Hackers Quotes

Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first.

Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.

Our cousin Patrick Hacker McKaybees, died fighting by the side of the king.

I have a hacker, a half-dead dog, and a child. It’s hardly an arsenal.

There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.

No one messes around with a nerd’s computer and escapes unscathed.

Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.

Hackers are nerdy, pasty, tubby, little geeks with triple thick glasses and this is probably a demented otaku with smelly feet. So catching him will be a breeze!

But, Colonel, Sir, you’re sitting right here on the sofa, in what you describe as my hacker’s condo, and you certainly appear to be very much alive. I’ll ask again, is this some kind of joke?

You lose yourself, Erica, because with the right person, who you become together is something so much greater, more than you could even realize right now.

I'm a hacker!" Cadel protested. "I don't poison people! I don't blow them up!

But Asha Grant isn't a hacker wizard like her cousin. She's not a kung fu expert.She's not particularly brilliant at anything. She's a ***ing pharmacy intern,chum.Just a regular person like you.An ordinary person caught up in a really **** situation.So I think,out of every person in these files, that makes her the bravest.

Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?

You were right. I'm going to make you want things you never knew you wanted.

I went to prison for my hacking. Now people hire me to do the same things I went to prison for, but in a legal and beneficial way.

Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.

Most hackers are young because young people tend to be adaptable. As long as you remain adaptable, you can always be a good hacker.

It is not the monsters we should be afraid of; it is the people that don't recognize the same monsters inside of themself.

The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.

A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way,” Einstein once said, “but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.

I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can't even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails.

progress comes not only in great leaps but also from hundreds of small steps.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about.

I've got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus.

Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.

Every time some [developer] says, ‘Nobody will go to the trouble of doing that,’ there’s some kid in Finland who will go to the trouble.

Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product.

You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.

I’m a fucking killing machine, and you’re a sweet little hacker who likes to flirt with danger. Baby, I am danger.

Sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest of what I want with you that scares me shitless.

He shook his head and raked his hands through his hair. "I'm sorry, Erica, but I'm going to fix this. I promise." I nodded, trusting he would. Said by Blake to Erica

I appreciate the offer. I really do. But you can't put a price on independence, Blake.

No engineer would have dreamed of such an inelegant solution, which goes to illustrate the opportunistic nature of evolution. (As Francis Crick once said, ‘God is a hacker, not an engineer.’)

Genius has less to do with the size of your mind than how open it is.

i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

The Yankees' Facebook page was hacked. The hacker was immediately purchased and signed to a 5 year contract with the Yankees.

Billions of people online and millions of businesses with countless applications, data sources, chat rooms, bloggers, gamers, and hackers all interacting in a great experiment of anarchism.

To guys like Mark, time was another weapon of the establishment, like alphabetical order. The great engineers, hackers - they didn't function under the same time constraints as everyone else.

if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

You read everything—that’s part of the job,” he said. “You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful.

Mrs Hacker was the only woman present. They’d made her a sort of honorary man for the evening.

JOHN: you hacked my dad's wallet??

I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, one who is half hacker, half bard.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

It would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level, at least -- an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name -- its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to sort of a standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

But the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. Only in storybooks do inventions come like a thunderbolt, or a lightbulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage.

Innovation requires articulation.

Tsukiko Saionji: He doesn't look like a weed whacker. Aoi "Flippy" Kyogoku: But I'm a computer hacker, and a safe cracker, and a butt smacker...and I've got just the right equipment to trim your hedge.

Baby, this is who I am. I'm hardwired this way. And if I'm trying to take control over the situation, please understand that I have very solid reasoning for it.

If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.

A physicist is one who’s concerned with the truth,” he later said. “An engineer is one who’s concerned with getting the job done.

I can't live without this Erica. Without you.

There are lines of yours I know by heart. There are scents of yours soaked in my skin.

Who gets to choose what battle takes her down?

I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable, even (e.g., “gender hackers”)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief?

What hackers do is figure out technology and experiment with it in ways many people never imagined. They also have a strong desire to share this information with others and to explain it to people whose only qualification may be the desire to learn.

I love you, and I'm going to do whatever I need to do to protect you. Do you understand?

