YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Menn

lines on the record: 85
first: 2019-08-21
most recent: 2019-08-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So there's some yippy anti-establishment stuff around that too. Right. Which is interesting because some of them wind up working for the US government.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost everybody was born in 70, 71 because that gets you to the population bubble that we talked about earlier. Interestingly, that also means that they were born to young parents during the Vietnam War.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's one guy. There's one guy whose name was Swamp Rat initially, and then it was Grandmaster Rat. But his real name, he's Iard him in the book, is Kevin Wheeler. And he was like a marketing whiz from Lubbock, Texas, which is where it starts, home of Buddy Holly. And Texas Tech University more relevantly. So he was a kid of academic administrators. And it's Kevin's show. I mean, Kevin, you know, other people, somebody can nominate a member, somebody has to have met him, and there's a discussion, and then Kevin gets the final say yes or no. But Kevin is still running it.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are invited. It is super selective. One of the rules is you can't ask to join. They have to find you. So sort of like Matt Blaze, great cryptography professor said it's like nerd skull and bones.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's different reasons for different groups. I mean, like the hardcore criminal guys, yeah, they are collaborating and like, okay, you're good at, you know, you figure out how to break into AT&T and I know what you do when you find the manual. And then there's that stuff. The CDC was more like the liberal arts wing. They were like, yeah, some of you guys go off and do what you want. And here's a place to relax and hang out and, you know, talk about technology and not be real judgy about it. So one of them became a DA. One of them went into politics famously. Others are artists and performance artists. And which came in handy later on. So they evolved.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then one of the more important things they did is that they had a member named Jesse Dryden, son of Spencer Dryden of the Jefferson Airplane, out here in San Francisco. And Jesse started a hacking convention called Hohokon in 1990 in Texas. And this was the first hacker gathering to invite the cops in the press, which has become a standard now. Yeah. And because they had this conference, some more technologically sophisticated hackers came. And there was a lot of overlap with a group called the Loft, very famous, the first sort of shared hacking space. Guys who testified before Congress in 1998, those people came down to Hohokan and they sort of got melded in with the CDC group. So initially the CDC was making fun of more sophisticated, accomplished criminal actors.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So funny, they wrote these text files. Text files was sort of the lingua franca of the Bolton Board era of the Internet. You could write essays about anything, fiction, humor, song lyrics. Sometimes they just transcribe song lyrics. But what the Cult of the Dead Cow did, their text files, were pretty funny. They were pretty good quality. And there were some marketing pizzazz around them. They numbered all the text files. Distributed them as widely as they could to other bulletin boards. And people would want to have CDC 1 through 10 and then 11 through 20 or whatever. And so a lot of people, if you came online, they were some of the first text files you were likely to see. So they got established sort of in the part of the subculture very early on.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. I mean, they weren't about destruction, they weren't about stealing. They followed the sort of early hacker code, which is something that I think that we have lost, something I'm attempting to bring back here. Which is.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not just because the most influential, and they're basically good guys. That's the point. I mean, some of them dabbled in crime. That was never the point of the organization.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's an area code. But it costs three, four, five hundred dollars a month to get onto these bulletin boards because it's so laborious and slow. And so basically everybody got away with that once and then their parents read them the Riot Act. And then they stole credit card.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money, and the catch is that everybody's a criminal because you needed long distance service. Unless the Bolton Board was in your area code, children, long distance service is something that where the phone company charges you or your parents.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And do things. Right. And these guys had their own boards. And some of them were devoted to punk music and some were just making fun of more sophisticated hackers. There were some that were sort of more crime-oriented, but those guys happened to drop out of CDC very early. Right.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very early. Yeah. There is this kind of magical population bubble for tech people. People, so it goes from when war games came out. It caught people. Matthew Broderick. Yeah, and taught people that you could war dial and just connect into interesting places and things might happen, sometimes including a nuclear war. And the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which passed in the mid-80s three years later, and basically said that everything you're doing is illegal. So if you came online and like, you got excited and then you saw the feds take it away, or at least imposing penalties, that was very painful. And that sort of radicalized people protect people in a way. And so a lot of influential people came from that little population bubble.