Jason Scott: textfiles.com

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Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

“Gerbil Feed Bomb”: Swamp Rat, “Gerbil Feed Bomb,” 1985, www.cult deadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0001.html. Most of the text files I cite are still available online via www.cultdeadcow.com or Jason Scott Sadofsky’s www.textfiles.com. The inclusion of a link here, however, is no guarantee it will still be online at publication or thereafter. I will also note that not everything on the cDc site is accurate. “KGB ‘had some nutty retardo sex & violence stuff’”: This is from an email to a friend in cDc. “In our circle”: Interview with Brewer. “Book of Cow”: Franken Gibe, “The Book of Cow,” 1987, http://textfiles.com/groups/CDC/book.of.cow. “I took my stupidity very seriously”: This is from a later text file, Franken Gibe, “Retro Cow,” 1989, www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0100.html.

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“a decent summary of software commands”: Franken Gibe, “Gibe’s UNIX COMMAND Bible,” 1987, http://textfiles.com/groups/CDC/cDc-0014.txt. “telecom as a means, not an end”: This phrase and close variations appeared in cDc files and public statements, including www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0100.html. “No longer could this strong desire”: Psychedelic Warlord, “Visions from the Last Crusade,” 1988, www.textfiles.com/groups/CDC/visions/crusade. “The first cDc file Warlord published”: Psychedelic Warlord, “A Feature on MONEY—Today’s Monster,” 1987, http://textfiles.com/groups/CDC/cDc-0031.txt. “interview with a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi”: Psychedelic Warlord, “Interview with Neo-Nazi ‘Ausderau,’” 1988, http://textfiles.com/groups/CDC/cDc-0059.txt.

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“interview with a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi”: Psychedelic Warlord, “Interview with Neo-Nazi ‘Ausderau,’” 1988, http://textfiles.com/groups/CDC/cDc-0059.txt. “Chris Tucker, who dialed in from a board in Rhode Island”: Chris Tucker’s history comes from interviews with Osband, Mudge, Kevin, and others in cDc. “In June 1971”: The best account of the Yippie-phreaker coevolution is in Phil Lapsley’s Exploding the Phone (New York: Grove Press, 2013). “Political Rant #1”: Nightstalker, “Political Rant #1,” September 1, 1997, www.cultdeadcow.com/cDc_files/cDc-0339.txt. Chapter 3: The Cons “Houston-area hacker Jesse Dryden”: I was unable to reach Jesse through close friends, relatives, database searches, or previous email addresses.

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley

air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, card file, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dumpster diving, Garrett Hardin, Hush-A-Phone, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Markoff, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, The Home Computer Revolution, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Jordan Hayes, the best system administrator in the world, supported my requests for domain names and Web hosting with patience and humor. Jackie Cheong loaned me her quiet office so I could write; her husband, Curt Hardyck, denied me the office wifi password so that I actually would write. Jason Scott of textfiles.com offered invaluable insights, guidance, introductions, and feedback. Steven Gibb, the executor of Joybubbles’s estate, graciously provided access to Joybubbles’s (né Joe Engressia’s) old tapes and documents. Sam Etler, Steph Kerman, and Mark Cuccia became my go-to resources for technical questions about the telephone network of the 1960s and ’70s.

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Leighton, and Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive Edition, volume I (Boston: Addison Wesley, 2005), p. 1–1. 119 “Through the years”: Engressia speech, 1974. 119 “His sister recalls”: Toni Engressia speaking on the Joybubbles memorial telephone conference, September 16, 2007; “emergency room”: Joybubbles, “Stories and Stuff,” May 8, 2004, at http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/storiesandstuff/joybubbles_-_stories_and_stuff_-_20040508.mp3. 119 “Most people”: Engressia speech, 1974. 120 “We met a phone man”: Joybubbles, author interview, 2006. 120 The Engressias moved a lot: Ibid.; Toni Engressia, author interview, 2008; and other Joybubbles/Engressia published interviews. 120 “Daddy hated the snow”: Toni Engressia, author interview, 2008. 121 “I learned a whole lot”: Engressia speech, 1974. 122 “I was seven or eight”: “A Conversation with Joybubbles.” 123 “I got $2.50 a week”: Engressia speech, 1974. 123 Dade County Junior College: Bill Acker, author interview, 2008. 123 “I can whistle like a bird”: Leslie Taylor, “Blind Student Dials Trouble,” USF Oracle, November 27, 1968, p. 1 <db1015>.

