d3constructionists-blog

[d3constructionists-blog]

We’re back after 18yrs to showcase the “Hacker Manifesto” collection by Deconstructionists x Cherry Fukuoka. The collection is exclusively sold by Cherry Fukuoka in Japan. 

[d3constructionists-blog]

After a good 5 years, we must put an end to HACK TH3 PLANET! The Department of Defense deems us a threat to the safety of the country. We weren't going to leave without a fight but they said they would go after any IP address that ever visited our site and we didn’t want to bring our loyal supporters into a fight that isn’t yours.

We must delete most of our content because, in the eyes of the U.S. Government, the content we are sharing is dangering millions of lives, we beg the differ, we feel we are saving millions of lives. We will keep the few articles and resources that aren’t considered legal as a way of archiving the community we built here together but this will be the last post...  

Yesterday it was us but tomorrow it could be you because as you know another one got caught today, it's all over the papers.  "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...Damn kids.  They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?  Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world...Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...Damn underachiever.  They're all alike.

 I'm in junior high or high school.  I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction.  I understand it.  "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work.  I did it in my head..." Damn kid.  Probably copied it.  They're all alike. I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second, this is cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up.  Not because it doesn't like me...Or feels threatened by me...Or thinks I'm a smart ass...Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...Damn kid.  All he does is play games.  They're all alike. And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here...even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all... Damn kid.  Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.  We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic.  The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.  We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.  We explore... and you call us criminals.  We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals.  We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity.  My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.  You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

[d3constructionists-blog]

March 31, 1999

The Reality Is All Virtual, And Densely Complicated 

Action heroes speak volumes about the couch-potato audiences that they thrill. So it's understandable that ''The Matrix,'' a furious special-effects tornado directed by the imaginative brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski (''Bound''), couldn't care less about the spies, cowboys, and Rambos of times gone by. Aiming their film squarely at a generation bred on comics and computers, the Wachowskis stylishly envision the ultimate in cyberescapism, creating a movie that captures the duality of life a la laptop. Though the wildest exploits befall this film's sleek hero, most of its reality is so virtual that characters spend long spells of time lying stock still with their eyes closed.

In a film that's as likely to transfix fans of computer gamesmanship as to baffle anyone with quaintly humanistic notions of life on earth, the Wachowskis have synthesized a savvy visual vocabulary (thanks especially to Bill Pope's inspired techno-cinematography), a wild hodgepodge of classical references (from the biblical to Lewis Carroll) and a situation that calls for a lot of explaining.

The most salient things any prospective viewer need know is that Keanu Reeves makes a strikingly chic Prada model of an action hero, that the martial arts dynamics are phenomenal (thanks to Peter Pan-type wires for flying and inventive slow-motion tricks), and that anyone bored with the notably pretentious plotting can keep busy toting up this film's debts to other futuristic science fiction. Neat tricks here echo ''Terminator'' and ''Alien'' films, ''The X-Files,'' ''Men in Black'' and ''Strange Days,'' with a strong whiff of ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' in the battle royale being waged between man and computer. Nonetheless whatever recycling the brothers do here is canny enough to give ''The Matrix'' a strong identity of its own.

Mr. Reeves plays a late-20th-century computer hacker whose terminal begins telling him one fateful day that he may have some sort of messianic function in deciding the fate of the world. And what that function may be is so complicated that it takes the film the better part of an hour to explain. Dubbed Neo (in a film whose similarly portentous character names include Morpheus and Trinity, with a time-traveling vehicle called Nebuchadnezzar), the hacker is gradually made to understand that everything he imagines to be real is actually the handiwork of 21st-century computers. These computers have subverted human beings into batterylike energy sources confined to pods, and they can be stopped only by a savior modestly known as the One.

We know even before Neo does that his role in saving the human race will be a biggie. (But on the evidence of Mr. Reeves's beautiful, equally androgynous co-star, Carrie-Anne Moss in Helmut Newton cat-woman mode, propagating in the future looks to be all business.) The film happily leads him through varying states of awareness, much of it explained by Laurence Fishburne in the film's philosophical-mentor role. Mr. Fishburne's Morpheus does what he can to explain how the villain of a film can be ''a neural interactive simulation'' and that the Matrix is everywhere, enforced by sinister morphing figures in suits and sunglasses. ''The Matrix'' is the kind of film in which sunglasses are an integral part of sleekly staged fight scenes.

With enough visual bravado to sustain a steady element of surprise (even when the film's most important Oracle turns out to be a grandmotherly type who bakes cookies and has magnets on her refrigerator), ''The Matrix'' makes particular virtues out of eerily inhuman lighting effects, lightning-fast virtual scene changes (as when Neo wishes for guns and thousands of them suddenly appear) and the martial arts stunts that are its single strongest selling point. As supervised by Yuen Wo Ping, these airborne sequences bring Hong Kong action style home to audiences in a mainstream American adventure with big prospects as a cult classic and with the future very much in mind.

''The Matrix'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes strange, unreal forms of violence and occasional gore. THE MATRIX Written and directed by the Wachowski Brothers; director of photography, Bill Pope; edited by Zach Staenberg; music by Don Davis; production designer, Owen Paterson; produced by Joel Silver; released by Warner Brothers. Running time: 115 minutes. This film is rated R. WITH: Keanu Reeves (Neo), Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus), Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity), Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith) and Joe Pantoliano (Cypher).

#technology

[d3constructionists-blog]

September 3, 1998

Hackers: the good, the bad, the ugly

LAS VEGAS -- Computer hackers normally shun the spotlight, but many of them came out into the open for the recent Defcon convention in Las Vegas, offering outsiders a rare chance to glimpse their distinctive subculture.

While most of the year, hackers connect via modems and e-mail, here they met face-to-face. Fueled by cigarettes and caffeine, they huddled in groups around computers, swapped strategies, exchanged tactics and briefed each other on the latest technological developments.

No business clothes here. The standard apparel was T-shirts and shorts (and forget about those name tags saying "Hello, my name is ..."). Others opted for an in-your-face look: a spiky dog collar here, a punk hairdo there; miscellaneous pierced noses, tongues and other appendages.

Some of the more colorful attendees

They start early...

Most hackers start practicing their craft by tinkering as kids.

One hacker said he got his start at age 13, when he broke into a credit card database.

"I knew I shouldn't have been doing it. But I figured: I'm under 15, I can't get in that much trouble, can I?" he said.

The hacker community is divided into two categories. The "white hat hackers" are those paid by corporations and the federal government to legally break into systems to find vulnerabilities in computer software and then fix the flaws.

The other group, known as "black hat hackers," are malicious: They break into networks illegally to steal bank account numbers or credit cards in order to make money.

Chasing thrills...

Many hackers say they do break-ins because it's addictive, a thrill -- and one feels the "power at the fingertips."

"It's so many things at the same time: you want the knowledge, you want the power -- you just want to be there. You don't want to miss out," one of the few women hackers said of her experience.

A hacker's idea of having a good time is a race to see which team can be first to break into a computer network. The winning team gets a cash prize.

"We own every one of these machines. It's on our network, not the Internet. So this is completely legal," said one convention-goer.( 112K/7 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

From outcasts to experts

Even though they were once considered outcasts, many hackers now hold critical and high-paying jobs with corporations and governments.

The Hackers Ball

One group of hackers, called Lopht, even appeared before Congress recently to explain flaws in computer security.

"It was actually a pretty monumental step forward to see the Senate and large legislative groups almost embracing hackers and saying: 'Hey, you guys have something that you're actually bringing to the table,'" said Dr. Mudge, a member of the group.

#technology

[d3constructionists-blog]

August 23, 1998

ART; As Asia Regroups, Art Has a New Urgency 

 THE Taiwan Domestic Airport was closed down temporarily in June when missiles were fired in the air by a citizen of mainland China. The man in question had arrived in Taipei just days earlier. Estimates range, but the official figure for the number of missiles involved in the incident stands at 200. Residents of northern Taipei were surprised but ''not unduly alarmed,'' according to one local report, by the flashes of intense light and the terrific noise. No injuries were reported.

The closing of the airport had actually been negotiated in advance by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the missiles had in fact been fired by Cai Guoqiang, a New York-based artist, in a performance at the opening of the Taiwan Biennial. His project, ''Golden Missile,'' was one of many radical works in a show that is without question the most important exhibition of contemporary art ever mounted on this island.

Democracy and biennials arrived in Taiwan about the same time, in the early 1980's. For more than a decade afterward, a sculpture biennial alternated with a painting biennial, so that there was in fact a biennial every year. Then the directors of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum decided that these categories were inadequate to contemporary art, and so they established, in 1996, a new Taiwanese biennial modeled loosely on the Whitney Museum's, which represents the major trends and tendencies of the moment in American art. Now internationalism has arrived. The current exhibition, the first North Asian Biennial, includes work by artists from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and mainland China. The show, which runs through Sept. 6, was curated by Nanjo Fumio, a well-known Japanese critic, who commissioned site-specific installations for it. The work ranges from the formal to the didactic to the comical to the acutely political; such profound variety and the ostentatious display of total artistic freedom seem almost incredible in a country that held its first fully open elections little more than two years ago.

The Taiwan Biennial reflects the liberal policies of the Taipei city government, which is led by the leftish Democratic Progressive Party (the national government remains in the hands of the rightish Kuomintang). Though the Taipei government is building several new museums in town, the biennial is the most concrete evidence to date of the authorities' commitment to culture. It is a tough, provocative, politically eclectic show.

While neighboring sections of the globe have in recent decades assumed clear regional identities -- there is, to some degree, a culture of Southeast Asia -- the four countries of the north have remained culturally insulated. Each in its way has achieved a level of success and sophistication that has allowed it relative self-sufficiency, and all four are historically isolationist in any case. This biennial takes on the big questions: How do these four countries define an idea of Asia or of the Far East for Western viewers? How does each country combine its own artistic traditions with the modernist idea of internationalism? What constitutes originality in these cultures, and what is the status of originality in each one? How much is it possible or desirable for these societies to escape from their long histories? These questions, which underlie so much modern art from Asia, have never before been negotiated so thoroughly or so publicly.

Mr. Fumio writes in the exhibit's brochure: ''Asia's cities are seeking a new post-colonial identity as they sculpt modernity. Its economies have grown, heated up and contracted. Its politics are in turmoil, and its democracies are beginning to take on unique shapes. Tradition is being re-examined, reborn and creatively transmitted. Western modernity is learned from, studied, copied, denied.''

