jolie movie called Hackers. And the movie I should add that was double-booked for this room at this time. I couldn't believe it in the program there. It's bad enough they took my title. Now they wanted to knock me out of my room. Damn you, Angelina. But the book is undoubtedly really why I think I was asked to speak here today. And I've done a lot of journalism since. But I think probably I'm going to be remembered for hackers heroes of the computer revolution. It first appeared in 1984. It's never been out of print. I've yanked it from two publishers. And I felt they weren't doing enough with it. And currently with O'Reilly Media. I moved it to O'Reilly because O'Reilly really loves hackers. And that's a long time ago, 1984, 27 years. People knew him. How many in the room weren't born in 1984? So that's not only a long time in computer time. That's like a lifetime in real life there. Now the stuff we know today, the stuff we take for granted, was really unimaginable back then in 1984. And it's really amazing that you look back and you find you couldn't be optimistic enough about what's happened in technology. You look even at science fiction writers whose job it was to go wild and doing futuristic scenarios and dystopias. And they sort of underestimate how amazing things are now. I mean, who could have anticipated DEF CON, right? So I thought what I'd do tonight is kind of look back a little. And take a look at what's happened before and in the light of saying, how hackers themselves have changed what we do there. Because I really feel that in a very important way, we owe it all to hackers. We owe a lot of the big changes that came because of the hackers. Without hackers, we wouldn't be so advanced and we wouldn't be so productive and life would certainly be a lot less interesting. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. So let me tell you, especially those of you familiar with the book, that may not be familiar with the story behind it, how I came to write about hackers. So again, we're gonna go back in time here, like Ronald Reagan was in the White House and a lot of us are trying to figure out what happened to Luke Skywalker at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. And it was like a long time ago and I was a freelance writer back then. And as an English major, what else do you do? But I wasn't writing at all about science and technology. I never even took a science course in college. I was writing about like the usual stuff like murders and sports and music. And if you'll allow me one digression I'm totally away from the subject there. The coolest thing I did in that period, as I said, I'd write sometimes about music. And I was writing an article for the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine about reggae music. And a guy in my food co-op insisted that he could get me an interview with Bob Marley. And miraculously, it happened. He got me an interview with Bob Marley. And I asked Bob Marley, I said, Bob, how can I explain to the readers of the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine what reggae is? And he, you know, paused a little. And he raised his hand and he said, you know that quiet that happens before the hurricane that's coming? That's reggae. Oh, pretty cool. Yeah. Well, back to the hacking. All that stuff changed. My whole course of my career changed in 1981, 30 years ago, when I got an assignment from Rolling Stone Magazine to write about computer hackers. And I didn't really know what a computer hacker was. And as a matter of fact, I'd never even touched the computer. It was possible back then to reach adulthood without touching your computer. Now you can't reach age two without touching your computer. But that's the way things were back then. So I tried to look up what a hacker was and it was kind of difficult. There wasn't much about it. But I think if there were a dictionary definition back then of what a hacker was, it would be this, a hacker. Anti-social nerd, by and large loser who's addicted to computers. Maybe dangerous, but mostly a booger stain curiosity. Okay, I thought I could write that story. So I did more research. And one of the things I found was an article in a magazine called Psychology Today. It was called the hacker papers. It was a cover story. It was written by a guy named Philip Zimbardo. He was a Stanford professor. He was writing about his students. And he thought that hacking was an unhealthy abyss that the unsuspecting students would get sucked into. And this is literally what he said. He said, fascination with the computer becomes an addiction. And as with most addictions, the substance that gets abused is human relationships. Well, that impression, pretty negative one, was seconded in a little more extensive treatment of hackers I saw. Still not too much. In a book by a former MIT professor called Joseph Weisenbaum. Now Weisenbaum is best known for this program called ELISA, which is a faux artificial intelligence program that sort of emulated a therapist and you would talk to it. Amazing number of people were fooled. But he also wrote a book called Computer Power and Human Reason. And he had a passage that actually became quite notorious at MIT about hackers. And it was not very flattering. Let me read you this passage there. Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen seated at computer consoles. Their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers already poise the strike at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be riveted as a gambler's on the rolling dice. When not so transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pour like possessed students of a cobalistic text. They work until they nearly drop, 20, 30 hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them. Coffee, Coke, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify to the fact that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers. Well, this is straight out of Dov Stiefsky, right? You couldn't imagine a more gloomy and depressing bunch of people. I mean, Angelina Jolie shouldn't portray one of these people, she should adopt one of them. So I figured, cool, I'll go to Stanford and I'll write this story. But before I went, I talked to a colleague at Rolling Stone and he gave me a list of some other people to talk to, people in the burgeoning personal computer industry and some of the wizards I might not know about. So I had this list in hand when I flew out to California. And let me tell you, what I saw in California when I first researched this, totally blew out the stereotype I had. Within four hours, after getting off the plane, I was sitting in a hot tub with this guy named Jim Warren who run these things called the computer fairs, sort of like a wild celebration of PCs. And in the tub with me and him were these two deadheads who lived in his property who were editing this magazine for him about data communications and sideband and they were like just going on and on and on about the transformative nature of the personal computer. And since I had been brought up in the sixties as revolutionary stuff really clicked with me and I thought, wow, this is pretty interesting. And set the tone for the entire visit. And the people I met were not at all like was described by Weismbaum or Zimbardo. These were people who were not depressed, well maybe a couple of them were sort of depressed, but by and large they were like adventurous. They were like thrilled about exploring with computer and sharing what they knew about it. And they were talking about how they were empowered by programming. And what's more by pushing the envelope on computers which were just then being able to find their way on a desktop, they were on to something that was going to change the lives of all of us. And I really began to perceive this in talking to them. They were way ahead of the game and I wanted to learn much more about this. And in fact, after my article came out, that's what I did. I decided to write more and more about the field. I began a column for a magazine called Popular Computing about telecomputing and then more a general column. And I would write about things for rolling so in other magazines like the Us Festival, the Steve Wozniak did and the development of the Macintosh and the culture of computer bulletin boards. I also got a computer for myself. I got an Apple II computer that I used for all my work and for games and for other stuff. And I had my girlfriend who's now my wife also get one of those computers. And a couple of months after we got the computer, this is really bizarre, a magazine called her, they wanted to interview her and do her picture. They had a full page picture of her because she was like a woman who used the computer. You know, all she used before was word processing, right? It's like now you think like women who use pencils, right? But that's the way things were. This was like really something new. So around that time, a publisher asked me if I wanted to do a book about hackers. They saw my article on Rolling Stone. And I wanted to do a book at the time and the time actually, this is actually true. I was circulating a proposal to do a book about cheesy nightclub singers. But it wasn't finding much of a welcome. So I said, okay, I'll do this hackers thing. And I signed up with Doubleday. And it was interesting, we had sort of a fight about the title of the book. The sales force didn't want to call it hackers because they said no one would know what a hacker was. And certainly they never heard of the word. But we managed to keep the title there. And I was nervous about my first book. I really didn't know how to write a book. And it was like a much bigger task than I'd taken on before. So I thought, well, gee, maybe what I'll do is I'll write a chapter about this kind of hacker and a chapter about this aspect of hacking. And maybe when I have enough chapters then I have a book. But I have to really give credit to my editor. He urged me to think big. And I thought, well, maybe I'll never write a book again. I should really take a shot at this. And Tim O'Reilly talks about big, hairy, audacious goals that you should take on. And I didn't know Tim O'Reilly then. But that's what I decided to go for. So I decided I'd write one big story. I'd write it as a narrative. And it was the way you just keep turning the pages. And it would be this epic tale about how this rebel force really caused the revolutions in computing. And that's what I wanted to do. But that was going to be a lot more work because in order to do something as a narrative, you have to kind of fill in the blanks. And you really have to kind of get to know your subject. You have to spend endless hours interviewing them. And you have to really get inside their heads. But on the other hand, it was a lot more fun because these were amazing people. And it was fun to do endless interviews with them and to get inside their heads. So I got my book contract in mid-1982. I started working on it. And I thought the outline in my head was, OK, there's going to be