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., “Inside Ma Bell,” 73 Magazine, June 1975, p. 67 <db318>. 241 some eight thousand people: Southwestern Bell memorandum/Q&A backgrounder titled “Fraud,” undated but circa 1977. 242 “Dear Telephone User”: “Dear Telephone User” letter from Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, mailed May 28, 1976. In the original, the last three paragraphs of the letter were all in capital letters; see http://pdf.textfiles.com/zines/TEL/TEL_spec2.jpg. 242 One recipient of this missive: Radio Electronics, 1976. 242 “serious national problem,” “nationwide telephone fraud”: “Free-Phone Racket Inside Post Office,” Sunday Times (London), January 21, 1973, p. 1. 243 “men of intellectual stature”: “Phone Fiddle by Bleep Box,” Daily Mirror, October 4, 1973. 243 charges went back to 1968: “Nineteen Accused of Dial-the-World Phone Fiddle,” Daily Telegraph, October 4, 1973. 243 exactly three went to live human beings: Robert Hill, “Days at the Old Bailey,” Interface (the house journal of Cambridge Consultants Ltd.), vol. 8, no. 1, April 1974, p. 10 <db341>.

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

From “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” p. 65. 68. http://www.firstmonday.org/Issues/issue8_12/ciffolilli/. 69. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki.html. 234_Notes 70. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml ?title=Albert_Einstein& diff=2380047& oldid= 2380036 . 71. http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:MP1. Chapter 8. CRISIS OF COMMUNITY 72. http://wwwtcsdaily.com/article .aspx?id=111504A. 73. http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000060.html. 74. http://www.news.com/In-search -of-the-Wikipedia-prankster—page-2/2008-1029_3 -5995977-2 .html ?tag=st.next. 75. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Semi-protection_policy#Semi -protection. 76. http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=1909. 77. http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/wikipedia=oops/. 78. http://en.wikipedia.org / w/ index.php?

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So while this showcased a community able to resolve a problem, it would likely drive away academics and scholars unaccustomed to Wikipedia’s contentious work process. This point has not gone unnoticed. Even those who join Wikipedia as enthusiastic contributors quickly see the unsavory agonistic side of the community. Community_at_Work_(The_Piranha_Effect)_131 Prominent Internet historian Jason Scott lamented this working aspect of Wikipedia during a public speech, highlighting the ominous side of a culture where “anyone can edit.” Scott is no Luddite. As a veteran of electronic bulletin board systems and online culture, his criticism had resonance even among people who are fans of Wikipedia: Jimbo [Wales] holds this up as the great aspect of Wikipedia, is that everybody gets to get their hands in it and that we’re all working together, but they don’t realize, we kill each other!

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The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.72 Jason Scott, mentioned previously as a critic of the phenomenon of edit warring, observed firsthand the problems that could occur when amateurs didn’t get it right. He had an anecdote from his experience with the article about New York politician [[Carmine DeSapio]]: Carmine DeSapio was the last head of Tammany Hall, which is the political machine that controlled New York City for a hundred years.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

snapshot, from October 17, 1996. “AFT: Please tell us about this new concept in releasing . . .” These quotes are copied verbatim from Affinity #3, “Spot Light.” “NetFraCk” is interviewed by “Mr. Mister” and the interview is dated August 19, 1996. The executable file may be retrieved from Textfiles.com, but you will need a DOS emulator to view it. My thanks to Johnny Ryan at University College Dublin for the original pointer. CHAPTER 6 the so-called “Rothschilds of the New World” This formulation comes from Peter C. Newman’s The Bronfman Dynasty (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978).

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The documentary record of the official court system was matched—and sometimes exceeded—by the shadow bureaucracy of the Scene itself. Various dupecheck sites and leaked databases provided millions of NFO files, but it wasn’t until Tony Söderberg’s creation of Srrdb.com that these found a centralized home. The tireless work of other Internet historians proved invaluable as well, particularly that of Jason Scott and the rest of the team at the Internet Archive. Reporting on the life and history of Dell Glover comes from a series of ten interviews I conducted with him, on the phone and in person, over the course of nearly three years. I corroborated the details of his story with historical photographs, court testimony, DOJ evidence, clemency letters written by his friends, family, and neighbors, Facebook posts, corporate records from Vivendi Universal and Glenayre, arrest records from the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office, and on-site visits to the Kings Mountain plant.

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, machine readable, machine translation, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking

Connor (Tomas) O’Brien considers the issue from the standpoint of graphic design and notes that the floppy’s distinctive shape, with one beveled corner, contributes to the icon’s being uniquely recognizable: see O’Brien, “In Defence of the Floppy Disk Save Symbol,” Connortomas.com, April 2013, http://connortomas.com/2013/04/in-defence-of-the-floppy-disk-save-symbol/. 68. See Jeff Jarvis, “Goodbye CTRL-S,” Medium.com, May 20, 2014, https://medium.com/change-objects/goodbye-ctrl-s-8f424e463dbe. 69. Jason Scott, “Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late,” ASCII (blog), July 12, 2011, http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191. 70. The diskettes can also be viewed online: “Exhibition of Abe Kobo at Tyohu City,” posted by Kato Koiti, Horagai (blog), January 22, 1998, http://www.horagai.com/www/abe/xtadu.htm. 71. These details are from Guzzardi’s editor’s note to The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (New York: Del Rey Books, 2002), Kindle loc. 57.

