Free as in Freedom - Sam Williams (read this if .TXT) 📗

ITS boasted features most commercial operating systems wouldn’t offer for years, features such as multitasking, debugging, and full-screen editing capability. Using it and the PDP-6 as a foundation, the Lab had been able to declare independence from Project MAC shortly before Stallman’s arrival.I apologize for the whirlwind summary of ITS’ genesis,

an operating system many hackers still regard as the epitome of the hacker ethos. For more information on the program’s political significance, see Simson Garfinkel, Architects of the Information Society: Thirty-Five Years of the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT (MIT Press, 1999).

As an apprentice hacker, Stallman quickly became enamored with ITS. Although forbidding to most newcomers, the program contained many built-in features that provided a lesson in software development to hacker apprentices such as himself.

“ITS had a very elegant internal mechanism for one program to examine another,” says Stallman, recalling the program. “You could examine all sorts of status about another program in a very clean, well-specified way.”

Using this feature, Stallman was able to watch how programs written by hackers processed instructions as they ran. Another favorite feature would allow the monitoring program to freeze the monitored program’s job between instructions. In other operating systems, such a command would have resulted in half-computed gibberish or an automatic systems crash. In ITS, it provided yet another way to monitor the step-by-step performance.

“If you said, `Stop the job,’ it would always be stopped in user mode. It would be stopped between two user-mode instructions, and everything about the job would be consistent for that point,” Stallman says. “If you said, `Resume the job,’ it would continue properly.

Not only that, but if you were to change the status of the job and then change it back, everything would be consistent. There was no hidden status anywhere.”

By the end of 1970, hacking at the AI Lab had become a regular part of Stallman’s weekly schedule. From Monday to Thursday, Stallman devoted his waking hours to his Harvard classes. As soon as Friday afternoon arrived, however, he was on the T, heading down to MIT for the weekend. Stallman usually timed his arrival to coincide with the ritual food run. Joining five or six other hackers in their nightly quest for Chinese food, he would jump inside a beat-up car and head across the Harvard Bridge into nearby Boston. For the next two hours, he and his hacker colleagues would discuss everything from ITS to the internal logic of the Chinese language and pictograph system. Following dinner, the group would return to MIT and hack code until dawn.

For the geeky outcast who rarely associated with his high-school peers, it was a heady experience, suddenly hanging out with people who shared the same predilection for computers, science fiction, and Chinese food. “I remember many sunrises seen from a car coming back from Chinatown,” Stallman would recall nostalgically, 15 years after the fact in a speech at the Swedish Royal Technical Institute. “It was actually a very beautiful thing to see a sunrise, ‘cause that’s such a calm time of day. It’s a wonderful time of day to get ready to go to bed. It’s so nice to walk home with the light just brightening and the birds starting to chirp; you can get a real feeling of gentle satisfaction, of tranquility about the work that you have done that night.“See Richard Stallman, “RMS lecture at KTH (Sweden),”

(October 30, 1986).

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html The more Stallman hung out with the hackers, the more he adopted the hacker worldview. Already committed to the notion of personal liberty, Stallman began to infuse his actions with a sense of communal responsibility. When others violated the communal code, Stallman was quick to speak out. Within a year of his first visit, Stallman was the one breaking into locked offices, trying to recover the sequestered terminals that belonged to the lab community as a whole. In true hacker fashion, Stallman also sought to make his own personal contribution to the art of lock hacking. One of the most artful door-opening tricks, commonly attributed to Greenblatt, involved bending a stiff wire into a cane and attaching a loop of tape to the long end. Sliding the wire under the door, a hacker could twist and rotate the wire so that the long end touched the door knob. Provided the adhesive on the tape held, a hacker could open the doorknob with a few sharp twists.

When Stallman tried the trick, he found it good but wanting in a few places. Getting the tape to stick wasn’t always easy, and twisting the wire in a way that turned the doorknob was similarly difficult. Stallman remembered that the hallway ceiling possessed tiles that could be slid away. Some hackers, in fact, had used the false ceiling as a way to get around locked doors, an approach that generally covered the perpetrator in fiberglass but got the job done.

Stallman considered an alternative approach. What if, instead of slipping a wire under the door, a hacker slid away one of the panels and stood over the door jamb?

Stallman took it upon himself to try it out. Instead of using a wire, Stallman draped out a long U-shaped loop of magnetic tape, fastening a loop of adhesive tape at the base of the U. Standing over the door jamb, he dangled the tape until it looped under the doorknob.

Lifting the tape until the adhesive fastened, he then pulled on the left end of the tape, twisting the doorknob counter-clockwise. Sure enough, the door opened. Stallman had added a new twist to the art of lock hacking.

“Sometimes you had to kick the door after you turned the door knob,” says Stallman, recalling the lingering bugginess of the new method. “It took a little bit of balance to pull it off.”

