best defense a good offense?

Ciccio · 09-17-2004, 12:35 PM

Well, in Hacker ethics, and the spirit of the age of information (trans) Pekka Himanen (I know the name is not spelled correctly) describes a hacker as a person dedicated to do something with passion... That aplies from a computer hacer to a blacksmith, as long as they do it with passion.

Personally I agree with both of you. I think a hacker is a person that has the desire to impove computers, either by writing programs, installing new software, etc AND that he must be passionate about that. Anyway... this is going a lot Off Topic... so I think we should stop. Perhaps there should be another thread about this particular issue...

win32sux · 09-17-2004, 11:07 PM

Eric Steven Raymond wrote a nice paper on the "hacker" issue...

here's an excerpt and the link:

Quote:

The Jargon File contains a bunch of definitions of the term ‘hacker’, most having to do with technical adeptness and a delight in solving problems and overcoming limits. If you want to know how to become a hacker, though, only two are really relevant.

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.

The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term ‘hacker’.

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.htm

tekhead2 · 09-24-2004, 08:43 PM

Personally, I think that todays information laws are total crap. I think that they are only to protect the software companies and their "intellectual" property. They are neither adaptive, nor applicable to any of us as an end user! They are just there to keep the big companies making money. I believe that there is a place for hacking, and that is ethical hacking. Linux has been , and hopefully will always be a test bed for best security practices, due to its open source nature it has an inherit advantage over other closed source operating systems. The software community needs the hacker element to stop it from growing stagnant. Just think of how many of us who would be without a job if it were not for the hacker? I know alot of people who make a living feeding on peoples fear of hackers, and their misunderstandings. Not too many people understand them, or even what they are capable of.

dalek · 09-25-2004, 03:35 AM

I guess the cops can thank the murderers for their job too. Just because something generates jobs doesn't make it right. That includes hackers, actually crackers IMO.

I'm not much on big businesses either, but they do have the right to protect what THEY make. If you invent something, you would want to make something off of it too, especially if that is how you make your living.

Later