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Two tales from the city's edge
Deep underground with L.A.'s computer and scooter scenes
By Noah Barron
The Obscurantist Online
Skroot holds a potato he 'hacked' using a tattoo needle. Catsex? Don't ask.
Image from LA2600.org
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This reporter on his stock four-stroke Vespa ET4. The modern automatic "twist-and-go" scooters are regarded with skepticism by scooter purists.
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The tall, combat-booted hacker hefted up a large, fatigue-green metal case. It sure looked like an ammo canister by the light of the streetlamp.
“Here you go,” he said, opening it to the circle of onlookers. “A 1,000 rounds.” Inside, rifle ammunition glittered like a pirate’s doubloons.
The corporate computer security technician known as Vidiot, who was buying the bullets on a downtown L.A. street corner, replied, “Okay, I still owe you. How about if I pay you 20 bucks now and the rest later?”
Welcome to L.A. 2600, a group of self-professed hackers that has been meeting in the back of Philippe’s Deli across from Union Station for nearly 15 years. They get together to talk shop, tell stories, smoke cigarettes and enjoy the camaraderie of forbidden knowledge. And, as the above scene shows, they have an unusual view of the legal system—when it applies to them and when it doesn’t is a matter of speculation.
This month’s meeting had a presentation on hardening Linux systems—or for the layman—making them less vulnerable to cracking. (For those of you not hip to the lingo, according to the 2600 folks—a “hacker” is a computer adept with no malicious intent, and a “cracker” is someone who uses their knowledge to do harm. Club leader Skroo has another word for crackers—“shitheads.”)
According to a tall, bearded hacker who declined to give his name, the word “hacker” traces its use to the early days of networking at MIT when large computers, running simple code, needed the most minimalist programming to work best. Those programmers could “take a bit of code and ‘hack it’—the best hackers would take the most amount of code and break it down into its smallest elements and still have it do the job.”
The L.A. chapter of 2600 has long since broken with its namesake, 2600, the hacker quarterly magazine published on the East Coast. The moniker itself is drawn from a sound wavelength—2600 hertz—a tone which could be played into regular payphones on the street to get free calling through trunk connections and other kinds of illicit access to the phone system, an activity referred to in the 1980s as “phone phreaking.”
According to 2600 club members, one way to get this vaunted tone was by blowing into a specific whistle found inside Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes.
In honor of the phone-phreaking tradition, each 2600 meeting begins by the payphones in Union Station.
As the hackers begin to show up in the station, a well-dressed and attractive young woman joined them. They exchanged nervous jokes and looks—obviously this was a person who was not a club regular. After some discussion, it becomes clear that this woman wanted to find someone willing to hack—or indeed crack—someone’s Web page to take down libelous material posted about her.
“I don’t want this stuff up there about me, you know what I mean? I wrote him about his Web site and he seemed a little crazy. He’s been sued several times and doesn’t care,” she said.
One by one the hackers tell her that this is illegal—and more importantly—doomed, since whoever is blackening her name undoubtedly has his files backed up elsewhere. They advised her to call the Internet service provider and threaten suit. Dejected, she left.
“That was weird,” said the bearded hacker. “Did you guys think she was a Fed?”
One hacker, Bob Smith said, “I think it’s taken for granted that there could be law enforcement at our meetings.” He said that the belief in privacy is a fallacy. “We should all expect that we are being watched.”
There is an ambient level of suspicion among the hackers of 2600. Most of them refuse to give their names and instead offer handles—9X, Xinc, Skroo—and when I asked to interview them, they demanded identification and my word that I wasn’t a cop.
One hacker, Felix, who was described by his compatriots as “all hair and newspapers—you’ll know what we mean” arrived bearing a tote bag full of old LA Times issues to match his giant salt-and-pepper beard. Felix refused to be interviewed and instead passed me a napkin with this written on it:
“The real hacker is a mutant, a nonconformist to society. When society is stagnant or becomes nonfunctional, even the powers that be seek the hacker to remedy the situation.”
“Oh no,” said Felix. “Now you have my handwriting on file.”
Several members noted a link between hacker culture and Libertarianism and indeed, an intense interest in firearms.
At the club meeting, Skroo got up and said, “Any of you know how to do custom shotgun loads? There’s one I’ve been working on—iron filings and rock salt—I call it the ‘The Irritator.’” Laughter filled the back room of the deli.
The one of the club’s current organizers, Xinc, wanted to dispel misconceptions about what a hacker really is. “The media generally presents us as dangerous, malicious, power-hungry basement-dwelling geeks intent on world domination, and yes there are people that run that direction,” Xinc said, “but on the flip side there are people that want to portray as creative, exploratory, curious out-for-the-sake-knowledge, altruistic—and that’s not entirely true either.
“Realistically this is a very broad cross section of society as a whole. They’re more involved in the application—the ability to manipulate one’s environment.”
The ability to customize and control computers—and the world at large—was a theme that the hackers continually returned to.
Skroo, the other club leader, whose moniker is short for “Skroo You,” works as an information security specialist. “Do you know how to throw a brick through a window?” he asked. I nod. “Do you go around throwing bricks through windows?” I shake my head. “Okay, now if you have your own brick and your own window, is it okay for you to throw it through to see what happens? There you go.”