two parts to the story. The first part I decided was going to be about this group called the Homebrew Computer Club. And that was really this amazing group of hobbyists and chip enthusiasts in the Silicon Valley who first got together in March 1975. They were really galvanized by the appearance of the first personal computer called the Altair 8800. It wasn't in one piece. It was a kit you had to put together then. And they hadn't even gotten their hands on one. They were so excited. It was going to happen that they had this group. And from that group, the personal computer industry really formed. One of the original Homebrew people who came to the first meeting was Steve Wozniak. And he built the Apple One to impress the people at the Homebrew Computer Club. So I thought that was going to be a great first part of the book. And the second part of the book was more contemporary. I thought I would write about what was happening now. The computers were getting more popular. And there was a commercial component to it. And I would write about these game hackers, these wizards who wrote great game programs, but how they coped with the idea that there was a commercial aspect to what they did. So I started to hang out with this company called Sierra Online. It was based in Coors Gold, California, near Yosemite. And that would be the second part. But as I proceeded along those lines and bounced back and forth between this and that, I began to realize that really I wasn't starting at the beginning. There was something earlier that went even before Homebrew and a style and a culture that existed there. You know, the hacker culture really began somewhere. And I began to figure out where that was, where hacker culture actually began. And that was at MIT. So meanwhile, I was interviewing all these people for the books and the other things. I interviewed Steve Wozniak, of course, who's an amazing guy. He was really generous with his time. He helped me out a lot. And he was like a true hacker. From the time he was a kid, he did all the things, taking things apart. And like all hackers, he wanted to do the impossible, do what people said can't be done. And he did it time and again with Apple, with the computer and the disk drive. I didn't talk to Steve Jobs for the book though. Though I did talk to him and meet him right before the book came out. I told you I did a story for Rolling Stone about the beginning of the Macintosh. I convinced Rolling Stone to do a story about a computer, which was like a big deal back then in late 1983. And I remember really clearly the day I first saw the Macintosh. I went in there before it came out a couple months earlier. And it was an incredible day because there were these amazing people working on it. They had these great hackers like Andy Hertzfeld and Steve Capps and Bill Atkinson. And some of the people I met that day, to this day, are still my friends. We really connected. And at the end of the day, I was going to meet Steve Jobs. And it was about 5 o'clock. We were going to go out to dinner. And he was going to give me an interview over dinner. And he showed up to the point of time. And before we even said hello, and we got to his car, he started to say, Roll Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone is really going downhill, really big time. And I was just in a plane. And I saw the latest issue of Rolling Stone. I have this cover story about MTV. And it was a total piece of shit. And he kept going on and on and on about that. And sometimes people talk, and you want to get in something weird and edgewise. You have to wait. They take a breath. And I just really wanted to interrupt and tell him, before you go too far, I wrote that story, Steve, about MTV. And when I finally did tell him, he did something which was very Steve Jobs like his. He didn't look like almost acknowledged that I said it. He just changed the subject and went on to something else there. And actually, over the years, I had many, many, many conversations with him and had a great relationship. But we never talked about MTV. And I also, one person I did interview for the book was Bill Gates. I interviewed him in early 1983. He looked like he was about 13 years old. I remember he was sitting there using a mouse, which is a kind of unusual thing back then, using it with DOS, which is kind of odd. And Bill, some people are critical of him. But he really was a real hardcore hacker. And then, again, you look at his past and typical hacker experiences. And even after he stopped coding in Microsoft, he would examine the products and evaluate them how good they would be if he did it. And very few things met up to that standard there. And he was hardcore in everything. I had a lot of conversations with him subsequently. And I remember one time in particular, we had a disagreement about the meaning of the word anti-trust. And that was at a time when that was sort of an emotional issue with Bill. And he threw a pencil at me. And that was sort of like a legend in Microsoft PR circles. So anyway, once I realized that MIT was going to be important part of my book, I had to go there. And that really led to that first section of the book called True Hackers, which I feel, and I think a lot of other people feel, is really the most important part of the book. Because at MIT, it was really the beginning of the computer culture that persists to this day. And I guarantee you that DEF CON would not be what it is if we're not for the culture that those people invented at MIT. So let me tell you