Such activities reflected a growing willingness on Stallman’s part to speak and act out in defense of political beliefs. The AI Lab’s spirit of direct action had proved inspirational enough for Stallman to break out of the timid impotence of his teenage years.

Breaking into an office to free a terminal wasn’t the same as taking part in a protest march, but it was effective in ways that most protests weren’t. It solved the problem at hand.

By the time of his last years at Harvard, Stallman was beginning to apply the whimsical and irreverent lessons of the AI Lab back at school.

“Did he tell you about the snake?” his mother asks at one point during an interview. “He and his dorm mates put a snake up for student election. Apparently it got a considerable number of votes.”

Stallman verifies the snake candidacy with a few caveats. The snake was a candidate for election within Currier House, Stallman’s dorm, not the campus-wide student council. Stallman does remember the snake attracting a fairly significant number of votes, thanks in large part to the fact that both the snake and its owner both shared the same last name. “People may have voted for it, because they thought they were voting for the owner,” Stallman says. “Campaign posters said that the snake was `slithering for’ the office. We also said it was an `at large’ candidate, since it had climbed into the wall through the ventilating unit a few weeks before and nobody knew where it was.”

Running a snake for dorm council was just one of several election-related pranks. In a later election, Stallman and his dorm mates nominated the house master’s son. “His platform was mandatory retirement at age seven,” Stallman recalls. Such pranks paled in comparison to the fake-candidate pranks on the MIT

campus, however. One of the most successful fake-candidate pranks was a cat named Woodstock, which actually managed to outdraw most of the human candidates in a campus-wide election. “They never announced how many votes Woodstock got, and they treated those votes as spoiled ballots,” Stallman recalls. “But the large number of spoiled ballots in that election suggested that Woodstock had actually won. A couple of years later, Woodstock was suspiciously run over by a car. Nobody knows if the driver was working for the MIT administration.”

Stallman says he had nothing to do with Woodstock’s candidacy, “but I admired it.“In an email shortly after this book went into its final

edit cycle, Stallman says he drew political inspiration from the Harvard campus as well. “In my first year of Harvard, in a Chinese History class, I read the story of the first revolt against the Chin dynasty,” he says.

“The story is not reliable history, but it was very moving.”

At the AI Lab, Stallman’s political activities had a sharper-edged tone. During the 1970s, hackers faced the constant challenge of faculty members and

administrators pulling an end-run around ITS and its hacker-friendly design. One of the first attempts came in the mid-1970s, as more and more faculty members began calling for a file security system to protect research data. Most other computer labs had installed such systems during late 1960s, but the AI Lab, through the insistence of Stallman and other hackers, remained a security-free zone.

For Stallman, the opposition to security was both ethical and practical. On the ethical side, Stallman pointed out that the entire art of hacking relied on intellectual openness and trust. On the practical side, he pointed to the internal structure of ITS being built to foster this spirit of openness, and any attempt to reverse that design required a major overhaul.

“The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System decided that file protection was usually used by a self-styled system manager to get power over everyone else,” Stallman would later explain. “They didn’t want anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so they didn’t implement that kind of a feature. The result was, that whenever something in the system was broken, you could always fix it.“See Richard Stallman (1986).

Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI Lab’s machines security-free. Over at the nearby MIT

Laboratory for Computer Sciences, however, security-minded faculty members won the day. The LCS

installed its first password-based system in 1977. Once again, Stallman took it upon himself to correct what he saw as ethical laxity. Gaining access to the software code that controlled the password system, Stallman implanted a software command that sent out a message to any LCS user who attempted to choose a unique password.

If a user entered “starfish,” for example, the message came back something like: I see you chose the password “starfish.” I suggest that you switch to the password “carriage return.” It’s much easier to type, and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords.See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback],

1984): 417. I have modified this quote, which Levy also uses as an excerpt, to illustrate more directly how the program might reveal the false security of the system.

Levy uses the placeholder “[such and such].”

Users who did enter “carriage return”-that is, users who simply pressed the Enter or Return button, entering a blank string instead of a unique password-left their accounts accessible to the world at large. As scary as that might have been for some users, it reinforced the hacker notion that Institute computers, and even Institute computer files, belonged to the public, not private individuals. Stallman, speaking in an interview for the 1984 book Hackers, proudly noted that one-fifth of the LCS staff accepted this argument and employed the blank-string password.See Steven Levy, Hackers (Penguin USA [paperback], 1984): 417.

Stallman’s null-string crusade would prove ultimately futile. By the early 1980s, even the AI Lab’s machines were sporting password-based security systems. Even so, it represents a major milestone in terms of Stallman’s personal and political maturation. To the objective observer familiar with Stallman’s later career, it offers a convenient