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Floppies may be residual media, but they are also remnants or remainders and survive today as material artifacts as well as virtual totems—most of us have a shoebox or two of them tucked away somewhere. As the physical media (widely cited as having a thirty-year life span) decays, information returns to entropy by the natural processes of magnetic degradation and chemical decomposition. Thus the computer historian and archives activist Jason Scott writes on his widely read blog: “Someone has to break it to you, and that person is me. It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care.… With some perseverance and faced against all the odds stacked against you, something might get out of these poor black squares, but I would not count on it.”69 Writers had to come to terms with the particular characteristics of the diskettes, in particular how many pages could be stored on each—sometimes, especially in the early days, only a single chapter’s worth.

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Several individuals extended themselves to facilitate access to archives: Donald Brinkman, Lee Dirks (RIP), and Amy Stevenson at Microsoft; Peggy Kidwell at the Smithsonian; Leslie Morris and Melanie Wisner at the Houghton; and Joel Minor at Washington University in St. Louis. Others helped furnish me with primary source documents essential to my research: for this I thank Larry Bond, Leon Cooper, Joan Elkin, Lori Emerson, Thomas Haigh, Till Heilmann, Sam Kalow, Lawrence Krakauer, Edward Milward-Oliver, Paul Moran, Stephen Olsen, Gabriela Redwine, Jason Scott, Hal Sedgwick, Steve Soboroff, and Larry Tesler. Eric Cartier and his staff in the University of Maryland Libraries’ Digital Conversion and Media Reformatting department assisted with image scanning and preparation. For interviews, conversations, personal emails, or other personal communications I am deeply indebted to Patricia Freed Ackerman, Roger Angell, Mary Jo Bang, Adam Begley, Evelyn Berezin, Tim Bergin, Edwin Black, Sarah Blake, Adam Bradley, David Brin, Maud Casey, Michael Chabon, Leon Cooper, Kathryn Cramer, John F.

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

Breaking Journalism Down: Work, Authority, and Networking Local News, 1997–2009. PhD diss., Columbia University. 2012. Networking the News: The Struggle to Rebuild Metropolitan Journalism in the Web Era, 1997–2011. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Anonymous. n.d. Anatomy of a Pirate. http://www.textfiles.com/piracy/anatomy.txt (accessed July 25, 2004). Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Asad, Talal, ed. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1984.

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These quotes are culled from my life history interviews. 5. Efficiency can mean various things for programming/software, including running faster, using less computing resources, or both. 6. For a comprehensive history of the BBS era, see the excellent eight-part documentary BBS: The Documentary by Jason Scott (2005). 7. BBSs also played a prominent role among phreaks and underground hackers (Thomas 2003; Sterling 1992). Usenet, a large newsgroup service, was significant for hackers as well (Pfaffenberger 1996). 8. FidoNet, established in 1984, was an independent mail and information transport system that connected BBSs together. 9.

Curation Nation by Rosenbaum, Steven

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, future of journalism, independent contractor, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Mary Meeker, means of production, off-the-grid, PageRank, pattern recognition, post-work, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Yogi Berra

“Start by thinking about the etymological roots of ‘curate’—to take care of. Information surplus creates different challenges in preservation and archival record keeping. There are ‘digital ethnographers,’ slightly fewer ‘cyber anthropologists,’ but media is most in need of digital historians like Jason Scott providing historical context. Someone who can determine the ‘and this’ from the ‘don’t forget’ in fickle Internet memes. Implied by the word curator is an intuitive sense of pattern recognition … More visual than a mere editor, the Internet curator requires a sense of the relationships between words, images, space, and shapes.” But I still haven’t answered the question I set out to resolve for you in this chapter: what is curation, exactly?

We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines

Albert Einstein, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Skype

He isn’t just a multi-hyphenate behind-the-scenes creative, but the movies’ number one fan. The credits may state that the movies are all Robert Zemeckis’s films, but as anyone who has chronicled the trilogy’s ascent in our popular culture—and Gale’s role in it—can attest to, they are equally Bob Gale’s babies. By the time the Bobs exchanged Internet memes via email, the last film in the Back to the Future trilogy had been released twenty-five years prior. Unlike on a television show, where the same cast and crew can work together day in and day out for years, moviemaking is much more ephemeral. Yes, a director or producer may invite some of his team on Project A to work with him or her on Project B, which was what happened with some of the various members of the Back to the Future team who had crossed each others’ paths before and after filming the trilogy, but that is by no means expected.

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., 1985 Drew Struzan illustrated dozens of concepts, including the one shown here, before settling on the iconic one-sheet for Back to the Future of Marty staring at his watch in disbelief. © Drew Struzan, 1985 Tom Wilson gets his old-age makeup touched up during the Back to the Future Part II shoot. © Universal City Studios, Inc., 1989 Jason Scott Lee, whose face is not visible, along with Ricky Dean Logan and Darlene Vogel shooting the hoverboard stunt sequence on the futuristic Hill Valley courthouse square. © Universal City Studios, Inc., 1989 John Bell’s concept art for the Mattel hoverboard. “It just kept getting whittled down because . . . they didn’t want to blow a lot of money reproducing intricate designs,” he says