how that started there. It all began in a building called Building 20. This is like a structure that came up during World War II. And the architect who built it later wrote that this building was made just to last through the war and for perhaps six months afterwards. And of course, the building lasted until 1998 when it got knocked down to, MIT wanted to build the lab for computer science, which was this big building designed by Frank Geary to look like it was sort of falling down. And the building actually is sort of falling down as it turns out, they have a big problem with it. And the building, of course, is named after Bill Gates. So Building 20 was the home of a lot of things at MIT, it was the home of the nuclear lab and other things. It was also home of a lot of student clubs that were headquartered there. So one of these clubs was called the Tech Model Railroad Club. The members called it Timurk, is the way they pronounce the acronym there. And if you were wandering the Building 20, looking the hallways, you'd see the sign for the Tech Model Railroad Club and you'd go in there and you'd be amazed because there was this amazing train layout there. It was a very elaborate, sophisticated train layout with these mountains and different locomotives chugging along and little people and things like that, as nice as you can imagine. And there were a lot of people at Timurk who specialized in paper mache and painting and renovating the locomotives and doing all the things that you do if you're a train hobbyist. But then there was another contingent of the Model Railroad Club that was called S&P. That stood for Signals and Processing. These people weren't much concerned with what went on at the top of the table. They were concerned with what went on underneath the table. So if you looked under the table, you would see something like amazing with this incredible tangle of wires and cables and transformers and even stuff like telephone step switches and crossbar generators and things like that that were donated by Western Electric's College Gift Plan and other things. They scrounged out from junkyards there. And it was the lab system you could imagine that maybe you do amazing things on top of the layout. Things like having multiple people control different trains at different parts of the track and you could use a telephone dial to dictate where you wanted the train to go on the track. And the S&P people called themselves hackers. They were totally technical people who called themselves hackers. And I have not been able to find any earlier group of technical people who use that term to describe themselves. So where did that come from? I figure there was a part of it was the MIT used the word hack as a synonym for prank. So when people look painted the big dome in the main building, there's like a beanie or something like that. They called that a hack. And the other part of the term was like you hack with an axe. It was sort of a self-deprecating way to describe what they did when they worked for those 12-hour sessions to work for these weird things underneath the table there. So one of the guys at MIT, one of the freshmen at Timurk, he's got a name Peter Samson. And I came across some of the old newsletters of the Model Railroad Club from the late 50s. And he did this crazy poem, which I find is a historic document. It was one of the first times people wrote about hackers as hackers. So let me read you just a little of Peter Samson's poem after I hydrate. He goes, Hacking, hacking even as an ignorant freshman axe who has never lost occupancy and has dropped out, hacking the emboards for under its locks or the switches and under its control the advance around the layout. Hacking, hacking the grungy, herring, sprawling hacks of youth, uncabled, frying diodes, proud to be switch-thrower, fuse tester, maker of roots, player with railroads, and an advanced chopper to the system. Sort of Walt Whitman-esque in this scope there. So in the spring of 1959, MIT offered the first undergraduate class about computer programming ever. And the teacher was a guy named John McCarthy who later became a legend in artificial intelligence. And the hackers, the Timurk hackers, of course, were all in this class. They all wanted to take it there. They were kind of disappointed because the computer that was accessible to them was this big IBM 704, which was, like most computers at the time, accessible only by these punch cards that you would have to hand to the priesthood that watched the computer there. So they couldn't get direct access to the computer. And that just wouldn't do. But a few months later, Lincoln Labs, which was a part of MIT, sort of run by the Defense Agency, agencies donated this computer to MIT. And this was an interactive computer. It was a million-dollar thing called the TX-0. And they asked the hackers from Timurk to write some of the system software, some of the bugger's compilers. And, of course, they said yes. And this really transformed them because they could work interactively and they can do all kinds of things to it and they can have extended access to the computer there. So besides the bugger's compilers, they did the kinds of things that you couldn't do on the computer. As I said before, like Steve Wozniak, and really like any hackers, the people loved to do the impossible. So they did stuff on the computer that you couldn't do. There were other people that said you shouldn't do. For instance, one thing they did was they decided to use the computer to process text. And