This exhibit will doubtless affect our understanding of Asian art for the long term. Looking around the show, one can see how a new canon is being etched into the collective conscious. Further evidence of it will be visible in the Asia Society's ''Inside Out'' exhibition opening next month in New York.

Mun-Lee Lin, the director of the Tapei museum, and Yulin Lee, the head of its international programs, wanted to insert Taiwan into the Asian-identity dialogue, and to make the island a center for cultural innovation. ''In this time of globalization, the idea of 'Western' and 'Asian' problems is no longer meaningful,'' Mr. Lin said. ''But as we approach technological par with the West, variations between Western and Eastern Zeitgeist become more potent, more significant and harder to define. We hope this exhibit will forward that debate, to the benefit of both West and East. We have studied the work of other countries as we have grappled with the question of who we are, looking at our local past, at the traditions brought over from the mainland in 1949, at the effect of American support and of the withdrawal of American support. We are a younger and less clearly defined society than are Japan, China and Korea; but it is now time for us to be the hosts, and to establish the place of our own artists.''

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum is one of the worst conceived museum spaces in the world. The cavernous lobby always feels vacant; the glass atrium in the middle of the museum looks like an air shaft in an apartment block; and the galleries are either oppressively low ceilinged or vacantly high ceilinged and all poorly proportioned. Mr. Fumio commissioned artists for specific spaces, and he managed to bring every corner of the museum to life. Six works transform the lobby, including Choi Jeonghwa's 40-foot gold column topped by a motorized goddess whose wings beat just below the ceiling.

The dingy atrium has been filled with gigantic asymmetrical black-dotted fuschia balloons by Yayoi Kusama, one of the great names of Japanese modern art. Tied loosely to the atrium walls, these pink dirigibles shift very slightly and very slowly in the wind. They look benign as giant manatees, and the light that reflects off and through them gives the whole museum a welcoming, rosy glow.

The show mixes big names with relative unknowns. In addition to the work of Ms. Kusama, Mr. Choi and Mr. Cai, there are major pieces by such fixtures on the international exhibition scene as Nobuyoshi Araki, Tatsuo Miyajima, Chen Zhen, Ho Chungming and Xu Bing. Mr. Araki spent a month in Taipei photographing the mopeds that are the city's main form of transportation and then mounted these photographs in the form of a giant mural showing the dynamic motion of the new Taiwan. Mr. Miyajima has installed LED (light emitting diode) displays of unexplained changing numbers in a large room, leaving it dark except for the red and green glow of the shifting digits, evoking calculators, production figures, economics and the passage of time.

Ho Chungming's woodblocks, mounted like posted bills outside the museum, announce to visitors, ''God Hates You: You Are Too Busy'' and ''God Hates You: You Are Too Lazy'' and ''God Hates You: You Are Too Fearful.'' Xu Bing, in the most sophisticated installation of all, has created a system of English-language characters, made exercise books, set up a classroom with desks, pots of ink, brushes and ink stones and produced a videotape of a teacher lecturing on brush-stroke technique in a voice that is at once deeply respectful and utterly patronizing of Chinese culture.

Much of the work by less-known artists is also effective. Wu Tien Chang has repainted a well-known 1950's Taiwanese painting of a Shanghai woman walking through a Taiwan market. While the locals are a grimy lot, the woman walks in a soft glow of supernal elegance, a manifestation of the racist views of the mainlanders who arrived in 1949 with Chiang Kai-shek. By projecting a film onto a mirrored reflection of the painting, Mr. Wu creates an illusion that the woman dances toward the viewer while the rest of the painting disappears. Sentimental music plays. As she comes closer, she becomes confusing: is she a woman or the artist in drag? Is she beautiful or grotesque? Welcoming or salacious? Superior or utterly lost?

The Korean artist Kim Beom's ''Art of Transforming'' plays on the ideas of the natural and the unnatural that have plagued Asians as they try to reconcile industry and tradition. In the installation,''How to Become Grass,'' there is a text from Mr. Kim that says, in part, : ''Let your hair grow long and paste hay on your body. Dye your hair green in summer and ocher in winter. Lie still always, but in spring and fall, after dying your fingertips, point them to the sky and make a wish that your offspring will prosper. Gradually learn how to obtain the hair coloring from nature.''

Some artists, including the Korean Bahc Mo and the Chinese Lin Yilin, built huge projects just outside the museum. Mr. Bahc has created a wonderfully typical, chaotic Asian construction site, while Mr. Lin has made a wall of bricks precariously balanced on one another, with paper money fluttering where there might have been cement.

Another artist, Cai Guoqiang, has caused the entire exterior of the Taipei Museum to disappear under a skin of commerce. Ringing the building is a bamboo advertising scaffold like the ones that enclose so many buildings across Asia, and covering it are actual advertisements, the sale of which helped pay for this hugely expensive project.

As might be expected, underlying any vanguard art show in Taiwan is an implied criticism of the cultural repression that still exists on the mainland. The artists in the biennial who reside in mainland China did not come to Taiwan. Unable to get the necessary exit papers from their own Government, they made their site-specific installations without direct experience of the sites, responding to photographs with drawings and instructions. They will never see the work completed or in place.

None of the strong work of these artists was included in the Guggenheim's exhibition of 20th-century Chinese art last winter in New York. The curators of that show have said in a letter to Artforum magazine: ''We were able to present a history of 20th-century Chinese art that has not been manipulated for political purposes. Chinese institutions are now willing to have the recent past openly re-examined.'' The ambivalent position of contemporary Chinese arts in the Taiwan Bienniel contravenes such naivite.

#darkwebart

[d3constructionists-blog]

August 4, 1998

Hackers claim to find security holes in Microsoft's Windows

LAS VEGAS -- Some serious security holes may have been spotted in the latest Microsoft operating systems. A program just released claims to make it possible to remotely take over a computer running Windows '95 and '98 without the user's knowledge.

"I am currently writing a sniffing plug-in that allows you to sniff any traffic that goes by a Windows machine," explained the man who released the program." ... You can reboot a remote machine; you can lock up a remote machine."

He goes by the nickname Sir Dystic, and he is a member of a so-called hacker group. Members of this and other groups attended a recent hackers' convention in Las Vegas.

While the term "hackers" covers a wide range of people, many at the convention spend their free time figuring out how computers work and looking for weaknesses in computer programs that let people sneak in and look at what's on your computer without your knowing it.

Back Orifice

Sir Dystic released the new program, called Back Orifice, at the convention. Back Orifice is a play on the name of Microsoft's software package, BackOffice. Back Orifice has advantages for users, but could pose security problems too -- and now it's widely available on the Internet.

According to the hacker group, a person can download the software from a Web site into a computer and, if the computer is logged onto a network, go to any other computer in the world, access it and run it remotely.

It's also possible for someone to load the program onto an unsuspecting victim's computer. This can be accomplished through e-mail attachments or through software that is unintentionally downloaded from the Internet.

"Once it's in there," Sir Dystic said, "a remote user can do pretty much anything that the local user can do and more ... including controlling the full file system, grabbing video from any cameras they have hooked up, seeing what they see on the screen, getting a log of what they type into the keyboard."

A convention for so-called hackers was held in Las Vegas

Microsoft sees no legitimate use for this product, and claims Windows users are safe.

"If you use safe computing practice on the Internet and do not download unsigned executables, meaning software from people you don't know, then you're not going to download this software," Microsoft spokesman Ed Muth said.

But Sir Dystic said the hackers are releasing the program to the public to force Microsoft's hand, pressuring the company to fix vulnerabilities in Windows security.

"By releasing this publicly, it is now something people have to deal with," he said. "It is an issue and it will be dealt with, or people will be screwed."

Microsoft said it tried to contact Sir Dystic and his hacker group about their program, but got no response.

#technology

[d3constructionists-blog]

August 2, 1998

The Hacker Myth Crumbles at Convention

AS VEGAS -- Seventeen-year-old Heath Miller has come to his first Def Con hacker convention in full battle array, wearing a black T-shirt depicting a shrieking skull and army-green shorts so baggy they can keep his ankles warm. In short, he looks precisely like the devious computer whiz your mother warned you about.

Kim Kulish/SABA for Cybertimes

A computer hacker who goes by the handle "Etherbunny" dressed in phone companies' clothes (including a Lucent Technologies flag , worn as a cape) during the Def Con 6.0 convention at the Plaza Hotel in Downtown Las Vegas.

So much for first impressions. Miller is an excellent student, hopes to attend MIT and recently placed third in a national science contest with a project that it is not exactly a nefarious bit of hacking: He built a sensor system that lets school bus drivers monitor whether students are wearing their seat belts.

The sixth-annual Def Con is in full swing in Las Vegas, but anyone who came here looking for Public Enemy #1 may want to pack up his dragnets and go home. Turns out that for the most part, this convention doesn't live up to its reputation as a gathering of clandestine, underground hackers plotting to cripple the Pentagon via modem.

Instead, many are here just to party. Others are just young and bright, with creative minds and a passion for understanding computers. Sure, they might spend too many adolescent hours tanning by the light of the monitor, but that doesn't exactly make them the next coming of Hannibal Lecter.

There were some bits of mischief. Several hotel rooms were trashed and windows broken amid the post-pubescent revelry. Also, conventioneers discovered the radio frequency of the hotel security system, then used their own walkie-talkies to request that security personnel be sent all over the building. Hotel security figured out what was happening and ignored the requests.

"Then it just went away," said Joe Gruszka, a security officer at the Plaza Hotel, where Def Con is being held. "Now, every once in a while, we just hear giggling, that sort of thing."

Giggling over walkie-talkies? How can the Pentagon ever expect to protect itself?

This is not to say that Def Con is devoid of more troubling impulses. Many here would clearly like the bragging rights granted to the discoverer of some new hack (known as an "exploit") that can be used to infiltrate critical corporate or government computers. Def Con founder Jeff Moss said that the convention has its share of "malicious" hackers.

The formal proceedings include talks on "hacking into the travel industry" and creating a false identity, plus an extensive session on how to pick locks.

And on Monday, Cult of the Dead Cow, one of the oldest and most respected hacking groups, plans to give out free copies of a program it claims can be used to hack into a Windows 95 or 98 computer from a remote location and essentially take control of it.

But Moss and others make a key, sometimes tricky, distinction: they say hackers, by definition, relish the pursuit of information, including how systems work and how they can be made not to work. But they are different from "crackers," whose overriding purpose is to hack into computer systems and destroy them.

For instance, the members of Cult of the Dead Cow defend their exploitation of a security flaw in Windows on the basis that they are pointing out a dangerous problem with the software, and also providing a possible tool. "There is a legitimate use for this as a network management tool," said a Dead Cow member, who goes by the hacker handle "Death Veggie."

