I'm no futurist. I don't even like planning where I'm going to lunch. So when the organizer of a computer hackers' conference tries to explain to me what it's all about, I feel like a "Jeopardy" contestant who has been catapulted to the set of "Fear Factor."
I don't know this world. I don't recognize half the words when I read the come-on for this weekend conference beginning June 6 at the University Club of Pittsburgh:
"Come out and meet your favorite hackers, phreakers, phrackers, feds, 2600 kids, cops, security professionals, U4EA, r00t kids club, press, groupies, conference whores, k0d3 kids, convicted felons and concerned parents!"
But I'm intrigued. My knowledge of hacking mostly comes from bad movies and worse reporting by the likes of me, middle-aged journalists trying to cover the doings of a younger generation of communicators.
There actually doesn't seem to be much sinister about SummerCon 2003 (www.summercon.org). The FBI won't need to crash this party; Special Agent Tom Grasso has been invited to speak on high-tech crime investigation.
On the other hand, the lore from conventions past has compelled organizers to warn in an e-mail: "If you want to commit crimes, if you are interested in pulling fire alarms or breaking things, don't come to this con."
You don't get that from the people behind the Mary Kay Cosmetics bashes.
Mark Trumpbour, 27, of Spring Hill, is organizing this with his brother, Louis, 29, who is flying in from Berlin, Germany, to offer the opening remarks.
They grew up in a little dot on the East Coast called Sea Girt, N.J., the 11th and 12th of a dozen children in a house that got an Atari 800 computer one Christmas about a quarter-century ago. It had maybe one-three thousandth the capacity of the average personal computer sold today, but the five youngest Trumpbour boys spent most of their free time with it.
"It was like a hacker commune," said Mark Trumpbour.
He then tries to take that back, but only because the word "commune" doesn't square with his family's entrepreneurial spirit. Trumpbour is a computer consultant who will come to your house and tell you how to take a $300 computer and give it "the same capacity all of AT&T had in 1982."
" 'Hacker' is almost a badge of honor when you think about it in the correct context," he said.
To the Trumpbour brothers, hacking isn't about destruction, it's about understanding how things work. They'll spend the convention with like-minded folk, people who have made long and strong friendships through the computer but feel the need to fortify those bonds through consumption of malt beverages.
Mark Trumpbour says they'll be lucky to get 150 people for this, but they don't want to be much bigger anyway.
"When you get to a certain number of people, everyone is just trying to look cooler than anyone else," he said.
Louis Trumpbour, who called Mark on his cell phone from Germany while we were talking, says much of the weekend's discussion will be about what it means to be a hacker at a time when almost anyone can do it. More and more people are digitized. Tens of thousands have downloaded music through services like Napster, so who are the hackers now?
Working in a medium most use but know little about, they have a passion for finding shortcuts they're not supposed to know, finding better ways to use machines they didn't make. There's philosophy and artistry involved, but they worry that hackers might become a footnote in technological history, and they might disappear like other frontiersmen before them.
But they intend to drink a fair amount of beer in Pittsburgh before they go. Even in a changing world, some guidelines for conventioneers are held sacred.
Brian O'Neill can be reached at boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947.
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