they made this program called Expensive Typewriter. And that was really the first word processor. And another hacker decided to do his math problems on the computer, not like heavy crunching programs, but the kinds of stuff he did in his classwork. And it was sort of a precursor to the first spreadsheet. And he handed in his homework to the teacher. He printed it out and the teacher gave him a zero because he said this can't be done on a computer. It must be wrong. So a couple of years after that, a new company called the Digital Equipment Corporation donated a prototype of one of the first mini computers, the PDP-1 to MIT. And they asked the hackers to write some of the system software for that. And they did that. They rose to that challenge. But they also did something which was different. They came across the first interactive computer game. It was called Space War. And it was real time and graphics. And that game, like all the programs that they did, were done as a collaboration. Now, with both the TX0 and the PDP-1, they would write their programs on paper tapes. And the paper tapes would be stored in a drawer. And anyone could go into the drawer and get the tape and run the program and look at how the code was written and then improve the program and then cut a new tape. And that tape would be the new program there. There was no idea of intellectual property or who owned it. The whole idea was to share all the information because from the moment that TX0 really got there, their goal was to learn as much as they could about it and share that information with each other. And that was the highest value that they had. So that really formed the idea that information really should be free and should be shared with each other there. Now, spending time with those hackers, I came to realize, the hackers at MIT, I came to realize they had a lot in common with the other hackers I had talked about in the other sections of the book, with the lectures of the Homebrew Computing Club and even the hackers who were working, like for a living, working for a Sierra online. A hacker is a hacker is a hacker. And I realized that hackers have this shared set of values that was pretty consistent no matter who they were, how old they were. So I came to call that the hacker ethic and I put that in the book and I had a number of principles to it but really the most important one was the one I just referred to, is that information should be free. And of course I'm not talking about free not costing anything because at that point, especially for the MIT, people weren't charging for software anyway, that was an alien concept, but free in the way that you should share it all. And also free in the way that information should move as freely as possible, both in the computer and this is something the way hackers thought, outside the computer as well. One of the precepts of the hacker ethic was that you have to resist bureaucracy because bureaucracy keeps you at a distance, that are removed from information. And the lack of bureaucracy makes for a free flow of information there. So those feelings even extended to physical systems. Now here at DEF CON, I'm really interested, you've got like a lock hacking village and it's like a big deal now to do lock hacking here. But let me tell you at MIT, they were first in lock hacking there. The hackers felt that locks, whether on computers or on doors, kept them away from the information they needed. So they started their own lock hacking community there. A lot of them took courses in locksmithing so they could learn more and they can get licenses to get the special blanks that only locksmiths could get hold of. And pretty much they were able to get into pretty much anything at MIT. And one of the hackers explained it to me, and I actually want to give this extended quote because I think it even extends outside of lock hacking and outside of that time period in the 50s and 60s there. This is a guy named David Silver. And as he explained it to me, this was a ultra highly clever warfare. There were administrators who would have high security locks and have vaults where they would store the keys and have sign out cards, the issue keys. And they felt secure, like they were locking everything up and controlling things and preventing information from flowing the wrong way and from things being stolen. And then there was another side of the world where people felt everything should be available to everybody and these hackers had pounds and pounds and pounds of keys that would get them to every conceivable place. The people who did this were very ethical and honest and they weren't using this power to steal or injure. It was kind of a game, partly out of necessity and partly out of ego and fun. At the absolute height of it, if you were in the right inside circle, you can get the combination to any safe and you get access to anything. Sound familiar? Now at one point, it got so the administrators felt they had to ramp up the warfare so they got this class two safe that was certified to keep classified secrets for the government and they felt the hackers could never get into that. And of course, you can't say to hackers, you can't get into that. They actually went to a junkyard where the government got rid of stuff and they found their own class two safe. They dragged it up to Tech Square where like a lot of the hackers were then in the artificial intelligence lab and they took it apart with the settling torches and figured out how all the tumblers worked and things like