Kim Kulish/SABA for Cybertimes

Hackers going by the handles of "Paydro", (L), Sloth and Spew, attended Def Con 6.0 convention in Las Vegas.

The convention undermines other hacker stereotypes. Moss, for example, is clean-cut, well-spoken and only a couple of cheekbones away from appearing in a J. Crew spread -- hardly the acne-scarred and tattooed misanthrope of hacker legend.

The trouble is, while most of the hackers vigorously denounce the media for mischaracterizing their behavior as nefarious, they also want to reinforce the mythology surrounding their craft. A handful of the younger ones, in particular, can be heard pointing out the likely "feds" in the crowd, and stating with melodrama thick as a malted milk that they would rather not discuss the illegal hacks they may or may not have perpetrated.

But the reverence for the mystique is nowhere more apparent than in their self-selected hacker handles. Some of the hackers treat their monikers like hard-earned honorifics, and they use them whenever possible. The name tags read like graffiti tags: Freaky, Phraud, Sloth, Paydro, Heph, Unix64. The bearers of these handles all declined to disclose the name that appears on their drivers licenses, presuming they are old enough to have one.

CyberTimes Special

Hackstock: A Reporter's Fact-Finding Mission

Related Article Hacker Convention Takes On a Corporate Tone (July 31, 1998)

"Spew," when asked how he got his name, said, "I've had it for a long time." Spew drove to Def Con from Sacramento, Calif., with Sloth and Paydro. All three are 17-year-old high-school seniors. Spew did say, though, that he was really just along for the ride. "Really, I'm more into playing games," Spew said shyly. "These guys make fun of me all the time 'cause I use Windows 95."

Aside from learning about the newest technology and hacking techniques, many hackers come here to meet friends they have previously met only online.

For example, Heph, an 18-year-old junior college student from Los Angeles, and Unix64, a 16-year-old from Scottsdale, Ariz., have over the last two years become virtual best friends through an online discussion system called Internet Relay Chat. They talk all the time online, but each managed to convince his parents to visit Las Vegas this summer so they could meet in person and attend Def Con.

After they met on Friday morning, it was on to the serious stuff: hearing from established hackers about how to expand their knowledge of the Unix operating system.

"I am SO into Unix," said Unix64, clad in an Arizona State University baseball cap and "South Park" T-shirt. "I'm here to sit in on the lectures and have fun. Mostly what's fun for me is learning."

Unix64 had better be careful. He'll give Def Con a bad name.

#technology

[d3constructionists-blog]

July 27, 1998

Hacker Convention Takes On a Corporate Tone

AS VEGAS -- "Dark Tangent," the founder of the annual hacker convention known as Def Con, isn't the arch-criminal you might expect, stealthily breaking into corporate America's most private systems. Instead, he's having corporate America over for lunch -- and its managers are paying handsomely for the privilege.

Christine Thompson / CyberTimes

The sixth-annual

Def Con

opens Friday in Sin City, and some 2,000 rowdy hackers and their groupies are expected to attend. But on Wednesday and Thursday, Dark Tangent -- whose given name is Jeff Moss -- hosted a conference and buffet lunches for a different crowd: 350 representatives from Fortune 500 companies, the military and law enforcement. Each paid $1,000 to hear hackers share their technical secrets.

"It's very fruitful," said Robin Hutchinson, a serious and clean-cut senior manager of electronic commerce for Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, which sent 11 computer professionals to the conference. "They've pulled together people who really know their stuff."

The phenomenon of leading members of the hacker underground sharing their expertise with the government and private industry is not new. A group of hackers from Boston even testified in front of a Senate committee earlier this year, reporting that the national infrastructure is vulnerable because of computer security flaws.

However, it has only been in the last year that hackers and potential hackees have come together at Def Con, which was once the domain of a close-knit group of anti-establishment ideologues -- rebellious both in attitude and attire. That faction will no doubt be in attendance when the real Def Con starts Friday, and some of them will be critical of the commercial tactics of their generally older (as in 30-something) colleagues.

But the drift towards corporate style was obvious at the prelude to Def Con, which looked like a convention of accountants or appliance salesmen. Attendees even wore name tags with actual names written on them instead of hacker monikers like "Mudge" or "Se7en." The talks were highly technical, featuring plenty of abbreviations (VPN, SNMP, GSM) that would be meaningless to non-engineers.

The clearest signs of the times may be the T-shirts Moss designed for this year's Def Con. On the back, they read, "I miss crime." Moss said the slogan narrowly beat out the runner-up: "Def Con VI: The Security World Sellout Tour."

Moss said the shirts' message is thick with irony. He said he is well aware that hackers -- once accused of thwarting law enforcement and threatening corporate America -- have increasingly turned to cooperating with companies and selling their services. In fact, when younger hackers accuse Moss and his more seasoned hacker colleagues of going corporate, he replies: Damn straight.

Moss, a clean-cut 28-year-old who looks the antithesis of the stereotypical hacker, said the truly dedicated hackers plied their trade in search of knowledge about computer systems, not to cause trouble. Now that corporate America is paying attention, Moss figures his subculture may as well capitalize on the fact that hacker interests are mainstream. Attendance has tripled since the first conference a year ago.

"The computer problems are what's interesting," said Moss, who added that he is not interested in limiting himself to working within the hacker community. "I don't care if it's kids we're dealing with, or AT&T."

On Friday, Moss will be dealing with the "kids" again, and he will undergo something of a transformation. He said he will shed his sweater, don a T-shirt, grab a drink and relax. Even the setting will change. The Wednesday and Thursday conference, called the "Black Hat Briefings," were held in the Caesar's Palace on the famed Las Vegas Strip, whereas Def Con will be held at a hotel in the lower-rent downtown area called the Plaza.

The reason, quite simply, is that the Def Con hackers aren't welcome at most places in Las Vegas. Over the years, they've applied their intellectually devious talents to pernicious ends, hacking into casino Web sites and elevator systems, and, one year, ripping dozens of smoke detectors from the ceiling of a hotel hallway.

"Two years ago, I would have been figuring out how many sea flares to bring to put into swimming pools and fountains," said Christian Valor, who goes by the name "Se7en" online. "I would have been figuring out how much mayhem I could create."

These days, though, Valor won't even hang around for Def Con. He came only as a guest speaker to share his experience as a former "phone phreaker" -- someone who breaks into telephone systems -- with law enforcement and military personnel. Valor spoke not at the Black Hat Briefings, but at a second conference of the hackers and the hacked -- this one with 40 attendees who paid $800 for the two-day affair.

Valor said he once took great pride in being a part of the hacker underground, but he said he had recently turned 30 and did not have time to play around anymore. "I have to pay the mortgage, I have a car payment," said Valor, who said he'll earn $90,000 this year as a consultant.

"There's been a changing of the guard," said Valor, inhaling a Marlboro Light. "If these young guys want to take over the world, let them. We're too old."

That said, Valor planned a late-night get-together with fellow hackers Thursday to discuss how to talk their way into getting free hotel stays, airline tickets and first-class upgrades. Which is to say that the real business of Def Con may have just begun.

The opening conference "was like going to a university class," said Hutchinson of Ernst & Young. Def Con "will be like the frat party," he said.

#technology

[d3constructionists-blog]

JULY 10, 1998

An Innovator Battling Demons of Society and Her Mind

The Japanese-born Yayoi Kusama, 69, is a legend in postwar art, and an elusive one. Her innovative work had high visibility in the 1960's, when she was living in New York and traveling frequently to Europe. After her return to Japan in the 70's, she faded from the international stage. Only in the 90's has she come back into view, and her art has never made more sense than it does now.

Her sculptures of 30 years ago of domestic objects bristling with phallic protrusions seem uncannily prescient of the body-and-gender-centered art of the present decade. Her abstract paintings composed of netlike skeins of pigment and fields of polka dots could be prototypes for the hands-on, minutely incremental, intensely personal work of many artists today.

And in an era when the idea of ''outsider'' has cachet, she seems, at least at first glance, to fill the bill. Virtually self-taught, she pursued a career, despite family disapproval, in an overwhelmingly male-dominated field. And since childhood she has been dogged by mental illness, which she claims as the source of her art but which finally prompted her to take up permanent residence in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo two decades ago.

New York has seen little of Ms. Kusama since then, but she is everywhere in the city at the moment. A retrospective of her work has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art. A gorgeous show of early paintings on paper can be savored at Peter Blum Gallery in SoHo. New work is on view at Robert Miller; and individual pieces are cropping up here and there in gallery group shows, notably at Pat Hearn and Derek Eller in Chelsea.

Altogether, it is a sizable serving to deal with, though it doesn't really feel that way. Ms. Kusama has been prodigiously inventive, but within a narrow range. Hers is an art of repetition and inflection, of variations on a few set themes. And the countless versions she has produced of each of her signature motifs tend to blur together in the mind, leaving the impression of an oeuvre that is at once stimulating and monotonous.

The Modern show, titled ''Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968'' and organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Japan Foundation, does everything possible to suggest the variety of Ms. Kusama's output. The curators, Laura Hoptman and Lynn Zelevansky, have wisely concentrated on the most innovative decade of her work and have streamlined an already modest-size show for its New York appearance.

The selection actually includes material from the early 1950's, when Ms. Kusama was still in Japan and was peripherally aligned with that country's dynamic postwar avant-garde. Already, the forces that shaped her work were in place: social pressures, a shrewd eye for nascent cultural trends and the obsessive-compulsive psychological disorders that, the artist reports, produced suffocating hallucinations of patterns and colors.

From the start, Ms. Kusama used art as a means of exercising control over such debilitating visions. She translated them into small gouache, watercolor and ink paintings of biomorphic forms that resemble mutating cells, psychedelically palpitating flowers and extraterrestrial orbs set against dark and empty space.

These jewel-like paintings are, as a group, among Ms. Kusama's most persuasive works. (She is said to have destroyed thousands of them before leaving Japan in a fit of anger at her dominating mother.) And the superb selection at Peter Blum Gallery forms an essential and revelatory supplement to the Modern retrospective. Similar examples at the Modern itself, like the little gouache titled ''Seed'' (1953-circa 1963), with its crochetlike net of red strokes floating over a blue and mustard ground, are also striking, though they were repainted after the artist's arrival in New York.

Once in the city, her art changed format. Perhaps under the lingering spell of Abstract Expressionism, she scaled up her ''infinity nets,'' as she called her designs, to wall-sized paintings of lacy allover patterns that pulse and shift over darker or lighter grounds. These proto-Minimalist works were an instant critical success when first exhibited in 1959. (Donald Judd wrote glowingly about them and bought a few pieces for his own collection.)

