The higher principles of hackers were summed up in a draft declaration prepared by the Galactic Hacker Party's organizers and circulated among delegates for their signatures. "The free and unfettered flow of information is an essential part of our fundamental liberties, and shall be upheld in all circumstances," the document proclaimed. "Computer technology shall not be used by government and corporate bodies to control and oppress the people."
The language echoed the beliefs of the second generation of hackers. But the conversation among the kids in the crypt and in the halls belied the rhetoric of the organizers. For Lee Felsenstein, an American visitor, it was a disturbing experience. Lee was a confirmed second-generation hacker, one of the original founders of the Homebrew Computer Club. He remained a staunch believer in freedom of speech and an avid supporter of individual rights. But he felt that the fourth-generation hackers were "underage and underdeveloped"; they displayed "negative social attitudes." Hacking, he said, had degenerated from being a collective mission of exploration into an orgy of self-indulgence.
For Lee, evidence of degeneracy included the hackers who boasted about breaking into American computers to steal military information and then selling it to the KGB. He was also disheartened to learn about the exploits of the VAXbusters, a German group that had broken into NASA and over a hundred other computers worldwide by exploiting a loophole in the operating system of Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX computers. The VAX, very powerful but small machines, are widely used in science laboratories, universities, and military installations.
More to the point, from Lee's point of view, the fourth generation of hackers was becoming involved in a new facet of computer programming, one that threatened everything he believed in. Far from increasing access and creating freedom for computer users, this new development could only cause the door to be slammed shut on access, for freedom to be replaced by fortresslike security.
During the Galactic Party, a number of hackers had been demonstrating new programs called computer viruses.
Lee left Amsterdam muttering about Babylon and ancient Rome. John Draper, alias Captain Crunch, was less bothered. He spent the remainder of his vacation traveling around Germany, taking his hacking road show to eighteen different cities.
There was, in fact, nothing new about computer viruses except their existence. Viruses had been foreseen in science fiction; the earliest use of the term has been traced to a series of short stories itten in the 1970s by David Gerrold. In 1972 Gerrold employed virus theme for a sci-fi potboiler called When HARLIE Was. HARLIE was an acronym for Human Analogue Robot Life Input Equivalents computer, which meant simply that the ficional creation could duplicate every function of the human brain--a sort of mechanical equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein's monster. This robot could also dial up other computers by telefone and reprogram them or modify data. In so doing, HARLIE was emulating a computer program called simply virus, which dialed up telephone numbers at random. When it found another computer at the end of the line, it loaded a copy of itself onto the new machine, which started dialing other comlters to transfer copies of the program, and so on. Soon hundreds of computers were tied up randomly calling numbers.
The Virus program was fictional, of course, and simply part of Gerrold's convoluted plot, but the concept of a computer program reproducing itself had been foreseen as early as 1948. In that John van Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematician and computer pioneer who had designed one of the world's first comruters, quaintly called Maniac, began theoretical work on what was then thought of as electronically created artificial life, which he termed automata. He predicted that the reproduction process for such automata would be fairly simple.
Later, in the 1960s, before the advent of computer games, university engineering students sometimes amused themselves by seeing who could write the shortest program that could reproduce an exact copy of itself. These were called self-replicating programs, but van Neumann would have recognized them as versions of his concept of electronic automata.
