Thursday, October 23, 2008

Timeline: '90 and '91

90’s
• LOD (Legion of Doom) & Masters of Deception are rival Hacking groups. The Great Hacker War begins, with a swift defeat of the old guard LOD. This is a completely new type of “warfare,” based on information control and cyberspace.
• Hackers penetrate DOD sites. Dutch hackers used university, government, and commercial systems to hack into Department of Defense websites. 34 sites were hacked into by way of vendor-supplied accounts and accounts with guessable or nonexistent passwords. Hacking was so much easier back then.
• “The Difference Engine.” A steampunk novel written by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Mechanical computers are everywhere, making the British Empire even more powerful.
• EFF founded. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an organization to protect civil liberties in a digital world. It educates press and policy makers, and funds legal defenses to protect digital freedoms.
• “Ribofunk.” A biopunk collection by Paul Di Fillippo. Biopunk is like cyberpunk, except that it focuses on synthetic biology and genetic information. Human experimentation in a totalitarian regime is a common theme.
• “Total Recall” (film). An Arnold Schwartzeneggar film about a man who purchases false memories as a sort of vacation. It triggers previously-deleted memories about being a secret agent on Mars, but the whole movie is possibly just part of the vacation.
• Steven Jackson games raided. The Secret Service targeted Loyd Blankenship, a well-known hacker who was publishing GURPS Cyberpunk via Steven Jackson Games. GURPS Cyberpunk is a role-playing toolkit, but the Secret Service claimed it was a “handbook of computer crime.”
• Op Sundevil. A nation-wide hacker crackdown. It targeted credit card thieves and telephone abusers.
• Phiber Optik hacks TRW. Mark Abene, aka Phiber Optik, hacked a lot of things, actually. He was arrested and indicted on 11 counts of computer crime, setting a legal example for other hackers.

91
• “Cultural logic of late capitalism.” A book by Frederic Jameson critiquing postmodernism from a Marxist perspective.
• 1,000 viruses exist in the world. Computers have become universal, and with them more and more viruses have cropped up. Such is cyberpunk: with technology comes hardship and irresponsibility.
• Debut of the WWW. The Web is a series of documents linked via hypertext and accessed on the Internet, viewed with browsers. It makes the internet a much more accessible place, since it can now be navigated by simply clicking.
• “Terminator 2” (film). Arnold is back from the future to protect John Connor, since he will grow up to save humanity. The movie plays with the idea of robotic emotion, as well as other Asamovian concepts.

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