On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 11:15:55AM -0800, James S. Kaplan wrote:
> PS I'm surprised at you guys falling for CBS/NBC/ABC terminology.....A
> hacker is a great programmer...
> a cracker does the illegal stuff.
not to start a flamewar or anything, but:
There seems to be this subtle war going on in the computer industry, to try and modify
the terms. Slashdot and ESR especially are trying to distance the term "hacker" from
computer intrusion. they present people who use the term "hacker" as clueless sheep of
the media, and that is just ridiculous.
To start off, I now use the term "cracker" for a modern day system intruder. Why?
because it doesn't really take any skill to invade machines anymore, usually it
literally involves a point-and-click interface. I carry a lot of pride in calling
myself a "hacker", thus I use the term "cracker" now. But growing up, and being in the
"know" for over 20 years now, a computer intruder was always termed a "hacker". Why?
Because it took hacking skills to break into a system. You had to know it, and you had
to use your mind to come up with inventive tricks.
As a kid/teen, I was heavily involved in various computer security antics, and the
scene associated with it. It was always termed hacking, hack, hackers, etc. Crackers
were people who came up with c0d3z for those l33t Apple II & C64 games. essentially,
people who defeated copyright protection mechanisms.
These days there's a big war to associate a set of morals to the term "hacker", and
they create outright BS to use in their battles. A hacker is a hacker if they invade
systems (using their wits), hack code all night high on mountain dew, write kernels,
hack hardware, hack music synthesizers (Transoniq Hacker anyone?).There are good
hackers, and there are bad hackers.
Yes, I've succumbed to the *term change*, simply because most of the jack asses out
their "hacking websites" don't know a damn thing, and are probably doing it from their
new AOL 6.0 (easier than ever!) software. I take pride in my lifelong ability of being
able to quickly pick up logic systems. Being a sysadmin now, I see the errors in my
ways as a teen, and how irresponsible it is to trespass into other people's systems.
It's especially annoying to go to the hack mirrors at attrition.org and see "h3y,
l0z3r sys4dm1n, w3 0wn y00, y00 h4v3 n0 sk1lls" pasted on the front pages of various
sites. These kiddies probably don't know a bit from a byte, and probably couldn't give
you their age in hexadecimal off the top of their head.
Ok, enough ranting, it's just annoying to see people fall for this recent charade of
the Slashdot/Linux community trying to revise history.
Jakob
