[Noisebridge-discuss] stop pretending to be me

[John Adams]

We weren't close-knit when we started. We were loosely selective and made
many friends along the way.

-j


On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 1:06 AM, Ever Falling <everfalling at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
>> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>>
>>
>
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