that and they were able to reverse engineer it and break into the administrators safe there. And you know, in hackers, I read about this poor guy who was in charge of protecting things from the hackers at MIT. This is an unenviable job. This guy named Russell Nofskar did it. And this guy, and it was really sad because the guy was sort of a hacker himself. Like a lot of hackers, he had a love of explosives. That seems to be another thing that a lot of hackers like. And actually, it was a young man he worked for a company, a high tech company and he convinced them to give him part of his salary in Primacord, which is like a very, you know what it is, right? And yeah, one very snowy winner, he can see that the scheme to blow up the snow on his walk with Primacord and his wife got hold of the idea and prevented it. He made him shovel the snow. But this guy actually sort of went over to the other side when he was charged with protecting the information. He took it very personally that the hackers got all this and he was like Elmer Fudd, he kept constantly getting outsmarted. And finally, he sat down and he declared a truce. He said, you know what, I give up, I'm standing down, but please, let's do it this way. So sort of like, don't ask, don't tell. I'll let you go where you want, but be righteous about it. Don't cause trouble where you go and don't talk about it to people if you happen to go climb up on the ceiling and drop into a locked room from the ceiling. You know, just look around and don't cause problem and then lock up and clean up after yourself and don't let people know that you were there. It's important to create the illusion of security and that's all we need there. So don't you think a lot of companies today sort of use the illusion approach to security there? That's another story there. So of course, it was a given that those hackers were honorable. Yeah, sometimes when they got on a computer and they were unauthorized to do it, sometimes the computer would crash, but they didn't necessarily mean for the computer to crash and sometimes when they borrowed tools, the tools would get broken, but they didn't mean to have broken. You know, sometimes those things happened and you know, but generally, you know, they were righteous, like they were ethical. And I have to say that amazingly, a lot of that ethical standard still persists to this day. Now, one of the people I spoke to for hackers, it was, he's in the last chapter of the book, was a guy who actually was virtually living in Tech Square, one of the MIT buildings at the time. And I was the first reporter to ever talk to this guy and he told me this like amazing story about, you know, his time at the MIT AI lab and, you know, his goals and his visions. And this guy was like Richard Stallman, who you all know of course as the founder, yeah, and conscience of the open source movement there. And I find it amazing that, you know, Stallman's teachings, as it were, have gone so wide and touched so many people there. And to me, that's a sign of really, you know, how lasting and resilient the Hathor ethic really, really was. Now, I can't overestimate the importance of the hacker ethic and the values of hackers to computers. You know, we owe it all to the hackers. And I talked about, you know, in things like word processing and other things, but also the nature of the PC from Homebrew and from other things. You know, unlike those mainframes that IBM 704, personal computers are built on a more open kind of system there. And again, Homebrew Club, it was those hackers. And when IBM decided to do their PC, they adopted the hackerish method to do it there. And then when the internet got developed, those were people who, you know, did their work in hacker hotbeds. Those were people who totally signed on to the free flow of information. And that was the design principle of the internet. And that's, you know, what we have here, and I don't think the internet would have been anywhere near as successful had it not been developed on hacker principle. We owe it all to the hackers. Now let me talk just a bit about what's happened to the word hacker, because I get comments on that a lot. Now when I wrote hackers, you know, the term was sort of moving and vacillating between that, you know, sort of like sick addict view that had it when it started into the more classic view of the hackers that I talked to, the true hackers that implied, you know, like wizardry and, you know, cleverness and, you know, doing the impossible and, you know, technical wizardry, things like that. But a few years after I wrote the book, there were a lot of well-publicized cases where people, you know, a lot of times kids would break into computer systems. There was one in Minnesota, which, you know, particularly got a lot of attention. And the press glommed on to the word hacker and used it so much that a lot of people who encountered the word for the first time in that thought hacking was totally synonymous with that kind of activity. And the older hackers really got bent out of shape by that. You know, there was this thing called the hacker conference that first started actually after my book when Stuart Brand gathered a lot of people together to, and whole earth people to join the generations of hackers. Well, this happened every year and people, you know, they were outraged at this. And, you know, one year the CBS news came and they did a report and they made these people look to the viewers like, you know, like they were the kids who broke into the computers and they didn't do that stuff. And they were very, like, offended there. And they wanted to, you know, write letters and, you know, somehow, you know, get the language police on there and, you know, and roll back what happened there. And it was futile and, you know, I guess it was silly to think that you could do that because language takes its own course and it turns out it's kind of useful to describe activities in that way there. And I think really what's happened there to the word hacker is I look at it as a trade with a lot of branches. And on one hand there's this branch with a classic sense of the definition, you know, which exists and then there's these other branches with, you know, like the definition that implied, you know, sort of like a darker side and, you know, darker and maybe even more dark. And there's certainly one branch which goes for, you know, malicious stuff and cyber warfare and people who work for Rupert Murdoch and, you know, things like that. And then there's, you know, sort of like the Bob Dylan branch. And I named that after, you know, the 1966 song Absolutely Sweet Marie where Bob Dylan said to live outside the law you must be honest, right? And that's, you know, maybe that's the DEFCON branch because, you know, like a lot of people here, I don't want to speak for you, but it seemed to be on that number there, like, you know, where, you know, like maybe the letter of law isn't so important as doing the right thing and being ethical there. So the 25th anniversary of the book, I did that revision for O'Reilly and I went back to some of the people who I interviewed originally, like Bill Gates and Richard Stallman. He's no less unique than he was before. He drove, he wore, unlike the first time, he wore this big gown and he had this, you know, kind of like a crazy suit, you know, because he's not this apostle of hacking, that was interesting. But I also talked to some people who I probably would have talked to if I were doing the book now and there were people like Mark Zuckerberg who is the founder of Facebook. And I was really interested to find that he'd love and embraced the word hacker. And he told me that he wants Facebook to be a great hacker company. And he was like returning to that original branch. I mean, you know, the branch of wizardry and, you know, like being really clever and really dedicated and finding great solutions there. And it's interesting also to see how the word hacking has now sort of come to mean, even apart from technology, just the idea of using cleverness and maybe a subversive way to, you know, hack something maybe not technical, like hack Washington or hack DNA, you know, the life hacking movement there. So I find it, you know, really encouraging that, you know, this movement is sort of, you know, coming back in a circular way to that kind of optimism there. And, you know, I have to say I've never been more optimistic about the whole concept of hacking that I am now. And I just feel really lucky that I stumbled on this topic and it's so privileged to have learned from hackers, you know, over these years. And I think I've also had like the best readers in the world and I'm really grateful for them. I can't tell you how many times people have come up to me and told me that reading hackers has meant something to them and affected their lives. There's people who say that, well, I grew up in this isolated area, the rural area, and I didn't know there were people like me and, you know, it was great to hear that. And other people said they changed their careers after they read hackers and some people say they dropped their careers after they read hackers and that was kind of cool too. And a lot of people ask me, well, how come you don't write a sequel to hackers? And I answer, I think, well, I think I've been doing nothing but writing sequels to hackers since it happened. If you look at the books I've written since, you know, almost all of them deal in some way with hackers and stuff hackers do. And I wrote about how like the bottom-up biological processes applied to computers led to artificial life. The people I talked to, in large part, were hackers there. And of course I wrote a book called Crypto and the people behind that revolution in cryptography and public key cryptography, were from that same building, Tech Square at MIT, who developed public key and really took on the NSA to establish that. On Sunday, as a matter of fact, Whit Diffie, who was one of the subjects of my book, is speaking here at DEF CON and I strongly urge you go and see him. He's really an amazing person there. And of course I wrote a book about the Macintosh I mentioned before about how the Mac hackers had such an impact on computers and the way we do computing. And my most recent book was about Google, which of course is a hacker haven. And it has a reverence built into the business plan. Now I have to admit though, back when I wrote the book, when I published the book, I was somewhat pessimistic about the future of hacking. I was sort of worried that commercialism would have its effect on hacking and I thought that because computers becoming so popular, maybe the passion of hacking might be watered down somewhat. But I'm so happy to say that I'm proved wrong. It was the exact opposite. The idea that the principles of hacking were built into the computers and into the internet put the virus of hacking out into the public at large. And hacking really changed everything, I think, for the better. We owe it all to hackers. Thank you very much.