The artist's drive toward cumulative pattern-making assumed other forms as well. She composed abstract collages from air-mail stickers, packaging labels and photographs of her own paintings. And in 1961, she began to create the distinctive soft sculptures that are probably her most familiar works.

Most of them take the form of pieces of everyday furniture -- chairs, beds, ironing boards -- which she covered with stuffed and sewn shapes resembling both phalluses and proliferating tumorous growths. By Ms. Kusama's account, these works were yet another exercise in psychic damage control, an attempt to confront deep-seated sexual fears by giving them physical embodiment.

Whether the artist's explanation of her work as neurotically generated and therapeutic can be taken entirely at face value has been questioned by some observers, who suggest that her declaration of mental illness is primarily an exoticizing bid for attention. And whatever the truth, there is no question that a hunger for publicity has fueled Ms. Kusama's career from the start.

It may have been one of the factors that prompted her to expand her sights beyond individual paintings and sculptures to her more spectacular room-filling installations, in which she often had herself photographed in the nude. (Three such environments, including 'Infinity Mirror Room,'' a witty but spooky reflective enclosure filled with tumescent polka-dotted forms, have been reconstructed for the Modern show.) And from these she proceeded to the politically pointed public performances that capped her New York career.

The only sense one can get of this Happening-inspired work now, of course, is through incidental materials and documentation. To this end, the exhibition includes a pulsating, orgiastic 1967 film in which the artist intently dabs paint on nude bodies to the beat on an acid-rock soundtrack. Also on hand is a blowup of a 1969 Daily News front page carrying a photograph of a nude guerrilla-style performance that Ms. Kusama had orchestrated in the Modern's sculpture garden. (At the time she referred to the museum as the ''Mausoleum of Modern Art.'')

It is crucial to view Ms. Kusama's work, which also included disruptive performances on Wall Street and antiwar demonstrations, within the framework of the volatile and still-under-studied countercultural era. She was certainly part of its full-frontal, exhibitionistic energy and, as a savvy art-world insider, she shared the stage as an equal with artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg in New York and Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein in Europe, all of whom in one way or another caught the spirit of that time.

Nor is it any less important to consider her within the context of postwar Japan, which in the early 60's saw the emergence of a socially anarchic, sexually obsessional art produced by figures like Kudo Tetsumi, Miki Tomio and the great performance artist Hijikata Tatsumi.

Without these perspectives on where Ms. Kusama came from, in fact, much of her work, particularly the sculpture, loses some of its punch.

One feels this in the cluster of sculptures at the end of the Modern show, and in the selection of recent work at Robert Miller. There, the ubiquitous phalluses, coated with neo-Baroque gold paint, look decorative and whimsical, devoid of any inkling of the social and psychological stresses that once fired them up. Whimsy always has a short shelf life; the new work adds bulk but not weight to the artist's reputation.

And it is a reputation to be valued. Ms. Kusama's best work -- especially the unforgettable early paintings done in Japan and New York -- have an expressive pressure and energy that is entirely original and hard-won.

Whatever their sources, they cut straight across cultures, always a signal accomplishment. It is a measure of her accomplishment that the number of younger artists of the 1990's who show affinities with her work are almost beyond count and are growing in number, giving her art of repetition and accumulation a historical dimension that is entirely apt.

''Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968'' remains at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53d Street, Manhattan, through Sept. 22. It travels to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Dec. 13 to March 7, 1999) and to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (April 29 to July 4, 1999). The exhibition was financed by the Nippon Foundation. ''Yayoi Kusama: Works from the 1950's'' remains at Peter Blum Gallery, 99 Wooster Street, SoHo, through Sept. 30. ''Yayoi Kusama Now'' remains at Robert Miller Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, through Aug. 7.

#darkwebart

[d3constructionists-blog]

January 22, 1998

THE PRESIDENT UNDER FIRE: THE OVERVIEW; SUBPOENAS SENT AS CLINTON DENIES REPORTS OF AN AFFAIR WITH AIDE AT WHITE HOUSE

As an independent counsel issued a fresh wave of White House subpoenas, President Clinton today denied accusations of having had a sexual affair with a 21-year-old White House intern and promised to cooperate with prosecutors investigating whether the President obstructed justice and sought to have the reported liaison covered up.

The Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, opened his sweeping inquiry after obtaining tape recordings of the former White House intern's story of the reported affair and her report that she had been advised to lie under oath to protect the President.

''That is not true,'' Mr. Clinton declared in brief comments. ''I did not ask anyone to tell anything other than the truth. There is no improper relationship, and I intend to cooperate with this inquiry. But that is not true.''[Excerpts, page A24.]

Details spilled out through the day, fueled by more than a dozen tape recordings of the intern that a friend had secretly made, some of them with a hidden F.B.I. tape recorder, said lawyers close to the investigation.

Late tonight, F.B.I. agents sought interviews with people whom the intern might have confided in at the White House and at the Pentagon, where she later worked. The subpoenas were said to be seeking White House logs showing when visitors were admitted to the executive mansion. These reportedly were to be cross-checked with detailed records kept by the Secret Service that show the President's minute-by-minute whereabouts.

The President made his denial in a television interview amid reports that the former White House intern had admitted to the affair and to the alleged advice to deny it under oath in secret tape recordings made by her confidante, Linda R. Tripp, and then by F.B.I. agents working with Ms. Tripp.

There were reports that Mr. Starr already possessed hours of secret tape recordings of the intern as possible evidence of alleged perjury and obstruction of justice by the President and his close friend and trouble-shooter, Vernon Jordan.

Mr. Starr, whose office was busy today issuing subpoenas and considering possible immunity for key witnesses, was reported investigating possible evidence that the President himself left in the alleged affair, including telephone messages subsequently re-recorded secretly for prosecutors.

Lawyers familiar with the content of some of the tapes said that Ms. Lewinsky told of the President advising her that if anyone asked about the affair, she was absolutely to deny it. In another reported disclosure, Ms. Lewinsky told her friend that Mr. Jordan, the President's confidant, took her for a ride in his car and advised her that if she kept quiet, nobody would go to jail.

Last Saturday, in his sealed deposition in the separate sexual misconduct civil case brought by Paula Jones, the President denied under oath having had an affair with Ms. Lewinsky, lawyers close to the inquiry said.

In a brief telephone interview tonight, Mr. Jordan said he would have no immediate comment about his possible dealings with Ms. Lewinsky, including the separate confirmation today of her lawyer's disclosure that the woman had recently obtained a job in New York City with the help of Mr. Jordan.

Ron O. Perelman, the Democratic fund-raiser who is chief of the Revlon empire, confirmed that Mr. Jordan had sought a public relations job for Ms. Lewinsky in New York but that it had been withdrawn in the light of the developing investigation.

News of the accusations and resulting investigation were first reported this morning by The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and ABC News, and other news organizations soon joined in the hunt.

And journalists at Newsweek magazine said today that they had considered running a report by their correspondent Michael Isikoff in this week's issue about the reported affair but were asked by Mr. Starr's deputies to hold off on contacting principals because, in Mr. Isikoff's words, ''they wanted Lewinsky to do a sting, to get Lewinsky to place a call to Jordan.'' In the end, Newsweek editors said, they did not think they had enough information about Ms. Lewinsky to use her name.

In a report published on line late Wednesday, Newsweek said its reporters had listened to some of the recordings. On one, the magazine said, Ms. Lewinsky intimates that she had a sexual relationship with the President, referring to him not by name, but as ''the big he'' and ''the creep.'' She said she intends to lie about the relationship if questioned by Paula Jones's lawyers. But she also can be heard saying, ''I have lied my entire life,'' which the magazine said raises some questions about her credibility.

Mr. Starr had been investigating the activities of Mr. Jordan in suspicion that he helped quiet former associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell in the Whitewater inquiry by obtaining a business contract for him amid his legal problems.

In quick order, as Mr. Starr avoided all substantive comment on his inquiry into the sex allegations, the possibility of eventual impeachment was raised in the Republican-controlled Congress, should the charges be born out.

Representative Henry J. Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary committee, said of Mr. Starr's new inquiry: ''It would seem to me if he verifies the authenticity of these charges, impeachment might very well be an option because subornation of perjury and tampering with witnesses, obstruction of justice are very, very serious charges. But it's important to note they're just charges as we speak.''

Mr. Starr cited confidentiality requirements in declining to comment on the sudden, new direction in his inquiry beyond expressing confidence that ''we are completely within our jurisdiction.'' In earlier clashes over Whitewater, Clinton defenders have accused Mr. Starr of roaming far beyond his mandate in a politically driven agenda. But his supporters emphasized that he proceeded into the new obstruction of justice inquiry with the assent of Attorney General Janet Reno.

The White House firmly proclaimed the President's innocence and denied that the charges put Mr. Clinton in any remote risk of impeachment. Officials bridled at questions about the precise language used by Mr. Clinton in his denials, including his choice of the present tense when he was asked, ''You had no sexual relationship with this young woman?''

The President replied, on the Public Broadcasting Service, ''There is not a sexual relationship.'' In a later interview, he said there had been no improper relationship.

Asked whether he had conversations with Ms. Lewinsky about her legal predicament, Mr. Clinton offered no specific answer. ''Given the state of this investigation, it would be inappropriate for me to say more.'' he told National Public Radio.

Individuals close to the investigation said the former intern had talked in detail of the affair and the reported cover-up attempt last Tuesday in an emotional conversation with the friend and former White House co-worker, Ms. Tripp. Ms. Tripp, equipped with a hidden recorder, was secretly taping the dialogue for Mr. Starr, said lawyers familiar with the case.

Ms. Lewinsky told on the tapes of having become deeply involved with the President, the lawyers said. She said she sought his advice in the legal predicament she eventually faced in having to be deposed under oath about her sex life in the separate civil sexual harassment suit brought against the President by Paula Jones, legal sources said. They reported that Ms. Lewinsky said that Mr. Clinton expressed sympathy and directed her to Mr. Jordan for advice. Mr. Jordan is reported to have counseled that she deny the affair, said individuals close to the investigation and some of the passages of Ms. Lewinsky on tape.

Her lawyer, William H. Ginsburg of Los Angeles, confirmed in television interviews that he has been in touch with Mr. Starr's office. He did not comment on the possibility of seeking immunity for cooperation by the woman, who is under pressure because she already has signed an affidavit in the Jones lawsuit flatly denying the affair. Mr. Starr presumably could threaten perjury charges against Ms. Lewinsky as a prod for her cooperation in pursuing the President and Mr. Jordan.