In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don’t understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.

But have you ever felt that something was so good it couldn’t possibly last?

Out in the field, any connection with home just makes you weaker. It reminds you that you were once civilized, soft; and that can get you killed faster than a bullet through the head.

Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution

Then don't give up on us. Love me, damn it. Please baby. Let me love you.

Jesus, Erica, I'd walk through fire to make sure you were safe.

Mine. You're mine. Just like this. Your body, your heart. Every part of you.

If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.

People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they’re doing and, moreover, make you want to admire them for it.

There was a key lesson for innovation: Understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on.

If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.

Now he was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that violated many of the principles of the hacker’s code: It was overpriced; it would have no slots, which meant that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion cards or jack into the motherboard to add their own new functions; and it took special tools just to open the plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker.

Insert quarter, avoid Klingons.

I found myself falling in love with him all over again. I fell in love with the broken parts and the parts that had healed and changed for the better.

Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31

authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured.

Why do they believe that?” “Because we are hackers,” Csongor said, “and they have seen movies.

If you are a good hacker everybody knows you, But if you are a great hacker nobody knows you.

Every hacker is to some extent a rebel who lives by different standards and enjoys beating the system.

Why should I apologize for being a HACKER? Has anyone ever apologized for turning me into one?

Hacking is a talent. You won't learn it at school. It's like being Messi or C.Ronaldo. If you were born to become a Hacker, it's your destiny. Otherwise, you'll be Hacked.

Wait, Ed. Did you say she?” “You better believe it. Our hacker’s a she!

Human Stupidity , that's why Hackers always win.

Attribution is an enduring problem when it comes to forensic investigations. Computer attacks can be launched from anywhere in the world and routed through multiple hijacked machines or proxy servers to hide evidence of their source. Unless a hacker is sloppy about hiding his tracks, it's often not possible to unmask the perpetrator through digital evidence alone.

Narcissistic Supply You get discarded as supply for one of two reason: They find you too outspoken about their abuse. They prefer someone that will keep stroking their ego and remain their silent doormat. Or, they found new narcissistic supply. Either way, you can count on the fact that they planned your devaluation phase and smear campaign in advance, so they could get one more ego stroke with your reaction. Narcissists are angry, spiteful takers that don't have empathy, remorse or conscience. They are incapable of unconditional love. Love to them is giving only when it serves them. They gaslight their victims by minimizing the trauma they have caused by blaming others or stating you are too sensitive. They never feel responsible or will admit to what they did to you. They have disordered thinking that is concerned with their needs and ego. It is not uncommon for them to hack their targets, in order to gain information about them. They enjoy mind games and control. This is their dopamine high. The sooner you distance yourself the healthier you will become. Narcissism can't be cured or prayed away. It is a mental disorder that turns the victims of its abuse into mental patients because it causes so much psychological manipulation.

Trans” may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some—but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some, “transitioning” may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others—like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T—it doesn’t? I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable, even (e.g., “gender hackers”)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?

The difference can be summed up in one word: authorization. I don’t need authorization to get in. It’s the word that instantly transforms me from the World’s Most Wanted Hacker to one of the Most Wanted Security Experts in the world. Just like magic.

When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.

From Orient Point The art of living isn't hard to muster: Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend. When someone makes you promises, don't trust her unless they're in the here and now, and just her willing largesse free-handed to a friend. The art of living isn't hard to muster: groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster; take brisk walks so you're hungry at the end. When someone makes you promises, don't trust her to know she can afford what they will cost her to keep until they're kept. Till then, pretend the art of living isn't hard to muster. Cooking, eating and drinking are a cluster of pleasures. Next time, don't go round the bend when someone makes you promises. Don't trust her past where you'd trust yourself, and don't adjust her words to mean more to you than she'd intend. The art of living isn't hard to muster. You never had her, so you haven't lost her like spare house keys. Whatever she opens, when someone makes you promises, don't. Trust your art; go on living: that's not hard to muster.

Love. It bloomed in small moments like this, making all the good times that much better, all the tough times worth working through.

We worried for decades about WMDs – Weapons of Mass Destruction. Now it is time to worry about a new kind of WMDs – Weapons of Mass Disruption.

