Agreed, never the less the topic is interesting, and the development of groups, organisations and their history is surly an issue that is worth discussing even for readers of hacker news.
Also I am quite sure that there is some overlap going on between "these" hacker communities and the hacker news community.
Also I am quite sure that there is some overlap going on between "these" hacker communities and the hacker news community.
Not significantly, I think. The old-school hacker communities arose as a reaction to the large-scale centralization of technology in the form of the phone companies, IBM, and so on; corporate and government infrastructure was a playground for phone phreaks and hackers who passed around, in grimy photocopied 'zines and text files, skeleton keys to get access to a forbidden realm that was otherwise completely inaccessible. Going back to the '70s, hacking was a way -- at least as the hackers themselves saw it -- to empower people to enter a world that was otherwise reserved for giant bureaucracies.
In a world of iPhones and $5 Digital Ocean droplets, the thrill comes from creation, not access. These days, black-hat hackers are professional criminals running electronic short-cons, and "hacker communities" are usually developing-world mafias; they're not (at the risk of romanticizing the way the world used to be) the harmless dialup daytrippers of legend. The lineal descendants of hackers like Cap'n Crunch or the Mentor aren't running botnets; they're building new technologies that are going to keep empowering us.
Exactly. There's so much work for people with those kinds of skills in the US and Europe that the "dialup daytrippers" end up in the corporate world right out of college. Even people who participate in illegal activities often have day jobs where they do white hat things.
Also I am quite sure that there is some overlap going on between "these" hacker communities and the hacker news community.