Mr. Ginsburg depicted Ms. Lewinsky as a victim poised between two powerful forces, a young, vulnerable neophyte in the Washington political culture.

''If the allegations are true that there was a sexual relationship with the president,'' said Mr. Ginsburg, ''Then he's a misogynist and I have to question his ability to lead. If they are not true, then why is the independent investigator ravaging the life of a 23-year-old girl?''

Whatever the eventual disposition of the charges, they raced across the nation this morning and sent the White House scrambling before the fresh sensation. By evening, a New York literary agent, Lucianne S. Goldberg, claimed that she already had two of Ms. Tripp's tape recordings in hand. ''They are shocking beyond belief, describing the whole relationship with a 21-year-old kid,'' she said.

''I smell a rat in this,'' commented Robert S. Bennett, the President's lawyer who was at Mr. Clinton's side last Saturday when the President was deposed under oath by attorneys for Ms. Jones. It was not immediately clear whether the President was specifically asked about Ms. Lewinsky and whether he repeated under the oath the denial he made today in two broadcast interviews.

According to lawyers familiar with the investigation, officials at the Justice Department were consulted last Wednesday by Mr. Starr's staff once Ms. Tripp's tapes were examined. At a Justice Department briefing Thursday night, the evidence in hand was strong enough to convince Attorney General Janet Reno to proceed immediately on Friday morning to the special three-judge panel that oversees the independent counsel law and agree to the enlargement of Mr. Starr's 3-year-old mandate so he could pursue the allegations contained on the tapes.

Justice Department prosecutors said they were flabbergasted when the charges and taped evidence was brought to them by Mr. Starr's staff, two days before the President's private deposition in the Paula Jones case.

In denying a sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky and the alleged attempt to cover it up, Mr. Clinton told Jim Lehrer of the Public Broadcasting Service. ''I did not urge anyone to say anything that was untrue.''

When asked whether he had Mr. Jordan, his close confidante and golfing partner, advise Ms. Lewinsky to deny the alleged affair, the President added, ''I absolutely did not do that.''

Ms. Tripp, the former White House worker who reportedly taped Ms. Lewinsky, had been a holdover from the Bush Administration who worked in the Clinton Administration's office of the White House counsel. She began taping Ms. Lewinsky for at least the past four months, lawyers said, before she went to Mr. Starr this month with the story she had learned.

Ms. Tripp's friends said that she had been involved in an earlier, less controversial instance of sex allegations at the White House -- the case of Kathleen Willey, who was alleged to have been groped by the President. Ms. Tripp had defended the President while confirming that Ms. Willey told her of the passing incident without complaint.

Subsequently denounced as ''not to be believed'' by Mr. Bennett, the President's lawyer, Ms. Tripp grew wary. Friends say she began secretly taping Ms. Lewinsky when the young woman began confiding in her. The two women had renewed their friendship after moving on to subsequent jobs at the Pentagon.

Ms. Tripp was expected to be granted immunity in Mr. Starr's inquiry as he pursues it more deeply into the White House. There was no immediate indication of how fast he would proceed or whether he might become involved with lawyers for Paula Jones, who are scheduled to depose Ms. Lewinsky on Friday in their civil suit against the President.

Hillary Rodham Clinton defended her husband against the charges. ''Certainly I believe they are false -- absolutely,'' she declared during a visit to Goucher College in Maryland. ''It's difficult and painful anytime someone you care about, you love, you admire is attacked and subjected to such relentless accusations as my husband has been.''

In taping Ms. Lewinsky, Ms. Tripp turned to the Whitewater counsel's office, lawyers said, because she had previously dealt with its investigators in earlier inquiries into Whitewater offshoots that involved her time at the White House.

She was said to have been the last office worker to have seen Vincent Foster alive at the White House counsel's office on the day he committed suicide, an event investigated by Mr. Starr.

Ms. Goldberg, the literary agent, said she met Ms. Tripp several years ago in the course of an author's interest about a possible book on Mr. Foster's death. The two remained friends, according to Ms. Goldberg.

''When this happened, she called, she was scared, afraid she was going to be subpoenaed, totally flummoxed by it,'' Ms. Goldberg said. ''She asked if I would stick with her and I said yes,'' the literary agent added, claiming she had no interest in turning the tapes into a literary project.

#encryptionpolitics

[d3constructionists-blog]

APRIL 16, 1997

Stitching Grunge From Borrowed Riffs

Nirvana is gone, Pearl Jam is unsure of its direction, Soundgarden has just disbanded, Alice in Chains is between albums. That leaves grunge in the hands of mopers-come-lately like Bush, the English band that headlined at Madison Square Garden on Monday night for an audience filled with squealing high school girls.

Bush is so unswervingly devoted to its Seattle sources that it might as well bill itself as a grunge tribute band. Gavin Rossdale sings in an Eddie Vedder groan, and the band doles out sullen, slow bass lines, burdened guitar riffs and beefed-up pop choruses. The band draws on Nirvana in uptempo songs, Pearl Jam in ballads and Soundgarden for the riff-rockers.

Mr. Rossdale's persona is slightly more romantic than other grunge acts; one of the things he's suffering over, in addition to his own battered self-esteem, is lost love, and he confesses to both loneliness and resentment.

Amid his late-adolescent profundities -- along the lines of ''I won't be saved by all your yesterdays'' -- Mr. Rossdale's lyrics also include glimmers of self-conscious insight: ''We are servants of our formulaic ways,'' he admits in ''Greedy Fly,'' one of the blatant Nirvana imitations.

Bush's four members are more competent musicians than their American rivals, Stone Temple Pilots, and the band's second album, ''Razorblade Suitcase'' (Trauma/ Interscope), slightly improves on its first, ''Sixteen Stone.''

Steve Albini, who also produced Nirvana records, roughed up the guitars in Bush's second album and encouraged more asymmetry in the songs.

Onstage, the band's timing wasn't as good; it stretched its material by repeating verses too many times, without reaching the obsessive intensity it sought. With too many one-note melodies, Mr. Rossdale's voice grew monotonous.

Mr. Rossdale hasn't decided on his attitude toward stardom. He was careful not to smile during the band's set and said only enough between songs to seem civil: one song, he explained, was about pregnancy, another about survival, another against prejudice. But platforms at the sides of the stage allowed him to pose closer to the bleachers, making a show of toiling over his guitar.

The songs' wretchedness and isolation -- ''I'm with everyone, and yet I'm not with everyone,'' he sang in ''Swallowed'' -- didn't prevent him from basking in the screams of the crowd.

While Bush, an all-male band, was glumly self-pitying, Veruca Salt, led by two women, channeled aggravation into gleeful, rowdy rock. Louise Post and Nina Gordon, who were dressed in shiny coordinated jumpsuits like cartoon characters, sang about keeping boyfriends in line and about their own teamwork, turning accusations and admonitions into clear-cut tunes.

They're a well-balanced pair; Ms. Post writes brawny, hard-riffing songs openly indebted to 1970's rockers like AC/DC, while Ms. Gordon leans toward bright punky pop melodies, complete with nonsense-syllable sing-alongs, like a latter-day Go-Go's. Even when they admit to needing pity or security, or they're just plain disgusted, the songs stay feisty, with all the optimism a major-key power chord can carry.

#spywaremusic

[d3constructionists-blog]

September 9, 1996

Part Artist, Part Hacker And Full-Time Programmer

From the outside, the so-called browser war appears to be an epic corporate struggle: Netscape vs. Microsoft in a classic David-and-Goliath fight, with each side vying to control computing in the Internet era.

But the foot soldiers in this high-tech battle also know it as a campaign that takes a relentless toll, measured in long hours and lost sleep. Just ask Brendan Eich, a 35-year-old computer programmer at the Netscape Communications Corporation.

In mid-August, Mr. Eich was well into a workday that began at 9 A.M. and did not end until well past 2 A.M. the following morning. It was a few days before Aug. 19, when the company released the latest version of its browser software for finding one's way around the Internet, Navigator 3.0. He pointed to a futon nearby, noting that naps are a survival tactic in his sleep-deprived profession.

For Mr. Eich and other Netscape programmers, the home stretch of product development means that their routine 60- or 70-hour workweeks escalate toward 100 hours or more, as they scramble to fix bugs -- misbehaving lines of software code.

''I try not to count the hours,'' Mr. Eich said. ''It's too depressing.''

Things have slowed a bit for him since August, but not much. As soon as one product is out the door, work on the next one begins. ''The next release is always around the corner,'' Mr. Eich said. ''Here, speed is paramount.''

Mr. Eich (pronounced IKE) labors on the grueling, lucrative frontier not only of the modern economy but also of the programmer's craft -- a blend of scientific precision and creative inspiration.

There are some 550,000 computer programmers in America, according to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, about the same number as bus drivers, real estate agents or house painters.

And like the practitioners of these other trades, the nation's programmers are a diverse lot. They range from hourly workers doing the mundane upkeep on old programs to entrepreneurial code hackers like Mr. Eich writing new Internet software that they hope will transform the computer industry -- and make them rich.

The ranks of computer programmers swelled by 25 percent in the last dozen years. And the Labor Department projects that their numbers will increase further, to more than 600,000 by 2005. Job growth is expected to be far greater in new fields like Internet software, as employment in traditional fields like mainframe programming eases.

Yet the kind of programming that creates new products and new companies is mainly a result of creativity and not head counts. Writing code, to be sure, is painstaking labor because computers are so literal-minded. A single number, letter or angle bracket out of order, or a space omitted, can make a program rebel.

Still, programming is as much an art as a science.

The artists of the profession have the ability to create the conceptual game plan for new products, think up helpful features and devise code-writing shortcuts so that programs are smaller and run faster.

The creative side of programming tends to be solitary work, as is writing a novel or composing a song. In fact, adding more people to a software project will typically delay the product even further. In the industry, this truism is known as Brooks's law, after Frederick P. Brooks Jr., a former I.B.M. software developer whose classic book on the process, ''The Mythical Man-Month,'' was published in 1974.

In recent years, new software languages and programming tools have made it easier for code writers to express their ideas. ''But the real important work will always be the creative thought,'' said Mr. Brooks, a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina.

The Competition

Web Browsing Is at Stake

While software development has long been a matter of programmers racing against deadlines, the rush for riches on the Internet has squeezed new-product cycles to six months or less. Many of the programs are being distributed over the Internet as soon as they are finished, with work on the next version starting right away.

