"Bruce Sterling - The Hacker Crackdown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

This book is about the electronic frontier of the 1990s. It concerns
activities that take place inside computers and over telephone lines.


A science fiction writer coined the useful term "cyberspace" in 1982.
But the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about a hundred
and thirty years old. Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone con-
versation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic
device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other
city. *The place between* the phones. The indefinite place *out there,*
where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet and communi-
cate.


Although it is not exactly "real," "cyberspace" is a genuine place.
Things happen there that have very genuine consequences. This "place"
is not "real," but it is serious, it is earnest. Tens of thousands of people
have dedicated their lives to it, to the public service of public commu-
nication by wire and electronics.

People have worked on this "frontier" for generations now. Some people
became rich and famous from their efforts there. Some just played in
it, as hobbyists. Others soberly pondered it, and wrote about it, and
regulated it, and negotiated over it in international forums, and sued one
another about it, in gigantic, epic court battles that lasted for years.
And almost since the beginning, some people have committed crimes in
this place.


But in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once
thin and dark and one-dimensional — little more than a narrow speak-
ing-tube, stretching from phone to phone — has flung itself open like a
gigantic jack-in- the- box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of
the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has


11
B R U CE S T ER L IN G — T H E HAC KE R CRA C KD OW N NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE
 become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the
world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and televi-
sion, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you
can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense
today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.

Because people live in it now. Not just a few people, not just a few
technicians and eccentrics, but thousands of people, quite normal people.
And not just for a little while, either, but for hours straight, over
weeks, and months, and years. Cyberspace today is a "Net," a