Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.

Perspective
For a while, especially while with 2600, I spent a lot of energy keeping up with daily drama and developments in the hacker scene (if you want to call it that, yeah, gross *shrug*) and the politics of computer security. Whenever a story would break about some high profile DDoS attack or the virus of the week, inevitably mainstream press would email 2600 asking for comment. As an undergrad slacking off at a party school I had plenty of time to be a media whore and really quite enjoyed it. I learned a lot about how the media works, how stories get written, how easy it is to fuck with reporters, and how dependent they are on "experts". The ridiculousness of my inherited position of authority was not lost on me, not that I was any sort of a spokesperson or anything, this was just every once in a while. Eventually we started posting articles and commentary on the 2600 website more frequently. Lots of time was spent defending the good name of hackers, adding our spin to stories, correcting the use of words like cracker (which by the way, is a sucky word that should only be used to refer to snack food, white people, and cracking software), as well as more important news and issues.

I like to think that I've gained some perspective over the last couple of years. My local scene changed, people moved away, l0pht became @Stake, and with it went the very important resource Hacker News Network (which eventually became @Stake's news section and saw the departure of its editor Space Rogue, and now is gone altogether). HNN had broken many stories relating to computer security and the hacker underground in its (relatively) brief run. Like the time HNN hyped a "declaration of cyberwar" made on IRC by a group called Legions of the Undergound and all hell broke loose. Eventually I left school and started focusing on other things. It's nice not to be so invested in caring about the injustices foisted upon every other fucknut who gets busted for doing something stupid. The laws are still completely fucked, and someone should be sticking up for these kids, who are invariably portrayed as dangerous monsters to further the careers of their captors and to be exploited by the security industry. I'm just saying, it's nice not to have to be so Catcher-in-the-Rye about it all the time. Though I still can't stand phoneys.

When the law is so out of whack with reality and when fear of technology, hackers and "terror" override commonsense in the criminal justice system, it's easy to find something to defend about even the lamest or most outrageous offenses. Kevin Mitnick got a raw deal in many many ways. When people would criticize the Free Kevin campaign by listing Kevin's supposed transgressions, my response would be that even if the worst was true, he still is getting screwed over and deserves to be treated fairly, etc. etc. It's a good argument and I stand by it, and when my dad asks me what I think of the latest virus posterchild T33kid, it's all fairly predictable. The FBI busts the hapless copycat fat kid who didn't even think to cover his tracks and holds him up to take the heat for virus writers everywhere. There's not much to like about him, but there's even less to like about how he's going to be treated by the feds. At least people like T33kid end up doing cool shit like creating Napster and saving lives.

So now I find myself in a bit of a dilemma. How to feel about Adrian Lamo's impending bust? See, Adrian is a part of the San Francisco area 2600 scene as well. I don't have a lot of respect for him, and I have many reasons to hate him-- which are all as fantastically valid as they are private. The fact that there's now a warrant out for his arrest won't come as a surprise to anyone whose has been following news of his exploits. He has been roaming the country hacking into corporations (not necessarily a bad thing) trying to generate the maximum publicity. He's been doing things that would be very easy for him to get away with and that no one would really care about all that much. Instead of getting away with it, Adrian made a decision a long time ago to become a hacker martyr. A close friend of his already registered FreeAdrian.com over a year ago. So with each hack he rubbed the companies' noses in it and gave juicy leads on his latest exploits to friendly reporters. He dresses it up with rhetoric relating to the responsibility of people to secure their networks and about doing a public service. But whatever valid arguments he may have adopted, I find myself just not caring about them. I don't care about the companies he broke into, I don't care so much about his professed motives.

What bothers me is the way he is going to be treated by the justice system and the ways that people will react to it. I fully anticipate raging debates on Slashdot and people rallying to his support. Comparisons to Mitnick will trumpeted like a holy call to arms. But this is a guy who actively sought to get busted and to get screwed over. Anyone being prosecuted, or even investigated, for federal hacking crimes is going to get royally shafted by The Man, I'm certain that Adrian knows this, believes this, and still sought to be busted. On the other hand, just because he brought it upon himself doesn't mean that the government should be able to have their way with him. Indeed, when the MPAA sued 2600 some might say we brought it upon ourselves. We looked at it as a chance to stand up for others and to challenge an unjust law, even though we knew there was a chance we'd lose everything and that we'd probably get screwed.

Does Lamo still deserve my support? Even though this is what he wanted? Even though he's a completely psycho asshole who deserves far worse? What about when they throw him in the hole for having too many cans of tuna? I can't help but wonder how I'd feel about this if it wasn't him, if I didn't know everything was just going according to plan, if I didn't already believe that all his talk about security and ethics is just shallow bullshit aimed at garnering support. All in an effort to become "The Next Mitnick", with the added bonus of escaping his tumultuous life by going to prison.

Discuss

posted by Pip Macki at 5:31:42 PM | permalink

Introduction
Thanks for the introduction Xeni. I'm certain that my Rotten Staff page has received more traffic from BoingBoing over the past few months than its ever gotten from anywhere else. It's a little embarrassing. I'm not actually that cool or that narcissistic. I can't even spell well-- however I will endeavor to spellcheck. Oh, and I should mention that Rotten isn't my site, I work for/with the owner/founder/curator and help out with various projects.

I'm not sure how much I'll be able to contribute to this page. I'm visiting Boston all month, which means I'm not on IRC 12 hours a day hearing about clever and interesting memes that I could redistribute. Also, I already had Karen plug sites for me while she was editing this space. However you can definitely count on me to make liberal use of words like blogosphere and to talk about the latest trends in flash mobbing. Also, I'll regularly call attention to how many friends I have and how much cool stuff they do (did you see that picture Xeni linked of me and John Gilmore?? That's right! I know that guy) and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Once I saw Dean Haglund at a Denny's. Okay, that last one wasn't true, I don't know why I lied. I guess I was trying to impress you, did it work? Oh! Also, swearing. There will be lots of swearing.

Discuss

posted by Pip Macki at 7:59:49 PM | permalink

teevee
My parents weren't hippies, they were just.. indecisive. Besides, they never owned a TV so the decision seemed particularly freighted. Every time we went to an electronics store, my dad would scratch his head over some new must-have feature and we'd leave empty handed. It's not that easy to think in front of a wall of 48" televisions.

In fact, growing up without TV had surprisingly few affects one way or the other. Some parents expressed concern, but I actually learned to read without the help of Sesame Street. On the other hand, despite some early optimism from teachers, my attention span still ended up falling solidly in the post-literate camp. Television is so pervasive that it sinks in without watching.

I can only point to a couple quirks that, I think, came from abstinence from the most common bit of consumer electronics. One is my frequent inability to correctly pronounce words longer than 3 syllables. (Yes, lack of TV may just be a convenient excuse, but I'll take it.) And the other is my inability to see what's funny about prison rape.

I was growing up in the early 1980s and -- I don't actually have any numbers on this -- but I think it was a particularly fecund time for the rape joke genre. Reagan was president, Beverly Hills Cop was in theaters. What I know for sure is that the dozen or so times that I watched television at a friends house for any extended period I was most struck by the references to soap; picking it up; and the unspoken but implicitly comical aftermath.

That's why, once I had some resources, I looked around for a group that did something about the issue. I found two: Stop Prisoner Rape in the US and a prison organization in South Africa. SPR has been around for twenty years but has become increasingly effective, both in getting legislation passed and in providing help and legal assistance to survivors.

Discuss

posted by steve steinberg at 12:22:51 AM | permalink

Guestbar Archives