The maximum sentence was twenty years for each free phone call. Twenty years for each call! I was facing a worst-case scenario of 460 years.

Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.

Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.

It means that every waking breath you take, every step you take, you don't just take to move your own life forward, but ours. You take it knowing I'm right there with you, irrevocably tied to every decision you make.

These are the bozos. They are graspers and self-promoters, shameless resume padders, people who describe themselves as “product marketing professionals,” “growth hackers,” “creative rockstar interns,” and “public speakers.

And I’m going to make you fall in love with me all over again. Every morning and every night. In every city and at the edge of every ocean. I’ll remind you why you’re mine and why I’ve always been yours.

People who do good work often think that whatever they’re working on is no good. Others see what they’ve done and think it’s wonderful, but the creator sees nothing but flaws. This pattern is no coincidence: worry made the work good.

innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact. When Einstein was stymied while working out General Relativity, he would pull out his violin and play Mozart until he could reconnect to what he called the harmony of the spheres.

Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I’ve read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.

The tale of their teamwork is important because we don’t often focus on how central that skill is to innovation.

The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.

As a matter of fact, yeah, they were foolproof. The problem is that you don't have to protect yourself against fools. You have to protect yourself against people like me.

One might say that there is an "ethics barrier " a speed above which ethics can no longer exit. After that point the only remaining goal is to survive the immediate moment.

the Hacker Ethic, which instructs you to keep working until your hack tops previous efforts.

The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.

A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing : to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.

Ours was a hard love. We'd fallen hard into it, and we'd fought hard to keep it. Our kind of love didn't ask nicely. It took. It ravaged. It consumed the heart whole and asked questions later. The rewards were soul-deep and all-consuming, sweeping through like a wildfire.

I think all artists struggle to represent the geometry of life in their own way, just like writers deal with archetypes. There are only so many stories that you can tell, but an infinite number of storytellers.

You’re allowed to want different things in bed than you do in your normal everyday life.

She builds people up because she knows what it is like to be torn down.

Because it's true. Erica, one horrible experience doesn't define you. If it did, I doubt you'd want to be with me either. "I do," I said.

Introducing change is like pulling off a bandage : the pain is a memory as soon as you feel it.

The primary obligation of any prisoner is to escape. Whether that means actually leaving or simply figuring out a way to handle things so you don't go crazy is up to you.

I don't know if you have the words I need. I know you didn't need the ones I had.

The last thing I want to do is find my way back to myself when I've already found the best part of myself in her.

The Plot Against The Giant First Girl When this yokel comes maundering, Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him, Diffusing the civilest odors Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers. It will check him. Second Girl I shall run before him, Arching cloths besprinkled with colors As small as fish-eggs. The threads Will abash him. Third Girl Oh, la...le pauvre! I shall run before him, With a curious puffing. He will bend his ear then. I shall whisper Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals. It will undo him.

Rong Kang needed a college town that still embraced yesteryear, a place largely unknown to outsiders, a base where he could conspire at white linen tables, unnoticed. Claremont Village fit the bill.

To know a psycho was to be a psycho. Lawless had always worn many hats to many people. Thug. Thief. Entrepreneur. Biker. Hacker. Enforcer. Cat doctor. Dominant. Kinky fucker. Aloof sadist. The list was endless, and people got creative coming up with terms for him when he didn’t fit into a box of their choosing.

We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground.

Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully.

I crave uncomplicated quiet, and the sky.

The computer and the Internet are among the most important inventions of our era, but few people know who created them.

Landon? The door flug open, and I forgot how to breathe. Holy shit.

You're the only one Erica. There's never been anyone else.

I love you and I want to do this for you. I trust you to take me as far as you think I can go.

Our story is the happiest one I know.

I think you have a fetish for office sex, sweetie, he whispered. You're my fetish, Blake

I want you too. I'll probably lose my mind if I can't be inside you tonight." He exhaled a shaky breath. "I just don't want to...freak you out.

Yes. Hopelessly in love with you. Get used to it. Marriage is forever.

Our bodies, our love, and the fierce way we came together made sense when the rest of the world failed us.

