of view in 1980 as an idea that he thought should characterize the architecture of the Internet. “Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept.”13! Postel’s idea became known as the “robustness principle” and it was meant to determine how switches and nodes on the net should behave. They should, Postel felt, be good at handling lots of different types of communications - they should be “robust” — but they should also be careful not to spread too much non-standard garbage out into the networks. This was an essential advance over the old ARPANET Paul Baran had helped inspire. That system worked wonderfully by itself, in isolation, as it sent humming nuclear launch codes zipping around, but it struggled when it needed to interoperate with other networks. It wasn’t generous. The Internet that Postel and others were designing was intended to be much, much larger than ARPANET, so an ability to speak to others and be understood was essential. It was like planning an airport: You wanted to be able to land lots of different types of planes. But if someone started throw golf balls, jello and gasoline on the runway you'd have a problem. It would slow down the system for everyone. Postel was telling engineers: Be careful what you do and what you put onto the system. Take responsibility on your end. Build something that’s generous in what it will handle from others.
Be liberal in what you accept. From the first moments on the grass in Lelystad, the small town just outside Amsterdam where the Hacking At the End of the Universe conference gathered, the mad diversity that this idea suggested was an astonishing, delightful fact. As broad and strange a group as Rop’s email had hinted might come was in fact there, under the trees, happily running cables from tent to RV, powering their connected routers with gas-fired generators, marveling at data transmission speeds that today, your phone might manage from an underground garage with the barest connectivity. The two-day outdoor festival was an example of human interoperability. Postel’s Principle brought to life. Few of us knew most of the group. Nearly everyone was, well, not the most social. But there was instant connection, discussion, board gaming, and a degree of frank interoperating I’d never quite seen before. It was a harbinger of two decades of digital cross connection yet to come.
Of all the people at the Hacktic conference, however, among the system managers and Unix gurus and heating system guerillas (hey, everyone should have a hobby), it was the Warez Dudes who were of the most interest - both to the participants in the conference and to the white vans cruising nearby, allegedly filled with curious Dutch police. The nickname came from the “wares” they had access to, which were largely cracked open versions of commercial software that could be shared and distributed and manipulated on private bulletin board systems. The Warez Dudes were pirates. And like most pirates they had an early sense of the very edges of the law and of the smell of money drifting along new and essential routes. If hacker culture was, in those early days, a frontier society - and it was, even down to the sad shortage of single women - these were the people living on the very furthest edges of the
131 “Be conservative”: Jon Postel “DOD Standard Transmission Control Protocol” (1980) RFC 761, IED 129
94
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018326