Not a great movie in the traditional sense, but they hit on some important stuff. I loved when the one fed was reading from the Hacker Manifesto...
This is our world now... the world of the electron and
the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a
service already existing without paying for what could
be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons,
and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call
us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call
us criminals. We exist without skin color, without
nationality, without religious bias... and you call us
criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder,
cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for
our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.
My crime is that of judging people by what they say and
think, not what they look like. My crime is that of
outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive
me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.
> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons
This sounds like it was written by an angsty 14-year-old who has no idea what actually goes into building and maintaining public infrastructure. Not, of course, that telecoms are always good citizens, but still.
Oh, definitely. I'm just intrigued by how my perception of that culture has altered over time, especially as I've become more involved with the world 'behind the curtain', and the true magnitude of the industry required to produce all our modern amenities.
Long distance calls in those days were prohibitively expensive. He was writing about the public telephone system and BBSs, not the Internet. You did not dial a BBS outside of your area code (and sometimes not even within the area code because there might be toll charges).
Long distance calls were expensive because they were trying to pay off billions of dollars of basic infrastructure - the phone network that we're only now replacing nearly half a century later. Those fancy exchanges that the phreakers were exploiting? Those had to be invented, prototyped, tested, mass produced, installed, maintained... and that's not even considering tens of thousands of kilometers of telephone wires and poles, negotiating land rights, etc.
We only think of long distance communication as being next-to-free today because our information tech is already bootstrapped, computers are a billion times more powerful, and the market across which those costs are amortized are at least a million times bigger.