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes From a That's right. Yeah, that was the metaphor. And sometimes only one person could connect at a time. So you would write something and then you would go away and then you come back a day later to see if anybody left any comments. So it was incredibly rudimentary. But in a way that was good for this group because it was sort of self-selecting. If you were online then, you put a lot of effort into it, either because you had no life or because you really were interested in the technology itself that was allowing you to do this, or you were desperate to connect with people who were like you.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many people don't understand. Bolton boards are a prehistoric setup wherein if you can connect to a computer via a modem that was powered by a hamster in the kitchen and went incredibly slowly, then you could read files about whatever that bulletin board was dedicated to.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So eventually the Russians, like while I was working on that book, the Russians figured out that these guys would be really useful not only for, you know, to get a cloud of their take, but to deploy against Georgia and Estonia and other countries that they didn't like. So that book came out in 2010. And it was like the first journalism said, hmm, Russian intelligence is deliberately in bed with organized cybercrime. And now it's like, your gardener knows that. Everybody knows that now. But so that was that book. And then, as I said, I wanted to do something”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They did. And then they can By whatever legislator is they need. So there was that, but there was also more specifically the alliance of organized crime, the Russians, it was mainly about Russians, and they did capitalism better than we did. So we couldn't figure out what to invest in. We don't know which security products are better, what to tweak. But the criminals are like, they know exactly what works and they'll reinvest in that. And they specialize. One guy just writes viruses and one guy's got a botnet, all these captive computers that he can rent out. And there's just amazing innovation. They used to say that Porn drove technology. And like, you know, after the early 00s, it was basically crime that was driving technology. 100%.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second book, Fatal System Error, was about how bad things are right now. And among other things, talked about sort of the failure of the court system because the courts had decreed that software is licensed and not sold and therefore there's no product liability and nobody gets sued all over.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And so you wrote this book, Cautioner Tale that this was coming, and it came. And it absolutely Where do you imagine the state is now of that from your second book, which was about what could happen seeing it as racism”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of those bugs are exploitable. And the more complicated your network, your organization, the less defensible it is. And it was just getting worse and worse. And nobody There's really no way to deal with it unless you do kind of a blue sky startover type of approach and there just there was no momentum for that because there's no money for that.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so the basic problem is, as Vince Zerf told me, is that, you know, the internet basically escaped from the lab. You know, they were going to get to security, but the thing took off. And of course, they were like mild-mannered professors. They were interested in distributed network that would survive nuclear attack, which is where the DARPA money comes from back in the day. But then it was like academics. They're the only ones that they thought about using it. And the thing just kind of escaped. It's basically indefensible. You can't really, you don't really know who you're talking to. And it was designed so that all these different applications could work over and it wouldn't discriminate, which is great for innovation and great for crime. And then the software, the other huge problem is software. So people keep buying more software, stacking software on top of other software. And on average, every thousand lines of code has a bug in it.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wasn't thinking about it that abstractly. So, you know, my day-to-day job was at the LA Times, and I was interested in hacking as a bigger deal and getting sort of worse and worse despite the fact that people were spending money about it on it. But it was also just the individuals. People didn't know that Sean Fanning was a hacker And he was part of the same circles as people in the Cult of the Dead Cow. They were early beta testers of the Napster program. And so I got to know some very good young security people from working on the Napster book. And their basic worldview is things are going to be really bad.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know. Well, you know, so that's true on a personal level, in people's personal relationships with the internet, it was very important. People were exposing themselves. That's true. You know, you mentioned some of the big companies now. Another reason I wrote that book was that, I mean, I thought it was a cautionary tale. It's like these guys were deliberately breaking the law. Kleiner Perkins was willing to invest in them, even though they concluded that they were breaking the law, because they were going to get so big, so fast that they could flip it and make a deal and be great. And I just thought, wow, this is crazy. I thought this is an illustration of the dot-com insanity that people would invest in something that was illegal. It turns out that that's a role model and that”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Buy a single. But it opened up this idea, and I want to link it to your book that you would open your digital life to people, which I think was like you get in an Uber, like you get these kind of things are big deals. The idea that you'd rent your house out to someone that you don't know.