Nowhere is the Internet way of life, both the pressure and the thrill, more in evidence than at Netscape's corporate campus in Mountain View. The leader in software for browsing the Internet's vast World Wide Web, Netscape, founded in 1994, is now in a furious battle with the Microsoft Corporation. Netscape's Navigator program holds nearly 85 percent of the browser market, but Microsoft is doing all it can to help its Explorer close the gap.

The significance of the rivalry extends beyond the browser software, however. Today, Microsoft's Windows operating system determines the look and feel of the computers used by most people. But as more computing shifts to the Internet -- for retrieving news, playing games, sharing work, even perhaps handling word processing and spreadsheet calculations in the future -- the balance of power could shift.

Indeed, Netscape hopes to capitalize on its early lead in the browser business to establish a preferred technology ''platform'' for the Internet. The Netscape and Microsoft browsers are built with rival sets of software tools, or platforms, which are used by Web developers to try to make their sites sufficiently entertaining or informative to lure people to spend time and money on line. Netscape workers cringe at any suggestion that Navigator is a mere browser. The company mantra: ''We're building a platform here.''

So is Microsoft, of course. The giant of personal computer software is not only a marketing juggernaut, it is also catching up fast in technology, especially with its 3.0 version of Explorer, introduced last month.

''For Netscape to succeed, it has to continue to be seen as the innovator,'' said David Smith, an analyst at the Gartner Group, a research firm. ''If Netscape loses that edge, it's lost the war.''

For that edge, Netscape is betting on programmers like Mr. Eich. Soft-spoken and square-jawed, he is a product of Silicon Valley, raised in Palo Alto. He did his undergraduate work at Santa Clara University. After earning a master's degree in computer science at the University of Illinois in 1985, he returned to work first for Silicon Graphics Inc. and later for Microunity Systems Engineering Inc., an ambitious chip design and software start-up, but one that has had trouble turning research into products.

Mr. Eich was recruited to Netscape in April 1995, when the company had just 120 employees, compared with 1,300 today. With 11 years of industry experience, he is an old hand. ''It's all been spent hacking software,'' he noted.

At Netscape, Mr. Eich has created a programming language called Javascript. It is, in essence, a tool intended to help Web site designers and graphic artists put features like animated icons or automated data- gathering into their Web sites without having to master complex programming. In the programmer's jargon, an innovative idea or clever shortcut is called a ''neat hack,'' and Javascript itself is a neat hack.

The Language

Weapon of Choice Against Microsoft

Javascript can be thought of as training wheels for Java, the Internet programming language developed by Sun Microsystems Inc. Java is the new technology that has helped make static Web pages more animated and interactive, by fetching programs from powerful computers that run Web sites and bringing back information like sports scores and stock quotes to a user's personal computer.

With Javascript, Web builders can more easily put some basic interactive features into their sites, like validating credit card information on line. The scripting language can also be used to filter data and thus cut down on the number of electronic trips back and forth over the Internet to gather information, performing on-line chores quickly and reducing the waiting time that annoys users.

''The purpose of Javascript is to give potentially millions of people who are not programmers the ability to modify and embellish Web pages,'' Mr. Eich explained. ''Java itself is still a pretty hard-core programming language.''

Mr. Eich did the initial design work on Javascript in little more than a week in June 1995, as part of a project code-named Mocha -- for sweetened Java. The scripting language itself was originally called Livescript, but last December, with Sun Microsystem's blessing, it was changed to Javascript.

Features written in Javascript were first included in Netscape's browser last January, for Navigator 2.0. By now, trade publishers have brought out a few how-to guidebooks on Javascript, and the scripting language is starting to attract a loyal following among Web developers. ''Things that could take hundreds of lines of programming code in Java can be done with a few lines in Javascript,'' said Bill Dortch, an independent developer in Priest River, Idaho.

For Netscape, Javascript is a weapon in its struggle against Microsoft, a reason Web developers might choose Netscape's technology over Microsoft's. Though not a stand-alone product, Javascript is an ingredient in Netscape products besides its browser, like server software and Web site tools. James L. Barksdale, the president of Netscape, describes Javascript as a ''key tactical component of our strategic platform.'' To try to keep pace, Microsoft has developed its answer to Javascript, a scripting language called Jscript.

For Mr. Eich, the work may be exhausting, but the setting is certainly informal. A couple of dogs roam the aisles of work cubicles, which are separated by shoulder-high partitions. A few programmers have tossed a military camouflage net over their work areas, while another has shrouded her cubicle in black mesh. On one wall hangs a satirical shrine to William H. Gates, complete with a gilt-framed picture of Microsoft's chairman.

Mr. Eich works in a larger space, occupied by three other programmers and five computer work stations. The setting is cluttered but purposeful, a ''university lab rat atmosphere,'' as Mr. Eich describes it. For sustenance, he occasionally dips into a bag of multicolored Sour Gummy Worms candy.

In the last sprint before software is released, the programmers rush to remove the most worrisome bugs. Netscape's internal bug-tracking Web page, called Bug Splat, lists five categories of bugs from ''trivial'' to ''critical.''

''The criticals may not even be fixed at this stage,'' Mr. Eich said, as his team raced toward the Aug. 19 introduction.

Troublesome bugs that cannot be fixed in time become candidates for ''workarounds,'' minor tweaking tricks that Web developers can use to alleviate the problems. Mr. Eich is known as a fixture on the specialized electronic forums, or Internet newsgroups, that focus on Javascript, offering advice and workarounds.

Javascript is written mainly in C, a higher-level programming language that looks like a mixture of broken English with errant punctuation and symbols. Underlying this software nomenclature is the interpreting and compiling code that Mr. Eich has written, which translates Javascript down into the digital 1's and 0's that can be electronically processed by the microchips of a computer.

In this process of communicating in a language understood by the machine, Mr. Eich explained, lies both the frustration and the joy of programming. ''The pain of coding is saying things much more accurately than in a natural human language, removing the ambiguity of human speech or writing,'' he said.

''But it is a discipline,'' he added, ''that once you've mastered it, enables you to be very efficient in making the computer do what you want it to do. You can make the computer do tricks. That's very satisfying.''

Still, the software often plays tricks of its own on the programmers. To place his Javascript code into the latest version of Navigator, Mr. Eich had to write several thousand lines of programming. Some of the work was to add new features suggested by customers, or modifications, but much of it was debugging.

Frequently, though, the bugs resulted from his Javascript code reacting unpredictably when imbedded in the hypertext markup language of Navigator. The different kinds of software can behave almost as if they were living organisms when put together, sometimes coexisting peacefully, sometimes not. ''Software is weird,'' Mr. Eich observed. ''You have to rewrite code a lot. It's part of the process.''

The Payoff

For Some, a Path To the Good Life

For the gifted and fortunate, programming can be a path to riches. That is certainly the dream at Netscape, where the programmers hope they are in the right place at the right time -- hopes encouraged by Netscape's spectacular initial public offering in August 1995. It was the second I.P.O. for Mr. Eich, who was at Silicon Graphics when it went public in 1986.

Even by the volatile standards of high-tech companies, the share-price movements of Netscape's stock have been striking. The stock closed at $37.125 last week, less than half its peak of $87 a share last December just before Microsoft announced its Internet strategy, but still more than double the public offering price of $14 a share, adjusting for a stock split. Yet Netscape will have to do well over the next few years for Mr. Eich and other employees to really cash in, given the waiting period of more than four years before all their stock options can be exercised.

But Mr. Eich, who is single, has done well already, financially -- comfortably a millionaire. He lives in a town house in nearby Sunnyvale, and is an investor in duplex apartments in Santa Clara and San Jose.

Still, he has misgivings about his grinding work regimen, and talks wistfully about perhaps quitting someday to spend more time on his outside interests, which include gymnastics and dance. (His office footwear last month was a pair of Capezio jazz-dance shoes.)

Programmers, like mathematicians, often have an affinity for music, another rule-based discipline with its own particular notation. And Mr. Eich has studied piano for 20 years, playing the works of Bach, Chopin and Stravinsky on the baby grand that one room of his Sunnyvale town house was designed to accommodate.

But like so many Silicon Valley programmers, Mr. Eich seems to dream mostly of running his own company someday. He figures he needs a nest egg of $5 million or $6 million to take that gamble, and he says he does not have that much set aside yet. At Netscape, programmers at Mr. Eich's level bring in salaries in the $100,000 range, so his entrepreneurial hopes depend heavily on Netscape's success and its stock price.

''At Silicon Graphics and now at Netscape, I contributed and I was part of the story,'' Mr. Eich explained. ''But if I started my own company, it would be my story.''

@WORK

This is the sixth article focusing on the new or transformed jobs that have grown up in the computer industry. The first, on Jan. 1, focused on the people who answer customer queries on manufacturers' ''help'' lines. The second, on Feb. 12, covered the work of artists and programmers who design sites on the Internet's World Wide Web. The third, which ran on March 11, looked at the industry's supersalesmen, who have made product demonstrations into performance art. The fourth, on May 20, examined the rise of temporary-placement firms specializing in technically proficient temporary workers. The fifth, on Aug. 12, looked at the small, close-knit community of computer virus hunters.

#technology

[d3constructionists-blog]

March 10th, 1996

Dante by Alexander McQueen

There is something unsettling about the forward march of military-style on designer runways in the opening weeks of the international fashion season. Uniforms, battle fatigues, camouflage patterns and Eisenhower jackets have all made appearances.

At Gucci in Milan, Italy, epaulets appeared on crisp tailoring and shiny belts with metallic buckles cinched the waist. Gianni Versace, in his Istante line, made four-pocket military jackets the focus of his collection -- even if he presented them in sleek satin or reduced the battle blouse to strategically placed pockets on a wisp of lace dress.

At the London shows, the military look was popular for the fall season, with khaki or darker browns favored colors and army shirts and jackets key items. In an ironic take on street style, where army surplus coats are cold-weather gear, Red or Dead mined the cold war zone. The line was shown in a barrack-like building where army-clad dummies were stood on a balcony like Red Square comrades and ugly industrial prints were described as "Gdansk colliery."

At Alexander McQueen's show, the theme was more subtle and more somber. Looking at war through the ages, the edgy British designer presented sharp military tailoring, buttoned pants and denim outfits photo-printed with the stereotypes of aggressors on the front and of victims on the back: Biafran soldiers and innocent children, American soldiers in jungle camouflage and an elderly Vietnamese man.

"It is about war and peace," Mr. McQueen said of his show. "But I am not the sort of person who is going to stand up and say this -- either you see it in my collection or you don't."

