BE Chap 24, cont. P's great lists

[Neal Fultz]

I did a little more googling, found some pictures from the 2000 entrance
exam:

http://klein.zen.ru/hscool/exams/2000/index.html



On Wed, Mar 9, 2022 at 11:24 AM Neal Fultz <nfultz at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>