BE Chap 24, cont. P's great lists

[Neal Fultz]

I would push back on the bit about Mischa and Grischa.

The Civil Hacker's School is a real thing and predates the election of
Putin by a few years.

It is/was much closer to Defcon / ccc, part of the underground, nothing to
do with the Kremlin.  Probably the closest existing analog in the States is
the recurse center (https://www.recurse.com/) or the various hacker houses
that come and go.

You can see the founder, Ilya V. Vasilyev, talk about the first 10 years of
CHS history here (at CCC 2007 in Germany) -
https://media.ccc.de/v/cccamp07-en-2032-The_School_of_Hacking_Art - the
part about cultural barriers and differences and crime/prosecution is
particularly good. He explicitly connects the soviet ideology with cracking
copy protection, but also brings in some ethics from martial arts.

He also talks about needing to run his school in Russia, specifically
because Germany had banned development of tools for cracking copy
protection, but it was still legal in Russia. This is an important,
forgotten point that explains some of how the different scenes developed
differently in different jurisdictions. To this day, my little niche of
information economics has all its conferences in the Caribbean because the
USA still classifies encryption algorithms as an arms under export
regulations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States#Current_status


The Q&A is the best part, really good. A really good part about the 90s
dialectic between hacker vs cracker (white hat, black hat) vs in Russia
there was an idea of "hacking as a martial arts", can be good or bad and
student and teacher needs to take responsibility; unified Germany sat
somewhere between the western and eastern ideas.  Another good question
specifically asking about FSB influence, he was approached by them and
refused, and suffered some blowback. He finances the school out of pocket
and with student donations, like a dojo; he had an IT job at the world
trade center in moscow but quit to focus on the art. They have colored
bracelets instead of belts, entrance exams and attestations and everything.

IDK.

Anyway, it's pretty representative of the amount of idealism back in early
cyberculture (eg his first tutor went by the handle Buckaroo Banzai lol)
that started slipping away after 9/11, as the left-leaning in the
underground went to jail and the right-leaning were coopted by corporate /
nat-sec interests.

Not sure if Pynchon had that context, but it's an interesting allusion.

- Neal

On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 1:28 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> p 261....the list, Windust's place.....P's compressed 'social realism',
> Sinclair Lewis
> on observational speed with also P's hysterical irrealism in some of the
> items...."snack products
> with official-looking waivers where the nutritional information is usually
> found", like that.....
> and a single beet, a major Russian vegetable, a synecdoche for the segue to
> the KGB? [where Putin
> started his rise, of course], "still an arm of Russian espionage, its
> mission statement includes destroying
> America through cyberwarfare.".....Mischa and Grischa are recent graduates
> of its Civil Hackers' School. ....
>
> TRP knew the real Putin Russia by the time of this novel obviously and said
> so right here. Can't say we
> didn't know. "these days the Russian mob and the government share many
> interests"    p. 264
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>