Sometimes innovation is a matter of timing. A big idea comes along at just the moment when the technology exists to implement it.

People don’t invent things on the Internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.

A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade.

Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Only the paranoid survive.

If we had ever met in person, I would have given her a kiss to thank her for all the wonderful help she gave me. Ann, if you read this, your kiss is waiting.

When I was being moved, a deputy U.S. Marshal with a Southern accent so thick it sounded like he was doing a bad parody of a Good Ol’ Boy sheriff laughed and said, “You’re the only prisoner we ever had that got booted out of jail!

All I've ever wanted, since the day we met, was your trust. I want to be there for you, to help you, protect you. I can't do any of that the way I need to when you fight me and push me back.

The president, the secretary of state, the businessman, the preacher, the vendor, the spies, the clients and managers—all walking around Wall Street like chickens with their heads cut off—rushing to escape bankruptcy—plotting to melt down the Statue of Liberty—to press more copper pennies—to breed more headless chickens—to put more feathers in their caps—medals, diplomas, stock certificates, honorary doctorates—eggs and eggs of headless chickens—multitaskers—system hackers—who never know where they’re heading--northward, backward, eastward, forward, and never homeward—(where is home)—home is in the head—(but the head is cut off)—and the nest is full of banking forms and Easter eggs with coins inside. Beheaded chickens, how do you breed chickens with their heads cut off? By teaching them how to bankrupt creativity.

Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that’s simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don’t need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.

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 know he’s an assassin and I’m just his bizarre hacker partner in crime, but he is . . . different. More than a friend. In fact, if we weren’t in the situation we were in, I’d call him my best friend. No one else ever takes care to make sure that I’m comfortable like he does. It’s small things that tell me he’s thinking of me and my quirks even when I’m not in my own head. No one, not even my brother Daniel, is so attuned to my needs.

It seemed to me that transhumanism was an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, cowering in the darkening shadow of its own decay. This longing had historically been the domain of religion, and was now the increasingly fertile terrain of technology.

Right away, I invited on guests like Steve Wozniak, John Draper, and even porn star Danni Ashe, who took her top off in the studio to show us all how hot she was. (Listen up, Howard Stern, I’m following in your footsteps!)

If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he’d think communism had won. Everyone would be wearing the same clothes, have the same kind of office (or rather, cubicle) with the same furnishings, and address one another by their first names instead of by honorifics. Everything would seem exactly as he’d predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts. Oops.

There isn’t any loving, romantic way to put this: I told Bonnie we needed to get married so she couldn’t testify against me, and also so she could visit me if I landed in jail, which was looking like the way things were headed.

This isn’t about replacing human thinking with machine thinking. Rather, in the era of cognitive systems, humans and machines will collaborate to produce better results, each bringing their own superior skills to the partnership

Nearly a Valediction" You happened to me. I was happened to like an abandoned building by a bull- dozer, like the van that missed my skull happened a two-inch gash across my chin. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse. A new- born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone, swaddled in strange air I was that alone again, inventing life left after you. I don’t want to remember you as that four o’clock in the morning eight months long after you happened to me like a wrong number at midnight that blew up the phone bill to an astronomical unknown quantity in a foreign currency. The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me. You’ve grown into your skin since then; you’ve grown into the space you measure with someone you can love back without a caveat. While I love somebody I learn to live with through the downpulled winter days’ routine wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine- assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust- balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust that what comes next comes after what came first. She’ll never be a story I make up. You were the one I didn’t know where to stop. If I had blamed you, now I could forgive you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox- imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind, want where it no way ought to be, defined by where it was, and was and was until the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled through one cheek’s nap, a syllable, a tear, was never blame, whatever I wished it were. You were the weather in my neighborhood. You were the epic in the episode. You were the year poised on the equinox.

... there was one new metallic monstrosity stacked in one corner that she hadn’t seen the last time she was a visitor to his strange chamber, it appeared to be a mass of hard drives all fused together, but they looked too sophisticated to be merely hard drives. “What on earth is that?” “That’s my Kung Fu,” he said proudly, patting the top of the futuristic-looking stack. “Is that what you wanted to show me?” “No, but it’s impressive, isn’t it?” “If you say so.” Steves sighed and shook his head, so few people could appreciate the intellectual complexity of an almost untraceable hacking device.

