Jason Scott's Weblog
Just a few days ago at DEFCON, in the middle of my speech, I said “If you think you know hacking history and you don’t know the name “Joybubbles”, then you’re wrong.” Joybubbles (he legally changed his name from Joe Engressia later in life) was a phone phreak. And not just a phone phreak, a […]
This entry was written on August 12th. It’s filling the August 10th slot. The last few weeks of entries were “catch-up”, written many days after their “official” date. I had the ideas in various states of readiness and non-readiness, life got complicated, so I fell behind. I really wanted to keep things to five days […]
Like anyone who went to film school or liked watching movies, I always harbored a set of “properties” (books or short stories or other written material) that I’d like to make into a film of my own. Two of mine share a similar situation: the play Hackers by Mike Eisenberg and the book The Adolescence […]
Entry written on August 12th. How lucky I was to talk with Richard Thieme at a Shmoocon a number of years ago, and to discuss the topic of my talk, which was finding pre-20th century parallels to hacker cons. And how lucky it was that Richard then asked if I’d heard of a book called […]
Entry written on August 11th. It would be unfair to heap another bit of recognition onto YIPL/TAP without pointing out a slight-less-known phreaking magazine called TEL. PDF.TEXTFILES.COM has a collection of the seven known issues of TEL, which I will not hesitate to make clear is a mirror of a collection from the Green Bay […]
Entry written on August 11th. I could probably stretch post-defcon discussion into a bunch of entries, but let’s just go with one big one. From the Thursday evening of the 2nd of August through to early morning of the 6th, I probably walked 20 miles. You can’t get much of anything done in Vegas for […]
Entry written on August 11th. Like a healthy, extended walk in the woods, a browse through the TAP/YIPL archives is always good for the soul. I recommend a little jaunt through them about once a year. I shirk away from calling them “The Original Hacker Zine”, or “the beginning of it all”, because that isn’t […]
Entry written on August 10th. If you were saying to yourself “Now, where can I browse over 1,700 arcade manuals in PDF format?“, your prayers were just answered. This is over three gigabytes of manuals, schematics, and general information about arcade machines, scanned in by an anonymous army of dedicated people, and going back up […]
Entry written on August 9th. Philosophy Chat Time. These never go well for weblog entries, but it can’t hurt. I have a lot of friends who show me stuff they’ve worked on, or intend to send out there, or which is out there and they want me to review. I get sent a lot of […]
Entry written on August 9th. Frontalot finally released my video of his text adventure song. However, a caveat: you have to be a member of his Valued Sucker Program to grab a copy. So, for the moment it’s “out there” but only in a limited fashion. Remember, this thing is ending up on the GET […]