May 13, 2003

Hacker Cracker, Ejovi Nuwere with David Chanoff

One man gets out of a bad block of Bed-Stuy by becoming a grey-hat hacker. The escape narrative is similar to others mentioned here. One interesting difference is that hacker circles gave Nuwere an egalitarian kind of mentoring. I 'm going to remember it as a benefit of anonymity in the next argument about anonymity destroying community.

Nuwere's writing (whoever "with") has a pleasant echo of ringing spoken rhetoric, and he seems basically pragmatic rather than idealistic or tough.

Now suddenly - except it took a ton of work to get here - you're a programmer. And you're still only 14 years old. This is 1994, 1995 and there is no frenzy yet over Internet IPOs and stock options. But you're a rudimentary programmer and you've got a whole universe out there that's just waiting for you to conquer it. (p. 108)
A hacker is like what I imagine other voyeurs are. ... In a way it's about being someone other than who you really are, who I really was. (p 151)
What drew me into security rather than going deeper into the underground was that I realized it was much more difficult to fix things than to break them. (p. 190)
When contemplating anonymity and community, I should remember that on the same page he writes:
Besides, I thought that the best way for me to carve out a place in the security community would be to establish myself in my own identity. As I did that, people would respect me for who I am as opposed to my having the shadowy recognition of some code name.
Nuwere also is a serious competitive martial artist, which partly leads to an ambiguously heroic scene. As he and his most educated, least violent uncle are leaving his mother's deathbed, they walk into a hospital-corridor fistfight with a bunch of thugs. Nuwere finds a mop; it's a safety mop, the head won't come off. He knows the pragmatic thing to do is to run for help when badly outnumbered; the nurses don't call security, and leaving even for moments is unpleasantly like abandoning his uncle in the fight. On the other hand, he and his uncle live.

ISBN: 0-06-621079-8 So wrote clew in History (21st c.). | TrackBack

And thus wrote others:
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