- My biggest confession as a professional hacker is that I don’t do a lot of hacking, yet I try to think like a hacker all the time.
- I subscribed to a physical magazine in 2024.
- BM to DRM: Drop dead.
My biggest confession as a “professional” hacker is that, in relation to hacking in the cyber security sense, I don’t actually do a lot of it. I’ve never gone through a CTF start to finish, even though every disembodied voice is screaming I should. I only write code when I’ve got an idea that I know I can automate, or just want to see how something works. For contrast: I write indiscriminately. I only code when the result might be useful to me.
But hacking, as Bruce Schneier outlines in *A Hacker’s Mind,* is much more than breaking computers. Hacking is bending the rules of any system to work in your favour in a way that hasn’t been accounted for. Take finance, for example. Insider trading has been illegal for so long, it’s not a hack anymore. Hedge funds, meanwhile, have been propped up by loophole after loophole since the 1960s. They’ve only been allowed to exist through financial hacks.
I think a lot about hacking. I was going to buy Persona 3 Reload the other day – I know a lot of people who love the Persona series, and I’ve never played a single game, so I thought I’d give it a go. That was until players found out that the digital artbook and soundtrack, part of the deluxe editions, were embedded in executables, protected by DRM:
https://twitter.com/antumbral/status/1753506346853634463
Classic DRM moment. You don’t have to hand it to Atlus – there is a very specific reason why you need to launch a .exe to listen to a soundtrack. Wrapping up mp3 files in an executable means hardening your assets with enough IP law that it’s a felony to do anything with that executable other than open it.
Say you wanted to have access to those files on your phone, because you like studying to Mass Destruction. You would need to reverse-engineer the executable, exfiltrate the files, and — fucking OOPS! You’ve just violated Section 1201 of the DMCA (Or Article 6 of the EU’s Copyright Directive), which carries a $500,000 fine and five years in prison for a first offense. Debt for life, and a criminal record into the bargain.
As a hacker, my first thought is how someone would design a program to do this, and prevent playback if, say, Audacity was also running. I’m not about to buy one of the Deluxe editions to find out. The point is not that Atlus has made it impossible for the soundtrack to find its way onto YouTube – it’s that the minimal impact on the potentiality of this event transpiring does not excuse excessively egregious DRM from being a scummy move.
I still bought P3R. Just not the deluxe editions. For as much as I despise DRM, P3 is one of my friends’ favourite games, and I’m no fantasy prude, unlike Mum:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/05/fantasy-for-mums/
Note to self: watch out for Junpei. I can’t trust that man with a katana to save himself.
My second biggest confession as a “professional” hacker is that I don’t do a lot of reading on the subject. This, however, has changed as of today. Thrust upon me through my letterbox this morning was an envelope of promise. For within it was my first of many 2600 Magazine issues to come, as a new lifetime subscriber. When I was little, it never occurred to me that you’re supposed to read a magazine over the quarter. I always tried reading them in one go.
Cory Doctorow sounded the klaxon, in response to Gmail blocking invitations to 2600’s Hackers on Planet Earth convention, and I thought, “Hell yeah, why not? You’ve got to be good to yourself…”
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/19/hope-less/
You may still wonder, however, why the hell a zoomer like me would have any business buying a magazine. It’s 2024 – aren’t magazines all electronic now? Anything I could find in a quarterly gets uploaded to the web en masse. Every day.
The most facile answer I can give is that there is such a thing as too much content. Here, in my hands, is the sum curation of hacker stories over a three month period; it’s something that I own (a rarity these days!) and can return to at any time.
As much as I love my e-reader, the one fatal flaw in operating it is that you can’t go to a physical shelf, pull the pages out, and skim through the pages. There’s too much falderal in the way. You’ve got to navigate to the right menu, press the right option, and type in a page number manually. Too much friction.
Besides which, all of that nebulous ‘content’ you can find in a Google search? More and more of us are waking up to the fact that Google Search has become so enshittified, that unlike many of its in-house projects, long since taken out back, it’s practically undead:
Just this morning, I went from shite and queasy to bright and breezy after PvK pinged me about one such story from Defunctland (h/t Dawangthang):
https://twitter.com/Defunctland/status/1754647768465887445?s=20
While I won’t bother you with a laundry list of similar accounts, here’s the article which I believed kicked off the current trend, and one of Doctorow’s Medium columns from July 2023 – as ever, he spits facts:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
Yes, indeed, it’s morning again in America. Today, more people will Google search than ever before in the search engine’s history. With the Enshittocene at an all-time high, every one of their queries will be coked up with ads. This afternoon, their search for a certain photo on Images will be deluged with LLM-generated guff, and for dinner, they’ll fall for an SEO-boosted doppelganger of their favourite takeout’s site, charging premiums while boiler-room scammers skim the profits.
No thanks to all of that. I can find all the stories I’d want to read for the next three months in a little pamphlet on my shelf. Maybe one day it’ll be me who’s writing an article for 2600. Who’s to say?