However sincere the designer, the linkage of fashion with war is problematical; fashion tends to be perceived as trivial, and its raiding of blood-soaked references might therefore seem crassly exploitative.

Military looks on the runway are often badly received. Recently, Prada's trench coats, with their whiff of Fascist rigor, drew unfavorable comment, as did Comme des Garcons's showing of recycled khaki clothing, although the designer Rei Kawakubo said that it was an exercise in deconstruction unrelated to war.

Valentino's use of camouflage prints in his 1994 couture collection -- just when the United Nations peacekeeping force was in Rwanda -- was rejected by clients. Yves Saint Laurent's safari suits and military accessories were reviled by the press and clients in the late 1960's at the height of the antiwar demonstrations.

If fashion's war images are so badly received, why do designers persist with such references? Often, they are simply responding to the romance in the uniform from a long-gone era. Mr. Versace described his concept this season as "romantic military," and other designers have frequently found inspiration in the picturesque uniforms of toytown soldiers and gay hussars.

A 1995 exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was called "Swords Into Ploughshares" and showed the origins of military looks turned fashionable: the safari suit was developed by the need for camouflage in the heat and dust of Britain's far-flung empire; gilt braiding was designed to protect the chest, before its use became merely ceremonial.

Wartime images tend to be absorbed into fashion when the clothing no longer serves its original function. Either practical things turn decorative -- like the silver-ball buttons that were once designed as backup ammunition. Or in a postwar period, practical army gear is absorbed into civilian life, as with the blouson jacket or trench coat.

But war fashion also appears suddenly, apparently from nowhere. The most likely reason for the current vogue is the flood of secondhand or surplus army clothing that came from Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism. The clothes were practical and affordable for a young generation not necessarily making any statement about dressing aggressively.

Another explanation is that designers absorbed the imagery of the military that appeared on television screens and magazines last year as Europe celebrated the end of World War II 50 years before. Articles about the 20th anniversary of the Vietnam War may also have pricked the visual consciousness.

Retro fashions have also thrown up army looks, like the Eisenhower combat jacket from the 1940's as part of neo-conservative male dressing, or safari suits revived from the hippie era. Some garments, like the military blouson or the pilot's flying jacket, have just evolved into design classics.

One designer may act as a catalyst. Prada has stirred a general influence in uniforms, which have been developed as a fashionable look. Gucci's Tom Ford deliberately described the theme of his new collection as "uniforms, not military."

In a period when relatively few young people in Western societies do active military service, there is an esthetic attraction for trim clothes that are the antithesis of sloppy sportswear. Fashion follows its own logic, and any apparent connection between what goes on the runways and what appears in the headlines and on the nightly news programs is likely to be specious.

#BackdoorFashion

[d3constructionists-blog]

October 17, 1995

PERSONAL COMPUTERS;Action-Packed Future for Internet

THE Internet's World Wide Web is a vast electronic library, made up of millions of pages of information stored in hundreds of thousands of linked computers around the globe. With the proper computer software and the right Internet connections, personal computer users can flip from page to page and browse from one electronic document to another just by pointing and clicking on the computer screen.

The problem is that for most Internet visitors, flipping through the pages of the World Wide Web is about as exciting as turning pages of a book or magazine once every 30 seconds or so. (Even some people with fast modems call it the World Wide Wait.) Some pages are fascinating, others are dreary, but nothing really happens on the pages. Browsing is a passive activity once the reader lands on a page.

Imagine, instead, a Web where each page is active and interactive, instead of static. A simple graphic image becomes an animation. A photograph becomes a video clip. Stock quotes and sports scores are updated on screen as the user watches.

On the interactive Web page, users can make queries or place orders, and get responses and confirmations from the computer. Pages can contain specialized software applications that perform tasks for the user. Games and other forms of electronic entertainment will proliferate. Tutorials that show users how to use software, or program their VCR's, will become widespread.

At that point, the Web will be transformed into a powerful new communication medium, incorporating elements of books and magazines, mail, radio, television, telephone and, of course, the personal computer. The term "browser" suddenly becomes inadequate.

That is the promise hinted at by Netscape Navigator 2.0, a major upgrade of the most popular software used for browsing the Web.

What Navigator delivers, other than promises, is a slightly faster browser that integrates new tools for managing electronic mail and Usenet news groups. It has a streamlined system for jumping from site to site, and a better way to store favorite bookmarks. It also has a new technical framework, invisible to the end user, that will eventually enable all the active and interactive features described above.

Prototype versions of Navigator 2.0 for Windows, Macintosh and Unix computers were placed on the Web 10 days ago and are available for downloading via File Transfer Protocol from ftp://ftp.netscape.com/.

There is a huge gap between promise and reality, of course. Users of Navigator 2.0b (the b stands for "beta") will not find many Web sites that take advantage of the new features. It will be months, if not years, before Web sites routinely offer the active and interactive features that Netscape's new software allows.

Even so, hundreds of Web developers are already at work planning to design (or redesign) electronic documents with the "tags" that Navigator 2.0 enables. When a user of Navigator 2.0 enters a site that has been specifically designed for Navigator 2.0, the change will become apparent immediately.

In the rapidly changing virtual world of the Internet, it will not be long until Navigator 2.0 -- and any other so-called Web browsers that choose to adopt Netscape's technical features -- changes the look of the Web itself.

Once again, it must be stressed that one must traverse long and bumpy stretches of the Information Ho Chi Minh Trail to get to this new and improved World Wide Web.

It is inherently risky to trust an experimental program, but Navigator 2.0b is so compelling, and reveals so much about the future of the Web, that it is worthy of a preview.

Netscape has placed some demonstration and background files on the company's own Web site (http:// www.netscape.com/) that are worth investigating even if one has no interest in downloading the software at this time.

For those who want to start testing the software, there are many caveats. First, only those computer users who have a direct Internet connection can use Navigator 2.0, ruling out those who reach the Web indirectly, through a service like America Online or Compuserve. Those services have their own browsers. Prodigy is in the process of swapping its home-grown browser for Netscape Navigator, but the new version will not be available for some time.

Second, remember that this is beta software. The term "beta" is computerese for "use at your own risk, and let us know if it crashes your system." It is prudent to make a complete backup of your system's data before loading any beta program. If you have a previous version of Navigator, save a copy of it, too.

The software itself spans more than three megabytes of disk space, although with data compression it packs into a two-megabyte suitcase for traveling over the Internet.

There is no cost to obtain Navigator 2.0b beyond the fees for connecting to the Internet. In fact, Netscape is offering rewards to programmers who can find significant flaws in the software before the code is locked up for final release.

Netscape has put a timer into the beta software that will cause it to expire on Dec. 15, suggesting that the official version will be ready well before then. When the commercial version of Navigator 2.0 is shipped, it will be free to individuals to evaluate for 90 days. At the end of 90 days, or whenever one's conscience kicks in, Netscape asks users to send in $50, on the honor system. In this case, $50 is a bargain even though many other fine browsers are available without charge.

#technology

[d3constructionists-blog]

September 17, 1995

THE NIGHT; The Ubiquitous Kate Moss, Nowhere to Be Found

DOWNTOWN— "The more visible they make me," Kate Moss writes of the sniping news media in "Kate," her new book of photographs that will do more for her bank account than it will for art or literacy, "the more invisible I become."

It seemed that the British uberwaif was being true to her word at the James Danziger Gallery in SoHo on Sept. 11; more than 90 minutes into a two-hour opening reception for a show of photographs from the book, published by Rizzoli's Universe Publishing, she was nowhere to be found.

"She's not here," one guest said.

"But that's perfect," said another.

On the walls of the gallery, however, just as in the real world, she was everywhere. Kate spray-painted gold. Kate on the phone. Kate naked on a couch. Her cool, defiantly plain face surrounded trendy young guests who could only wish that their own nonchalance could buy such a meal ticket.

"Fabulous! Out of this world!" exclaimed Polly Mellen, the creative director of Allure, as she examined each photograph.

"It's great," Anna Sui, the designer, was saying nearby. "And did you see all her newspaper clippings on the wall?"

Perhaps it was so early in the season that people were willing to be excited by almost anything. But where was the guest of honor? Marc Jacobs and Naomi Campbell were there. Helena Christensen was, too. Ms. Moss, however, still wasn't.

"Maybe it's too much attention for her," suggested Lorenzo Scala of Rizzoli, who was not selling too many copies of the book.

Finally, almost two hours after the party had begun, Ms. Moss arrived with Johnny Depp. Wearing a secondhand black gown and delicate high-heel sandals that showed off her very grown-up red toenails, she moved from one room to the next with guests trailing her so closely that they seemed to be a part of her outfit.

"Hi," she said to a friend, careful not to blow her cigarette smoke in anybody's face.

"You look so nice," she told others.

The cool, detached persona of magazine covers and ad campaigns fell away as a poised but enthusiastic young woman made sure to let everyone get in a word or a hug.

"How many of your books have been sold tonight?" a photographer asked her.

"One, probably," she giggled modestly, holding up a copy.

Because of her late arrival, the party went on a little longer than planned. For most of it, the rebellious Mr. Depp, with biker sunglasses wrapped around his neck, stood as far away from the glitzy crush as possible, talking to Iggy Pop. At evening's end, Mr. Depp disappeared into a back office, then reappeared holding up a poster Mr. Pop had drawn opposing French nuclear testing. The photographers had a field day, and Ms. Moss looked on proudly.

"Don't buy French! Don't buy French!" she yelled above the din as she waved a glass of bubbly around.

"Oh dear," she said, catching herself. "I'm drinking Champagne, and all Champagne is French, isn't it?"

She pondered this irony for a moment.

"Well, it's only a gallery opening," she said, "so maybe it isn't." 'Crowded Intimacy'

On Sept. 22, Monica Keena, a petite 16-year-old with ivory skin, dark hair and trusting blue eyes, will be going into production in Prague and holding her own as Snow White against Sigourney Weaver's evil stepmother in the movie "Snow White in the Black Forest."

On Sept. 12, Ms. Keena was in another kind of black forest.

Taken by an agent to Bowery Bar, she stood in a forest of people in black. The occasion was a release party for "Intimacy," the romantic new album by Bruce Roberts, who has written songs for Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston and Dolly Parton. But it could have been any of the celebrity traps set up in town of late, as it suddenly became acceptable again to be in New York.

"This is like being in a dream," said Ms. Keena, who had just been introduced to Cindy Crawford and was standing between the backs of Marla and Donald Trump. "I'm leaning against Donald Trump! That's so great!"

