Hanseen says that when he tries to explain what his group did, there's a pretty clear dividing line among his listeners. Raymond, the hacker observer, says the point is that the Internet was more or less built upon a foundation of informal collaboration, of individuals proposing ideas to the larger community much in the way that Waitzman proposed RFC 1149 and the Norwegians implemented it. The ideas that make sense to enough people get codified into the standards that everyone agrees to abide by. The playfulness in the original joke RFC and the really high-level playfulness that these guys have displayed in getting carrier pigeons to do a ping for them are really inseparable from the kind of creativity that produced that technology in the first place. I'm actually more certain that I will be playing with computers in the future than I am that I will be working with computers.
Work can be real boring, but play is always fun.
There's just too much fun to be had with computers that you'd run out of it. Sound Off Send us a Letter to the Editor Related stories Hunting the wild hacker Work should be play, says a new book that sets forth the emerging ethical code of free-software programmers. Impugn it at your peril. A hacker historian parries a wrongheaded New York Times assault on digital culture.