Quantum Encryption is essential to protect our digital assets and infrastructure from attackers.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

This is one of the problems with reality: the extent to which it resembles bad fiction.

Computers and mobile devices are becoming known for their inherent insecurities and the ability to damage the long term health of the users.

Great stories build relationships and make people care. Those two things are necessary to change anything.

Like many entrepreneurs, Bushnell had no shame about distorting reality in order to motivate people.

Finally, I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences.

Do you feel me? It's me, baby. It'll always be me.

It’s clear where the world is going. We’re entering a world where every thermostat, every electrical heater, every air conditioner, every power plant, every medical device, every hospital, every traffic light, every automobile will be connected to the Internet. Think about what it will mean for the world when those devices are the subject of attack.” Then he made his pitch. “The world needs a new, digital Geneva Convention.

I own you, Erica. Your heart, the blood that beats through it when I hold you down this way. Your body, the way it moves for me, comes for me. It's all mine. Say it. Tell me I own you, baby.

Don't tell me about the Press. I know *exactly* who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they *ought* to run the country. The Times is read by the people who actually *do* run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who *own* the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by *another* country. The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who think it is.' "Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?" "Sun readers don't care *who* runs the country - as long as she's got big tits.

One of my favorite words is a French word: sousveillance. It is the opposite of surveillance. Surveillance means to look from above; sousveillance means to look from below. In their dream of nation-states controlling all of our financial futures, they made one major miscalculation. It’s a hell of a lot harder for a few hundred thousand people to watch 7 1/2 billion. But what do you think happens when 7 1/2 billion of us stare back? When the panopticon turns around? When our financial systems, our communication systems, are private, and secrecy is an illusion that can’t be sustained? When crimes committed in the names of states and powerful corporations are vulnerable to hackers and whistleblowers and leakers? When everything eventually comes out? We have a great advantage because the natural balance of the system is one in which individuals can have privacy but the powerful cannot have secrecy anymore.

Dear 2600: I think my girlfriend has been cheating on me and I wanted to know if I could get her password to Hotmail and AOL. I am so desperate to find out. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. And this is yet another popular category of letter we get. You say any help would be appreciated? Let’s find out if thats true. Do you think someone who is cheating on you might also be capable of having a mailbox you don’t know about? Do you think that even if you could get into the mailbox she uses that she would be discussing her deception there, especially if we live in a world where Hotmail and AOL passwords are so easily obtained? Finally, would you feel better if you invaded her privacy and found out that she was being totally honest with you? Whatever problems are going on in this relationship are not going to be solved with subterfuge. If you can’t communicate openly, there’s not much there to salvage.

Facebook’s strategy, as he described it, was not so different from Napster’s. But rather than exploiting weaknesses in the music industry, it would do so for the human mind. “The thought process that went into building these applications,” Parker told the media conference, “was all about, ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” To do that, he said, “We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you more likes and comments.” He termed this the “social-validation feedback loop,” calling it “exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” He and Zuckerberg “understood this” from the beginning, he said, and “we did it anyway.

Ada’s ability to appreciate the beauty of mathematics is a gift that eludes many people, including some who think of themselves as intellectual. She realized that math was a lovely language, one that describes the harmonies of the universe and can be poetic at times.

The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good. Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but worth solving. So ultimately design and research are aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions.

You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.

Human ingenuity,” wrote Leonardo da Vinci, whose Vitruvian Man became the ultimate symbol of the intersection of art and science, “will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,” she wrote in her “Notes.” “It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.” A century later this assertion would be dubbed “Lady Lovelace’s Objection

Many great thinkers are said to be misanthropes, usually because they did not embrace all people around them as the greatest thing since sliced bread (which is actually a terrible thing: it massively reduces flavor if you keep it more than a day, which the shipping process by very nature imposes). This enables us to write off their opinions as “subjective,” with an airy wave of our hand and the all-knowing proclamation, “You know he was a misanthrope” or “Her misanthropy kept her from knowing the good in humanity.” This dismissive outlook is designed to protect the meek among us, who might be offended by the knowledge that recreational heroin use is actually a somewhat illogical outlook (to avoid absolute categories, we say “for most,” since for some people, dying of heroin addiction is the best solution). Misanthropy goes into the file with evil, terrorists, hackers, Nazis, pot smokers and Montana cabin-dwellers – people who have rejected society, and thus cannot be trusted.

