A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
That was the division in the hacking world: There were people who were exploring it and the people who were trying to make money from it. And, generally, you stayed away from anyone who was trying to make money from it.
'The X-Files' was a hard sell because people didn't know what it was. The network didn't understand what it was that they were buying, and at the beginning, they wanted us to have closure. They wanted us to put the cuffs on the bad guy at the end of each episode.
It used to cost money to disclose and distribute information. In the digital age it costs money not to.
It's true, I had hacked into a lot of companies, and took copies of the source code to analyze it for security bugs. If I could locate security bugs, I could become better at hacking into their systems. It was all towards becoming a better hacker.
Back in the '90s, folks were not sure if they could trust the Web, and frankly, a lot of the services back then didn't provide massive value.
Then again, my case was all about the misappropriation of source code because I wanted to become the best hacker in the world and I enjoyed beating the security mechanisms.
Making things open-source brings the cost down.
We also had good software in the key categories and more focus on the gameplaying capability, so more of the marketing effort was targeted at game customers.
The Internet has made us richer, freer, connected and informed in ways its founders could not have dreamt of. It has also become a vector of attack, espionage, crime and harm.
While many hackers have the knowledge, skills, and tools to attack computer systems, they generally lack the motivation to cause violence or severe economic or social harm.
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