[Noisebridge-discuss] stop pretending to be me

Ever Falling everfalling at gmail.com
Sun May 13 08:06:24 UTC 2012


my experience is that the mailing list is nothing like the actual space.
this is the dark place where drama thrives and i actively discourage people
i tell about noisebridge to keep the mailing list at a distance if they
find they like the space itself. That being said I think maybe (and i could
be wrong about this because i don't know the history of hackerspaces) it's
a bit unfair to compare a small close-knit group of people to a much larger
and open free space for which 'hacking' seems to have a very
loose definition and application.

On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 12:49 AM, John Adams <jna at retina.net> wrote:

> From the outside, looking in...
>
> I was a founding member of one the earliest US hackerspaces, the l0pht,
> before we knew what the word was. This was when the words Open Source
> didn't exist and all we knew of was the League of Programming Freedom,
> which would later become the Free Software Foundation, thanks to RMS.
>
> It was when reverse engineering electronics wasn't much of a crime and
> most of the laws regarding "Cybersecurity" didn't exist yet. We started off
> because our girlfriends and wives (yes, some of us were that old) hated
> having all that technology littering our apartments and we all wanted some
> place to work.
>
> Women in our organization like Limor Fried (ladyada) and Window Snyder
> forged new ground for women in technology and rallied against male-driven
> engineering fields to create new opportunities to teach others engineering
> and security, for both men and women (and girls and boys.)
>
> If not for our ability to come together and share what we knew, none of us
> would have had Internet access or the chance to learn and work on Unix,
> which back then was extremely difficult to do (we had to cobble together
> Sun Sparcstations and Vax machines from junk). Even Slackware was in it's
> mere nascent phase of development and Linux was very, very unstable. These
> experiences, building these machines, built careers for people.
>
> What we did back then was more than likely illegal, and we had to work
> together to get access to technology. Our small group of people went on to
> do great things, from speaking in front of congress, to breaking RSA's
> SecurID, and forming great companies like @stake and VeraCode. All because
> we worked together on shared interests.
>
> What I do have to say is that the actions of some of the people on this
> list saddens me, and I am just responding to what I see here on the list.
> It keeps me from becoming an active member of Noisebridge. It keeps me from
> getting on my bicycle, riding to the mission and sharing what I know (and
> learning new things from) all of you because my perception of the actions
> of a few make it sound like a wonderful hackerspace has become overrun with
> drama and madness.
>
> It keeps me from donating money and certainly keeps me from helping out.
> You've got a permissive society here, perhaps too permissive to permit
> great things to happen.
>
> Cut it out. Convince me I'm wrong. I think all of you are smart enough to
> work through this and to realize the value in the resource that you have
> worked so hard to create and the insanity in allowing this to continue
> along the path you've chosen.
>
>
> --john
>
>
>
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>
>
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