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But having that terrible cop made it easier for Steve to say, well, you want to go with Naps? Is that what you want? You want to have a reasonable price where people can buy a single.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't the wisest call in the world. And they almost got away with it. They almost got like a billion dollars. And then Sean's uncle got too greedy and wanted, you know, another billion, and it all fell apart. And unfortunately, that was sort of the last chance to get a handle on this because the other outfits learned from Napster and said, oh, well, we'll base ourselves offshore. We won't keep track of what our users are doing. download and then we'll never see them again and it's hopeless so i mean but on the other hand it also set the stage for iTunes and a part of Apple's”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, they're not the sweetest people in the world. Screw them, right? But one of the hidden things was that people thought Napster was a revolution. It was exciting, and screw the man and all this stuff. But basically their business model was extortion. They were going to extort the record industry and then sell out for billions of dollars because they would actually know more about the record industry's customers than the record industry. Because the record industry doesn't really see who buys what stuff.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Matthew was the first big one, and then major companies like, wow, we could save a lot of money doing this. And it has tons of applications. But Napster went up against the record industry, which understandably was pretty annoyed that people could find even obscure unreleased tracks over next year.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and so unfortunately, this was used for mass piracy, possibly the biggest piracy ever. Yeah, where people, you could look up on anybody else's computer what music they were offering up in MP3s recordings and just downloaded from them and they downloaded from you. And it actually had this other really cool chat features and you could find people with similar interests and stuff like that. And in a way, it was sort of like a proto-social network in addition to everything else. But it was real technology.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's assume some people don't know it. Napster was this revolutionary file-sharing service that used peer-to-peer technology so that you didn't need massive servers and huge bandwidth that would get gunked up trying to download things.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, well, it's actually some of the same people. One of the reasons I wrote the Napster book was that despite the fact that it was on Time magazine's cover and everybody had heard of it, people didn't know really where it come from and how it got sort of corrupted by Silicon Valley Greed.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's not, you know, a certain point stops being helpful. And so I wanted to write a positive book. I wanted to say, here's something that might work. Here's something that's worked in the past. Here's a model. And once I did that, then the culture of the dead cow was like a pretty obvious way to go because they spanned the whole history of the internet and because they've accomplished so much against such crappy odds.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it did really well and it opened people's eyes and stuff. But, you know, it was a downer. It basically said we're screwed. We're screwed. And since then, there have been like a flood of other books that say we're screwed in this way, we're screwed in that way. And I didn't want to write another book like that, you know, admiring a different part of the same book. It was a conference.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's see, I've been a journalist for 30 years. I've been out in California since 98 covering tech. And at one time or another, like you, I've covered everything, you know, Microsoft, Apple, whatever. But I gravitated pretty early on to hacking insecurity because I thought it was the most interesting. It crossed a lot of boundaries and people, nobody had an incentive to tell you how bad it was. And I saw early on that it was going to get really, really bad. And so first I did a book about Napster. I mean, I have mainstream journalism jobs at times, Financial Times, now Reuters, but I've done three solo books on tech. The first was about Napster, and the second was about organized cybercrime and how it was merging with nation state capabilities. And that was called Fatal System Error.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Batto, all right, whatever. He's not going to win. Anyway, Joseph, welcome to Recoat. I have been not a Betto fan for a while. But anyway, I want to hear all about him and his hacking days. So Joe and I have known each other forever through many technology reporting iterations. I'd love to get you back on why you decided to write this book. And I want you to get into the name and everything else, but talk a little bit about your background so people have a sense of how you got here.”
2019-08-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT