On 08/01/14 07:05, James A. Donald wrote:
On 2014-01-08 04:51, rysiek wrote:
Neither does it fit 1. -- he did not break any kind of security systems,
cracked passwords, etc., he just put a laptop on a network that had
access to
these documents and downloaded the documents. That's all.
You are perhaps saying it frequently requires no skill, other than
fraud or burglary, to muck up someone else's network. Indeed it does
not.
Nonetheless, mucking up someone else's network by such simple means is
hacking in the first meaning of the word, hacking as an aggressive or
criminal act.
Because hacking from a distance requires skill, particularly if a
network has some halfway competent defenses, the word "hack" has also
come to mean some impressively clever stuff done with computers, but
the original meaning was simply bad stuff done by computer - and, in
the early days of the internet, it was possible to do bad stuff by
computer with very little skill.
And even today, it is possible to do bad stuff by computer with very
little skill if one physically accesses a network that is not intended
or expected to be accessed by outsiders.
im not so sure hacking ever meant simply doing bad stuff with a
computer. (if you take your lexicon from the main stream media perhaps
but its simply not true.) making stuff do things it was not intended to
do would be much closer to the original and correct definition of the
term "hacking"
