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The website really should auto-save WIP longposts as cookies. It's one of those QoL features that's really mandatory nowadays.
Is this really true? There are little enclaves here and there, but nothing like what I'd expect from a movement that amounts to a majority of young tech-savvy men and half the country. T_D's remnant on communities.win is the biggest one I can find. It was commensurately huge in 2016, MAGA was as big on the internet as in the collective subconscious, but the total censorship of the internet seems to have returned it to universally-known-but-never-spoken-of status on much of the user-facing internet.
I've been looking around on Tor, at the "darknet", and it feels surprisingly like a ghost town. "Dread", the oft-spoken of darknet forum, has top posts with upvotes in the low dozens. There's a huge potential audience for a leet uncensored darknet cyberpunk hacker forum, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't exist yet.
Yes, but much like a Good Jazz club during prohibition, you're not going to find them unless you already have a notion of where to look or who to ask because they're not in the Yellow Pages.
Part of this is by their own design, and part of it is because the Obama and Biden administrations both collaborated with companies like Google and Meta to suppress red-aligned sites and stories.
Perhaps this is just nostalgia talking, but I feel like hacker/techie culture and the "open internet" peaked in the early 00s, it wasn't quite the wild west of the 80s and 90s where you could just remote in to Cal-Tech's network if you knew the socket address, but we had maps/discoverability and the internet was still generally a high-trust environment. Bots and spam were not really a thing yet. IRC and BBS were at their peak and the high degree of overlap between the hacker/tech scene and AM/HAM radio culture ensured a broad representation of cultures and backgrounds.
I won't try to claim that the four tribes lived in harmony until the Fire Nation attacked, but I do feel like there was a certain Understanding or Detente, where everybody kind of agreed "IDGAF who you are, show me the code".
Somewhere between 2006 and 2010 this changed. both the IRC and radio scenes were in decline and the scuffle for control of the Open Projects Network after Rob Levin's death in 2006 combined with "Big Short" in 2008 seems to have formed an inflection point where the neighborhood changed and people started locking their proverbial doors. "Codes of Conduct" and "Position Statements" proliferated while big names like Torvalds, Stallman, and ESR publicly started building walls and planning their exit strategies. Meanwhile less prominent users started to self-sort into their own spaces.
Reddit and Twitter briefly reversed this trend of self sorting by virtue of being so big, but both were explicitly west-cost liberal aligned spaces (until Musk bought twitter but that's a separate story), and thier moderation/norms reflected this. Contra a lot of posters here who will point to Gamergate as the pivotal moment in the culture war, I feel that by 2014 the different tribes had already mostly gone their separate ways. Gamergate was a intratribal skirmish amongst of Blues arguing about "ethics in games journalism" while what Reds who were paying attention watched on in bemusement. Imagine believing that Journalists have ethics
If my own experience is representative, such spaces tend to be "by invite only", and to the extent that they are not, finding them is the first test in the entrance exam.
These days I find that the bifurcation of internet spaces and by extension the echo chambers is increasingly amplified by algorithmic factors, as Google, X, TikTok, Et Al are businesses and their business is not "Truth" or "Communication" but rather "Engagement". They show you what they think you want, and what they think you want is based on who they think you are. There is "Youtube A" and "Youtube B", "X A" and "X B", and only rarely do the two meet. If you want to do a fun experiment, buy a new device and spin up a new google account on it, keep it on a separate network from your main device, ideally try to keep it in a completely separate room or building. Then either loan it to a friend's tween daughter or download a bunch of Lainey Wilson and Ella Langley, (or if you're already a country type download a bunch of K-pop instead) and note how your search results and twitter feed on the new device differs from your main one.
I don’t want to say it got corporatized but it was destined to change with the increasing complexity and expansion of digital technology. That “thrifty,” “clever,” aspect of the culture is still there but is no longer the majority condition in tech at large. Things have changed drastically in the digital landscape and hacker culture from the days of old. It just isn’t livable anymore that way. Even the nature of hacking itself has changed.
Compare and contrast the days when SoBig, and MyDoom, and NetSky, and Bagle, and Conficker, and Code Red, and Sasser were wreaking havoc across networks. Some of this was criminal activity from organized crime like the Russian Business Network, the others were lone actors who did it for the thrill and love of technology. Nowadays networks are completely different. Even basic concepts have evolved. One thing you’ll read about if you pick up any intro to infosec book is the idea of an “attack surface.” That’s been known to be antiquated now for quite awhile at the most sophisticated levels. Today it’s conceptualized behind the scenes as an “attack fluid,” a dynamic topological system that operates in a continuous space.
Gradient based path optimization is what killed the old view of a network as a static graph of nodes and edges. In the discrete world you think in terms of “if-then” conditional statements: “If I have local admin on host A, I’ll then be able to dump the credentials of user B.” This is the logic of a maze runner, and it’s the mentality a lot of hackers used to operate with. Gradient based thinking though is the logic of a hydrologist. When you turn the discrete components of your network into a high dimensional vector, you’re moving into the domain of calculus and the network gets treated as a continuous space; and every entity becomes defined by its proximity to others based on shared characteristics. This is similar to how a lot of hedge fund investment strategies work at the highest levels. They don’t view investment vehicles/instruments as separated categories between stocks and bonds, and CD’s, and options, etc. They view it all-together as one single, bounded, conditional risk pool where you buy undervalued risk and you sell overvalued risk. So today, an attack on a network may look something like this:
An agent will go in and will initiate a swarm wide credential harvest across a few dozen nodes, maybe even more. That ends up triggering a massive flood of low priority alerts that becomes visible to the SOC. When the analysts then go in and start triaging the spike in activity, the apex agent (call it node 36 or whatever you want) uses an already mapped, path of least resistance to perform a strike on the database server using a zero day or whatever payload on the backend. By the time that happens, the SOC realizes it was a diversion and the swarm’s already fragmented the data and is exfiltrating it out of different nodes; and so the network ends up getting turned against its own creators.
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