Hacked

Another installment of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything

These days, it seems that everyone is getting hacked. Fast food companies, news organizations, everyone living in the United States…

The highlight of this installment is a conversation about hackers with Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman. She’s done some of my favorite work on Anonymous and Internet culture, and is in the news all the time now when hackers make headlines.

Gabriella began her academic career in the Bay Area, researching the Free Software movement. This research is the basis of her book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking.

Gabriella showed up on the scene when the Free Software movement was rebranding itself as “Open Source.” There are too many meanings of the word free in the English language: free beer, free lunch, free speech. But when the government started using the DMCA to crack down on coding, Hackers bonded around a very specific definition of the word.

This installment marks the first appearance of someone I have been recording for years: my friend “Chris” He is always up to something amazing, but I am always suspicious that he may be pulling my ear-leg. This time he gives us the “truth” about the alleged hack of the New York Times by the Chinese.

George R.R. Martin is the author of the Song of Ice and Fire series, the basis for the HBO show Game of Thrones. He is a very slow writer. Nobody knows when his next book will come out. So I got to thinking: what if I could find a hacker? Someone who could bust into his computer and get me some new chapters?