What the hell is Underground?

[L0rd_M@dness]

I was reading an article about old-school hackers and well, the author was not the first one who used the term 'underground' for referring to hacking communities.
The guy is a hacker himself, not some gay government agency writing shit about hackers.
So my question is: "What exactly is underground?"
DEFCON calls itself underground that I know. Is this just a fancy, made-up term with no real, technical meaning? Or does it mean something special...
I was just curious...

[techb]

Back in le day, undergound was coined because not a whole lot of people was into hacking. There was select few people who had a passion for it, and meet up usually in a basement or something. Homebrew computer club is a prim example spawning in garages and basements for those who loved the electrons and the old school days of building a computer from scratch. And no, not getting cards and mother boards from a store, but building the CPU and RAM by hand.


Underground now-a-days is usually used by media and only media. The only place I've seen the term underground used today is for music/indie and that is for aspiring artist/devs on site such as newgrounds.

[Dreamer]

^

I have also seen hacking sites use it trying to sound cool, and some of the private sites use it, but realistically  people use enderground just like they use l33t etc.
Come visit my underground forum.
Come visit my l33t forum.

Its an adjective to describe a forum that probably isn't underground or l33t.

[Kulverstukas]

AFAIK it's somewhat like techb said. To me it literally means being apart from the rest of the world, not necessarily doing bad things. Nowadays there are still such things where actual hackers exchange CC's, exploits and stuff - that place is called The underground. Though this has been used so much by the media... Dunno how to explain it, you just have to understand it yourself

[L0rd_M@dness]

I guess I kinda get it now.
Another guy said it was the bulletin boards, back in the old days, in which hackers were gathered. (I don't even know what he means by bulletin board, but I guess it was an old form of forum)
techb's description sort of reminds me of Hackerspaces today.
Also Kulverstakus said there are places in which hackers exchange CCs, exploits, etc. Like what? Are they just places which are not findable online, Or are they private websites & forums?

[lucid]

Some places are findable online...not usually on the clear side of things. Of course maybe he meant something else.

[Kulverstukas]

Yes I meant servers running without anyone else knowing just the picked ones. No crawlers can access.
By Bulleting boards, he means the oldschool BB's where you would connect to over Telnet epic stuff, there are some still online just for fun, but I don't know any...

[Jetra]

so like hacked severs that people would meet on?
with a hidden chat room or something.

[Kulverstukas]

not hacked, but dedicated to that. Could be chatrooms... the hell do I know, I never seen or been to one... I know what I read on the news