I don't think this quite hits the nail on the head. Perhaps hacker communities haven't grown, but I think the reasons given are a bit too abstract. In my opinion, there are two main factors at play here. One is that many of the late 90's early 2000's hackers went corporate for the $$, or worse, went government. I'll never forget calling Mudge up and asking him how DARPA was treating him, and he was loving it simply because of all the cool things he was seeing.
For quite a while I think the hacker community was much more about hobby and IT professionals who were curious (sysadmins breaking out of the box), whereas now people just want to break into stuff and get paid big bucks (banks seem to be the centerpiece of the pen-testing economy to me). I interviewed at a local security company, and when I started talking about evil-maid attacks, I got blank stares back. So what really ended up happening is that guys starting realizing they could just run scans and produce fancy reports and get paid lots of money, and they got lazy and stopped contributing to the community as much.
Secondly though, is the chilling effect. I have been ranting about NSA for at least a decade, but we didn't have much proof beyond the Echelon/Tempest leaks. Now we know how pervasive it really is and that it's still probably even worse than we thought, and people are starting to realize that we only temporarily won the 90's crypto wars.
Eben Moglen said about the cryptowars: "in 95 at Harvard, Stuart Baker (former NSA General Counsel), after a debate about the right to encrypt, said, "...public key encryption will become available. We fought a long losing battle against it, but it was just a delaying tactic..."
I spent some time at unallocated space, which is the closest big hacker lab to NSA headquarters, and it was sorta hush-hush that we just don't talk about NSA stuff while there. Great guys, all around, but I feel like too many hackers got mired in the technical and forgot about the political side of things.
We have to realize that what is going on is a massive control power play being put into action. Surveillance of the level that is happening isn't about security at all. It's about control. I'm willing to bet that in the next few months we are about to see some COINTELPRO level releases from Greenwald and team. Hack all you want, and maybe even get hired by some contractor to make lots of money... but if you dare start applying those skills to politics... you better watch out because you just went to the top of a list somewhere.
I have put it like this, if data = information, and information = power, then secret data = secret information = secret power. Hackers are a threat to those who wield secret data, and their communities are heavily targeted for infiltration and worse. This to me, is much more influential on the hacker community than some imaged lack of creativity. I think the creativity is there, but people are having to hide it away.
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I don't think this quite hits the nail on the head. Perhaps hacker communities haven't grown, but I think the reasons given are a bit too abstract. In my opinion, there are two main factors at play here. One is that many of the late 90's early 2000's hackers went corporate for the $$, or worse, went government. I'll never forget calling Mudge up and asking him how DARPA was treating him, and he was loving it simply because of all the cool things he was seeing.
For quite a while I think the hacker community was much more about hobby and IT professionals who were curious (sysadmins breaking out of the box), whereas now people just want to break into stuff and get paid big bucks (banks seem to be the centerpiece of the pen-testing economy to me). I interviewed at a local security company, and when I started talking about evil-maid attacks, I got blank stares back. So what really ended up happening is that guys starting realizing they could just run scans and produce fancy reports and get paid lots of money, and they got lazy and stopped contributing to the community as much.
Secondly though, is the chilling effect. I have been ranting about NSA for at least a decade, but we didn't have much proof beyond the Echelon/Tempest leaks. Now we know how pervasive it really is and that it's still probably even worse than we thought, and people are starting to realize that we only temporarily won the 90's crypto wars.
Eben Moglen said about the cryptowars: "in 95 at Harvard, Stuart Baker (former NSA General Counsel), after a debate about the right to encrypt, said, "...public key encryption will become available. We fought a long losing battle against it, but it was just a delaying tactic..."
I spent some time at unallocated space, which is the closest big hacker lab to NSA headquarters, and it was sorta hush-hush that we just don't talk about NSA stuff while there. Great guys, all around, but I feel like too many hackers got mired in the technical and forgot about the political side of things.
We have to realize that what is going on is a massive control power play being put into action. Surveillance of the level that is happening isn't about security at all. It's about control. I'm willing to bet that in the next few months we are about to see some COINTELPRO level releases from Greenwald and team. Hack all you want, and maybe even get hired by some contractor to make lots of money... but if you dare start applying those skills to politics... you better watch out because you just went to the top of a list somewhere.
I have put it like this, if data = information, and information = power, then secret data = secret information = secret power. Hackers are a threat to those who wield secret data, and their communities are heavily targeted for infiltration and worse. This to me, is much more influential on the hacker community than some imaged lack of creativity. I think the creativity is there, but people are having to hide it away.
I would like a clarification about the downvote please. I come here for the good conversation, not for reddit style disagreement votes.