While the wild beasts of resentment, false fellowship and pride lingered in the dim light around her, Ms. Keena oohed and ahed with the soft voice of a mourning dove. "I feel like I'm in the place I always strived for," she said as Barry Diller, Edgar Bronfman Jr., Calvin Klein, David Geffen and so many others with legendary ambition towered overhead.

Minutes later, the staff of the restaurant descended on the forest of black. "Everybody clear the room," said a marauding manager as tables were rushed in and the first celebrity guests for Karl Lagerfeld's dinner arrived, pushing the celebrity guests for the "Intimacy" party out to the patio.

"Intimacy is what we all need," Mr. Roberts said as he was swept out of his own party. "But this is crowded intimacy."

"My feet hurt," said Cindy Crawford, his date. "Let's get out of here." Feeding the Publicity Beast

"Press whore," Chi Chi Valenti said into the microphone in her typically sado-seductive voice over the house music at Jackie 60 on Sept. 12. "She'd kill for a mention."

Ms. Valenti, who produces performances regularly at venues on West 14th Street on Tuesday nights, was plugging the evening's offering -- "Press Whore," a one-act all-out, do-in play about the rumor mill and buzz machine, which she co-wrote with Michael Musto, the Village Voice gossip columnist, and Beauregard Houston Montgomery, a writer.

"I really should have a note pad and pretend to be jotting things down," Ms. Valenti said. "That's such a great look."

Because the show wasn't scheduled to begin until 1:30 A.M., most of the gossip writers and publicity purveyors invited to the event had begged off. "They all said it was genius, but past their bedtimes," Ms. Valenti said. "Most of the communication with them was by fax. It's very press whore to communicate by fax."

#BackdoorFashion

[d3constructionists-blog]

April 20, 1995

Chanel vs Supreme

Vogue visited Chanel's 57th and Fifth Avenue boutique, and compared the culture and devotees of the then 63-year-old luxury stalwart to the experience of shopping at Supreme's SoHo shop on Lafayette Street. Here’s some photos from the issue also and a few takeaways.

"Generally the vector of fashion influence points from downtown toward uptown, from the young-and-street to the mature-and-moneyed...Chanel's heavy molded-rubber boot echoes Supreme's affinity for practical workman's gear. You would probably see the construction-worker jacket translated into Chanel before you would see Chanel knocked off for Supreme.”

  "The Supreme ensemble is the baseball hat worn backward or the beanie, the fingertip length construction-worker jacket, tailored to stand slightly away from the body, protecting and concealing...The rumpled jeans, neither flared nor pegged, are worn low, and a few sizes too large. Then there are the flat Vans sneakers. Whereas at Chanel the outfit is finished by the high-heeled, platform-soled shoe...[At Supreme] The whole package will run you anywhere from $200 to $300, which is a hefty investment, but you can wear it with confidence, knowing that everything you buy at Supreme is cool and won't bind or constrict when you are skating. As with the Chanel suit, you are certain of always looking correct."

"But even more than at Chanel, at Supreme you are likely to see customers outfitted in the complete look—sometimes dozens at a time."

There is the foreign tourist—Japanese, South American, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, Russian—who comes for accessories, shoes, ties, bags, all clearly marked with the double C's logo, Coco, or Chanel, certified totems from the bastion of Western wealth and chic...As at Chanel, there are the tourists (mainly British and Japanese) who come for a prize item—usually the Supreme T-shirt—to prove that they have been to Supreme.

"She has her favorite sales associate, who might tactfully set aside something she feels is exactly right. The client receives flowers on her birthday, a card on Valentine's Day. She's invited to the trunk show, where she can order in advance."

"As at Chanel, name is very important at Supreme. All the apparel is emblazoned with the logo of either a skateboard manufacturer or Supreme. Employees as well as customers are encouraged to place red-and-white eight-inch-long 'Supreme' stickers on posters around town as Supreme's seal of approval. One especially favored spot was over Kate Moss's bikini in Calvin Klein ads. Apparently, Calvin Klein lawyers didn't get the concept, that the sticker was a compliment, and threatened consequences, so that particular location is now off-limits."

"Only Chanel has cold drinks served in crystal glasses. Only Supreme has a skateboard team."

#BackdoorFashion

[d3constructionists-blog]

January 14, 1995

Reprogramming a Convicted Hacker; To His On-Line Friends, Phiber Optik Is a Virtual Hero

Three years ago, Mark Abene was a computer cowboy who roamed cyberspace when it was an unfenced frontier. A computer geek who was "wired" long before the term was coined, he considered the Internet too easy and looked for a bigger challenge. And he found it by breaking into the computer systems of some of the nation's biggest corporations -- a crime that landed him and three of his friends in Federal prison.

Since the four were charged in 1992 with the most extensive computer intrusions on record, the world has caught up with them. Getting on line is the height of fashion; it has become a gathering place for everyone from the Rolling Stones to the Speaker of the House.

And now, Mr. Abene has emerged from Schuylkill County Prison in Pennsylvania to find himself a folk hero -- the infamous Phiber Optik.

"Mark is famous in the on-line world," said Stacy Horn, the founder of Echo, a New York computer bulletin board that is a kind of high-brow electronic salon, visited via modem by authors, professors and museum curators. "He broke into every phone company computer in the world."

Ms. Horn, dressed in downtown black, was the host of a welcome home party for Mr. Abene on Thursday night at the dance club Irving Plaza. The night pulsed with radical chic as Manhattan artists and professionals feted the 22-year-old man from Elmhurst, Queens, the son of a union official and a department store billing clerk, who did most of his breaking and entering with an inexpensive TRS-80 computer from Radio Shack.

"They tell us to reach out and touch someone, but don't reveal it's forbidden to touch them," a flutist in the underground band Foamola, who was identified only by her cyber handle, Violet Snow, said from the stage. "Phiber reached out and touched them, and was exiled to Pennsylvania."

Andrew Johnston, 26, a computer graphics designer for an advertising agency, said: "I grew up with computers like many in my generation, and I always had lots of respect for the hacker community. I always felt they were exercising freedom and pushing frontiers. They were doing something very important for American society."

Many said Mr. Abene, a thin young man with a wispy goatee, epitomized the hacker credo that access to information should be free, not monopolized by big corporations, although they were quick to acknowledge that they didn't want anyone breaking into their own computers to peek at their hard drives.

In the deep baritone he once used to convince Nynex employees that he was a repairman working on a telephone pole and in need of confidential information, Mr. Abene said before the party that his 10 months in prison had been miserable.

Deprived of a computer for the first time in years, he was bored and made to spend his days shoveling snow and buffing floors. Ms. Horn printed out and forwarded his E-mail from Echo, which held a kind of on-line vigil for him until his release. Prison, he said defiantly, did not reform or rehabilitate him.

"I wouldn't do this again now, but only because I was caught," he said. "I'm not telling people not to do the things I did. There's always going to be people hacking. All I'm doing is cautioning them they've got to be careful."

Mr. Abene and his three friends, who called themselves the Masters of Deception, or MOD, all pleaded guilty. According to a forthcoming book about the case, "Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyperspace" (Harper Collins) by Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner, MOD members traded celebrities' credit reports that they stole from the computers of TRW "like baseball cards." The reports included those of Geraldo Rivera, Richard Gere and Tony Randall. They also sold some reports.

The book depicts Mr. Abene as the brains behind the gang, the one who cracked the code for navigating the phone companies' vast network of call-switching computers. MOD members were able to set up unbillable phone numbers, listen to conversations, and in a prank aimed at a rival hacker, turn a home phone into a pay phone that demanded "Please deposit 25 cents" whenever the receiver was lifted.

The public first heard of the group on Nov. 28, 1989, when hackers wiped out the information in the Learning Link computer system operated by WNET, Channel 13, in New York, which served hundred of schools. Teachers and librarians who logged onto the system read the message, "Happy Thanksgiving you turkeys, from all of us at MOD."

Mr. Abene and many of his admirers are at pains to distinguish his actions from what they consider the more serious crimes of other MOD members. Mr. Abene denied he was involved in the crash of the Learning Link or in selling credit reports. "Selling access to credit histories is unacceptable," he said. "You're crossing the line into theft."

He maintains that he broke into computers only to gain an understanding of how they worked; his friends used the knowledge to make money. "It was something that got out of control," he said.

Yet, Stephen Fishbein, the lead prosecutor in the case, said Mr. Abene's role went well beyond electronic trespassing. "He's not telling the whole story when he says he was just looking," said Mr. Fishbein, who is now in private practice. "He was altering files and he was getting free services."

Indeed, Mr. Abene pleaded guilty in 1993 to breaking into computers belonging to Southwestern Bell, installing "back door" programs to allow him to re-enter at will and making other modifications that cost the company about $370,000 to correct.

Ms. Horn and some others at the party denied that Mr. Abene was being lionized for his outlaw deeds, but rather, for his contributions to Echo. Before Mr. Abene went to prison, Ms. Horn hired him to debug her computer system.

"I'd literally consulted supposedly the greatest minds in the country, engineers for each piece of equipment I had," she said, "but nobody could fix the problems. Here comes this kid who says, 'I can solve all your problems.' I was nervous, but my gut instinct was he could be trusted.

"He did fix all the problems. How could I not think of him as my techno savior?"

Other Echo members have come to know Mr. Abene -- now Echo's chief engineer -- as a calm and helpful voice on the phone, talking them through problems with the Internet. Initially disdainful of participating in Echo's on-line discussion groups, Mr. Abene joined one for people under 30. He met with fellow users off line, and fell in love with a young woman.

"Mark is a valued member of the community," said Robert Knuts, a fraud attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission who is a long-time Echo user. "I have a high level of confidence he's using his amazing talent to better the community.

The only discouraging words at the party came from a small contingent of hackers and former hackers, who watched as Mr. Abene was followed by reporters for Time, Newsweek, New York magazine, The New York Times and a local television news team.

A tall, thin young man, who described himself as an ex-hacker who now works in computer security, said that while growing up he'd worshiped Phiber Optik. "The hacker fight is a fight for freedom, for freedom of expression," said the young man, who did not want to be identified for fear of losing his job.

He sneered as a woman kissed Mr. Abene on the cheek and led him by the hand to meet her friends. The ex-hacker had recently met his hero in person and been disappointed. "He's gotten a swollen head now," said the young man.

Photo: Mark Abene, known as Phiber Optik, makes a point at his welcome home party at the Irving Plaza Club. He is one of the world's most celebrated hackers. "He broke into every phone company computer in the world," an admirer said. (Philip Greenberg for The New York Times)

#technology