So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It’s hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it’s hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.

Dear 2600: Tell me how much one of your hackers would charge me to delete my criminal record from the Texas police database. [NAME DELETED] Well, we would start with erasing your latest crime, that of soliciting a minor to commit another crime. (Your request was read by a small child here in the office.) After you’re all paid up on that, we will send out the bill for hiding your identity by not printing your real name, which you sent us like the meathead you apparently are. After that’s all sorted, we can assemble our team of hackers, who sit around the office waiting for such lucrative opportunities as this to come along, and figure out even more ways to shake you down. It’s what we do, after all. Just ask Fox News.

Ron Rivest, one of the inventors of RSA, thinks that restricting cryptography would be foolhardy: It is poor policy to clamp down indiscriminately on a technology just because some criminals might be able to use it to their advantage. For example, any U.S. citizen can freely buy a pair of gloves, even though a burglar might use them to ransack a house without leaving fingerprints. Cryptography is a data-protection technology, just as gloves are a hand-protection technology. Cryptography protects data from hackers, corporate spies, and con artists, whereas gloves protect hands from cuts, scrapes, heat, cold, and infection. The former can frustrate FBI wiretapping, and the latter can thwart FBI fingerprint analysis. Cryptography and gloves are both dirt-cheap and widely available. In fact, you can download good cryptographic software from the Internet for less than the price of a good pair of gloves.

First and foremost is that creativity is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than from the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses. This was true of every era of creative ferment. The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution all had their institutions for collaborative work and their networks for sharing ideas.

Dear 2600: …So, in the interest of information gathering and because I am a subscriber, are you going to be checking me out? This would be unnecessary since we checked you out before you subscribed. That’s why we made sure you heard about us and followed the plan by subscribing. Writing this letter, however, was not part of the plan and we will be taking corrective action.

When part of this ecosystem was lacking, such as for John Atanasoff at Iowa State or Charles Babbage in the shed behind his London home, great concepts ended up being consigned to history’s basement. And when great teams lacked passionate visionaries, such as Penn after Mauchly and Eckert left, Princeton after von Neumann, or Bell Labs after Shockley, innovation slowly withered.

Mario’s high spirits soon took a somber turn. He rolled himself closer to Frank. “I need this job, but you were right. More than a job, I need a way out.” Frank had him. He was about to detour the rest of Mario’s life. Build a team, deploy them, scoop up the data, get the hell out of town. Frank had left an unhappy trail of ruined technicians. Spies do that kind of shit, were his usual parting words.

Now kids get a MacBook and regard it as an appliance. They treat it like a refrigerator and expect it to be filled with good things, but they don’t know how it works. They don’t fully understand what I knew, and my parents knew, which was what you could do with a computer was limited only by your imagination.”8

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the United States would have to spend $3.6 trillion more than currently budgeted just to bring our infrastructure up to acceptable levels by 2020.95 China and India are spending almost 10 percent of GDP on infrastructure; Europe, around 5 percent.96 Even Mexico spends just over 3 percent.97 The United States has not broken 3 percent once since the mid-1970s.98

There was nothing he could ever do that would cause him to be loved less than he was in that moment - or in any moment of his existence. Nor could he possibly be loved more. Nor could he disappoint the One who’d breathed him into being. Austin was fully known in ways that he couldn’t understand, and yet he was fully, completely accepted and treasured." "How was it possible that such unfathomable perfections would love him so completely? He wasn’t perfect; nobody was. And yet, he was loved. He knew that without question.

This primary question of life organization is immensely important. If making money is the main goal, a person can often forget what his or her true interests are or how he or she wants to deserve recognition from others. It is much more difficult to add on other values to a life that started out with just making money in mind than it is to make some personally interesting endeavor financially possible or even profitable.

