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The History of Hacking  ·  May 31 – June 2, 2026  ·  Carolina Beach, NC

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  • NaClCon keynote: Lee Felsenstein

    From foodbark to All on Mon Jun 1 17:08:52 2026
    Lee Felsenstein just finished his keynote here at NaClCon and it was
    a rare shot of hope in an era that often feels dystopian.

    He drew a direct parallel between our current AI landscape and the
    mainframe days of the 1960s and 70s. Back then, tools were black
    boxes, access was restricted to a small cult of users who were, as
    his slides put it, "relieved of the need to understand operation",
    and the hardware was so massive and resource-heavy that it was
    completely inaccessible to the public.

    When pioneers started developing microcomputers and personal
    computing systems in the 70s and 80s, the reigning powers did exactly
    what you would expect: they tried to restrict knowledge of both
    hardware and software to keep it in as few hands as possible, at the
    greatest possible expense.

    As Felsenstein noted, the elite mentality has always been:
    "This you shall not know."

    History is repeating itself today. We are sliding right back into
    that "knowledge for me, but not for you" mindset. Corporate LLM
    developers train their models on public data, then turn around and
    slap cease-and-desist letters onto indy, reverse-engineered projects
    like OpenClaw.

    It is the modern equivalent of Bill Gates' famous 1976 "Open Letter
    to Hobbyists," which essentially told the early Homebrew Computer Club
    to stop sharing the code.

    So what do we do about it?

    Luckily, we are hackers. According to Felsenstein, our primary
    concerns aren't corporate compliance: they are virtuosity, the
    respect of our peers, and the liberation of captive information.

    When oppressive systems put up arbitrary walls to restrict our access
    to knowledge and power, Felsenstein left us with the ultimate
    takeaway:

    "We can violate the rules, which is our specialty."
  • From poindexter FORTRAN@VERT/REALITY to foodbark on Tue Jun 2 07:25:42 2026
    foodbark wrote to All <=-

    Lee Felsenstein just finished his keynote here at NaClCon and it was
    a rare shot of hope in an era that often feels dystopian.

    He drew a direct parallel between our current AI landscape and the mainframe days of the 1960s and 70s. Back then, tools were black
    boxes, access was restricted to a small cult of users who were, as
    his slides put it, "relieved of the need to understand operation",
    and the hardware was so massive and resource-heavy that it was
    completely inaccessible to the public.

    Thank you for sharing this. Sounds like a wonderful conference!


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