------------- Hacker's Myth ------------- This is a statement on the fate of the modern underground. There will be none of the nostalgia, melodrama, black hat rhetoric or white hat over-analysis that normally accompanies such writing. Since the early sixties there has been just one continuous hacking scene. From phreaking to hacking, people came and went, explosions of activity, various geographical shifts of influence. But although the scene seemed to constantly redefine itself in the ebb and flow of technology, it always had a direct lineage to the past, with similar traditions, culture and spirit. In the past few years this connection has been completely severed. And so there's very little point in writing about what the underground used to be; leave that to the historians. Very little point writing about what should be done to make everything good again; leave that to the dreamers and idealists. Instead I'm going to lay down some cold hard facts about the way things are now, and more importantly, how they came to be this way. This is the story of how the underground died.