Something else was running through my mind while we were watching Sneakers last night. Some of it had more to do with another movie, Hackers, but really, it reminded me about older Phone Phreaks, and the early internet hackers.

I, of course, didn't really know anything about this stuff, but it seems to me that a lot of it is simply less possible now. At least for the general public. Phone Phreaks used to record sounds and play them back into payphones in order to get the exchanges to do stuff that would usually cost money. Or so the story goes.

When the internet was in its earlier public days, when AOL was a major player, I recall a talking with a high school classmate over AOL and looking at a website called Neato Elito, all about this sort of stuff. The site is gone, but you can still find some of its stuff at the internet archive. A lot of it was about how much AOL stank.

But now, it seems like so much of that stuff is cut off from the average person. While we can take advantage more easily, perhaps, of what certain hackers manage to break, (e.g. DVD ripping) the actual hacking, the actual doing of the stuff is just not the same. It's now clean, easy and not so exciting. I'm sure that the people actually doing the hacking still have that sort of thrill, but to me, (even granting that I've had little to no interest in this stuff for a long time) it's just not the same. Perhaps it's just another example of the way in which the tactile is going away and being taken over by the digital.