A Neat Little Book Review from the Hartford Courant takes a look at hackers.
There’s an older, more honorable tradition that defines a hacker as someone who discovers a simple shortcut or an elegant solution to a technical problem.
Say your TV reception is poor. You tape a clothes hanger to the antenna, and it works much better. That’s a hack.
Lately, that original meaning of hacker seems to be coming back into style.
Lack of distinction
The jaundiced view most of society has for computer hackers derives from third-rate, tabloid hack scribblers and drooling subliterate moron lackeys of the corporate press who never learned to define their terms. In most cases, when some idjit was slobbering about hackers, he should have been using the word “cracker”, which is a technoweenie who hacks into people’s systems with malicious intent — Kevin Mitnick, for instance — usually to write viruses and trojans. Most hackers are simply technoweenies who reverse engineer software or test the limits of hardware so they can tell the rest of us where the weaknesses lie so we can protect ourselves from the crackers.
Re:Lack of distinction
Don’t you mean “cracks” into people’s systems. If you want to put down the “third-rate, tabloid hack scribblers and drooling subliterate moron lackeys of the corporate press who never learned to define their terms”, you better use the right terminology. Crackers crack. Hackers hack.
And on another note, you don’t have to crack anyone’s computer to write a virus. You watch vulnerability lists and code, code, code.
Get your information straight before you start talking like that.
Mal Y Clypse
Re:Lack of distinction
If someone doesn’t understand the difference between cracker and hacker, they aren’t going to understand the difference between cracking and hacking. So defining a cracker as someone who “hacks into people’s systems with malicious intent” isn’t all that bad as a definition.
Calling them “technoweenies” isn’t going to improve the view of hackers. That just gives people who don’t understand computers a way to view hackers as people who have nothing in common with “normal” people.
Re:Lack of distinction
Well, I don’t use the term as a value judgement, and whatever term I did use would only be misinterpreted by those who won’t make any distinction. These are the same people, by and large, who will view hackers as having nothing in common with “normal” people anyway.