Skroo continued, “It doesn’t just stop at computers, there are a lot of us here that have interests that go way beyond computers, I enjoy shooting, I enjoy off-roading, modifying my jeep to perform better off road.
“Most people are happy with things as they are out of the box. And that’s fine. Some people want to get a little bit deeper, figure out what they do with them and make them more suitable to their needs.”
The next day, on the very opposite end of Los Angeles County in Torrance, a similar motley group of guys were also smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and discussing customizing their machines.
This group, the South Bay Scooter Club,probably would get along well with the 2600 crew: both are self-professed geeks and gear-heads, both enjoy getting their machines to do things that they weren’t designed to do. But rather than computers, the South Bay Scooter Club modifies and rides vintage Vespas and Lambrettas, Italian motorscooters known for their clean lines and cultural pedigree dating back to England’s Mod movement, depicted in films like The Who’s musical epic "Quadrophenia". Both the hackers and the two-stroke fanatics enjoy do-it-yourself customization and don’t mind living on the fringes.
A declaration of journalistic bias: I recently purchased a 2005 Vespa ET4, a modern update of the classic scooter and I attended the ride, not only as a writer but as a neophyte scooter-head as well.
Joe Fresciello from Redondo Beach, an older Italian American gentleman, likes the Vespas because they remind him of his youth. “It all started in 1964, I was 19 years old, first trip to Sicily to visit my relatives. I bought a 50cc and rode it all around Italy, across the Straits of Messina, up to Napoli and then to Rome. It was a great trip. And then a few years ago, Vespa opened in Newport and I saw that same color: ugly green. I have three of ‘em now.”
Greg Pugh, a seven-year vet of the club, owns a dozen Vespas and Lambrettas, none with model years later than the mid-70s. His jacket, overloaded with rally patches from every ride he’s attended, attests to his dedication. Of his small-frame Vespa, he said he looks like “a bear riding a roller skate” when he sits on it.
“They’re ridiculous machines,” he says. “Only pseudo-reliable, if you’re doing long stretches, pushing the engine as fast as it can go, you got crappy brakes, drum in front, drum in back, sometimes none of them work. It’s a constant battle. You can’t run down to Home Depot either for parts—everything has to be ordered.”
Perhaps because we were riding the same modern (automatic, four-stroke)—and therefore less hallowed—Vespa ET4s, Tony Codianni, 62, another Italian American businessman, took a shine to me and insisted I ride in the pack close to him.
Like a swarm of bees (Vespa means ‘wasp’ in Italian), or perhaps an army of crazed lawnmowers, the pack of about 10 riders took off in a cloud of smoke. Starting in Torrance at the Claim Jumper Restaurant and winding through narrow coastal roads known to the scooter club as the “Swerve N’ Curve” route, we cruise past grinning gawkers and beautiful views of the wide Pacific.
At stoplights, Tony Codianni (aboard a scooter custom-painted "Tony C") pulls up to me and shouts over the engine noise “How ya doin, kiddo?” and hi-fives me.
Greg Pugh was on traffic duty. At stop signs or busy intersections, he pulled his scooter out into traffic and made sure the cars waited their turn. Throughout the ride, I’m impressed by the skill and courtesy the riders show one another and other motorists.
Pugh, though he mocks himself for dumping thousands of dollars into modifying a small engine that will still only go 80 mph, doesn’t take gibes from competing motorists lightly.
“Sure, they’ll say ‘when it grows up will it be a Harley?’ or ‘where are the pedals?’ but they don’t say that much around me probably because I’m bigger and meaner and I will throw a sparkplug through your windshield. But when you cut throw traffic and beat them all off a stoplight, that’s a good feeling.”
I have the misfortune of being caught behind club organizer Mario Artevia, riding his modified lime green 60s Lambretta, nicknamed Godzillabretta. The machine coughed up gouts of black smoke out of its custom exhaust kit. Stupidly riding with my helmet facemask up, I found myself feeling as though I had smoked an entire pack of unfiltered cigarettes simultaneously. I had the black nostril gunk to prove it.
The ride wound past the large Korean bell that features in the film The Usual Suspects and ended up in San Pedro’s Ports O’ Call at a bar called Utro’s. Beers were consumed, cigarettes were smoked and war stories exchanged about scooters loved and lost, rides completed and friends and enemies in the scooter world. At the end of the day, the riders left one by one, buzzing back to wherever they came from with another adventure under their belts.
On the first Friday of every month, hackers will meet to discuss how to modify their computers and explore the networks that connect them.
On the first Saturdays, scooterists will ride their motorized Shetland ponies in a mad pack, in search of traffic-free roads, the destination irrelevant.
Members of these groups get something from each other’s company that they say they can’t get anywhere else. It’s a sense of community, a curiosity about their machines, and an understanding that what they do doesn’t make much sense to outsiders that draws them together.
“Honestly, this is very much a social thing for us,” said Skroo of 2600, speaking words the scooterists would agree with as well. “This is just a chance for us to get together, talk, hang out, chat and exchange ideas and have a good time.”
Noah Barron is a USC Annenberg graduate journalism student. He welcomes your comments via email or at his website. |