Mauchly and Eckert should be at the top of the list of people who deserve credit for inventing the computer, not because the ideas were all their own but because they had the ability to draw ideas from multiple sources, add their own innovations, execute their vision by building a competent team, and have the most influence on the course of subsequent developments. The machine they built was the first general-purpose electronic computer.

This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

The next phase of the Digital Revolution will bring even more new methods of marrying technology with the creative industries, such as media, fashion, music, entertainment, education, literature, and the arts. Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity. Role-playing games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result in completely new forms of expression and formats of media. This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.

He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of “trends” that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC’s creed: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”60

As for building something users love, here are some general tips. Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. Get a version 1.0 out fast, then continue to improve the software, listening closely to users as you do. The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add.

Every moment of your life, every choice and every circumstance, has carved a path to this very moment,” Mom said. “You’re always exactly where you’re meant to be at precisely the perfect time. You can trust that always. When it’s dark and when it’s light. In those times when you scream at the sky or when you turn your face up to catch the warmth of the sun—you can trust that.

[Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?]" Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this? Before a face suddenly numinous, her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss? It’s documented torrents are unloosed by such events as recently produced not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us, one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate. My eyes and groin are permanently swollen, I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless —and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in. Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast, sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest of what I want with you that scares me shitless.

After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement-finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of those legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions that are funded by employers and guarantee a monthly sum in perpetuity with 401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans. “Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.

Hiro walks straight through the display, and it vanishes. Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of interactive three-dimensional movies. But in the end, they’re still nothing more than video games. Hiro’s not so poor, yet, that he would go and write video games for this company. It’s owned by the Nipponese, which is no big deal. But it’s also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the programmers have to wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning and sit in cubicles and go to meetings. When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that’s no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.

I miss my mother every day,” I said. “But this is my life and everything that has made me who I am, so I can’t dwell on what might have been.”    I’d always be out of step with most people my age who’d been given many more chances to get it right, whose parents were there to scoop them up when they faltered and to point them in the right direction when indecisions were met.    I had quickly learned that my own safety net had sizeable gaping holes in it, which likely explained why lately I felt like I was at sea without a life preserver.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: The Foreign Office is pro-Europe because it’s really anti-Europe. The civil service was united in its desire to make sure that the Common Market didn’t work. That’s why we went into it. Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, French and Italians against the Germans, and the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it’s worked so well? Jim Hacker: It’s all ancient history, surely. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn’t work. Now that we are inside, we can make a big pig’s breakfast of the whole thing! Set the Germans against the French, French against Italians, Italians against Dutch —The Foreign Office is terribly pleased! It’s just like old times! Jim Hacker: Surely we are committed to the European ideal! Sir Humphrey Appleby: Really, Minister! Jim Hacker: If not, why are we pressing for an increase in membership? Sir Humphrey Appleby: For the same reason. It's just like the United Nations, in fact. The more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and impotent it becomes. Jim Hacker: What appalling cynicism! Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes. We call it diplomacy, Minister.

Lovely and unremarkable, the clutter of mugs and books, the almost-empty Fig Newtons box, thick dishes in a big tin tray, the knife still standing in the butter, change like the color of river water in the delicate shift to day. Thin fog veils the hedges, where a neighbor dog makes rounds. 'Go to bed. It doesn't matter about the washing-up. Take this book along.' Whatever it was we said that night is gone, framed like a photograph nobody took. Stretched out on a camp cot with the book, I think that we will talk all night again, there, or another where, but I am wrong.

Byron published the first two cantos of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a romanticized account of his wanderings through Portugal, Malta, and Greece, and, as he later remarked, “awoke one morning and found myself famous.” Beautiful, seductive, troubled, brooding, and sexually adventurous, he was living the life of a Byronic hero while creating the archetype in his poetry. He became the toast of literary London and was feted at three parties each day, most memorably a lavish morning dance hosted by Lady Caroline Lamb. Lady Caroline, though married to a politically powerful aristocrat who was later prime minister, fell madly in love with Byron. He thought she was “too thin,” yet she had an unconventional sexual ambiguity (she liked to dress as a page boy) that he found enticing. They had a turbulent affair, and after it ended she stalked him obsessively. She famously declared him to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” which he was. So was she.

Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design. They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off,” Jobs said. Larry Page felt the same: “The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.”34 Another lesson of the digital age is as old as Aristotle: “Man is a social animal.” What else could explain CB and ham radios or their successors, such as WhatsApp and Twitter? Almost every digital tool, whether designed for it or not, was commandeered by humans for a social purpose: to create communities, facilitate communication, collaborate on projects, and enable social networking. Even the personal computer, which was originally embraced as a tool for individual creativity, inevitably led to the rise of modems, online services, and eventually Facebook, Flickr, and Foursquare. Machines, by contrast, are not social animals. They don’t join Facebook of their own volition nor seek companionship for its own sake. When Alan Turing asserted that machines would someday behave like humans, his critics countered that they would never be able to show affection or crave intimacy. To indulge Turing, perhaps we could program a machine to feign affection and pretend to seek intimacy, just as humans sometimes do. But Turing, more than almost anyone, would probably know the difference. According to the second part of Aristotle’s quote, the nonsocial nature of computers suggests that they are “either a beast or a god.” Actually, they are neither. Despite all of the proclamations of artificial intelligence engineers and Internet sociologists, digital tools have no personalities, intentions, or desires. They are what we make of them.

One day in September 2015, FBI agent Adrian Hawkins placed a call to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., and asked to speak to the person in charge of technology. He was routed to the DNC help desk, which transferred the call to Yared Tamene, a young IT specialist with The MIS Department, a consulting firm hired by the DNC. After identifying himself, Hawkins told Tamene that he had reason to believe that at least one computer on the DNC’s network was compromised. He asked if the DNC was aware of this and what it was doing. Tamene had nothing to do with cybersecurity and knew little about the subject. He was a mid-level network administrator; his basic IT duties for the DNC were to set up computer accounts for employees and be on call to deal with any problems. When he got the call, Tamene was wary. Was this a joke or, worse, a dirty trick? He asked Hawkins if he could prove he was an FBI agent, and, as Tamene later wrote in a memo, “he did not provide me with an adequate response.… At this point, I had no way of differentiating the call I received from a prank call.” Hawkins, though, was real. He was a well-regarded agent in the FBI’s cyber squad. And he was following a legitimate lead in a case that would come to affect a presidential election. Earlier in the year, U.S. cyber warriors intercepted a target list of about thirty U.S. government agencies, think tanks, and several political organizations designated for cyberattacks by a group of hackers known as APT 29. APT stood for Advanced Persistent Threat—technojargon for a sophisticated set of actors who penetrate networks, insert viruses, and extract data over prolonged periods of time.

Today the message most commentators take from Adam Smith is that government should get out of the way. But that was not Smith’s message. He was enthusiastic about government regulation so long as it wasn’t simply a ruse to advantage one set of commercial interests over another. When “regulation . . . is in favor of the workmen,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “it is always just and equitable.” He was equally enthusiastic about the taxes needed to fund effective governance. “Every tax,” he wrote, “is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty.”9 Contemporary libertarians who invoke Smith before decrying labor laws or comparing taxation to theft seem to have skipped these passages. Far from a tribune of unregulated markets, Smith was a celebrant of effective governance. His biggest concern about the state wasn’t that it would be overbearing but that it would be overly beholden to narrow private interests. His greatest ire was reserved not for public officials but for powerful merchants who combined to rig public policies and repress private wages. These “tribes of monopoly” he compared with an “overgrown standing army” that had “become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.” Too often, Smith maintained, concentrated economic power skewed the crafting of government policy. “Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen,” he complained, “its counsellors are always the masters. . . . They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”10

So which theory did Lagos believe in? The relativist or the universalist?" "He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning." "But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits." "Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret." "The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out, but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent part of the brain's deep structure -- as the universalists would have it." "Yes. This was his interpretation." "Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it -- digital namshubs?" "Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the functioning of the brain and of the body." "Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there any namshubs in English?" "Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the 'City of the Letter,' and Syria had Byblos, the 'Town of the Book.' By contrast other civilizations seem 'speechless' or at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language -- at least it was in Sumer five thousand years ago." "A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking." "Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name.' The practical Kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name.'" "The machine language of the world," Hiro says.