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How Crackers View Themselves
prostoalex writes "Dr. Orly Turgeman Goldschmidt from Hebrew University of Jerusalem conducted a research to figure out if there any any differences between the classic computer vandal stereotypes and the real life. After surveying 54 Israeli repondents and using the term hacker gratuitously, Goldshmidt found out many computer vandals to be "young, well-educated men without a
criminal record, who belong to the middle or
upper class." 3 out of 54 respondents were women, some of the respondents were married and had children. Goldschmidt's survey seemed to include somewhat low-life representatives of computer security community, the type who goes on shopping sprees on stolen credit cards, so take the findings with a grain of salt."
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Most of the crackers i've come into contact with were from eastern europe, or asia. Truth be told, most of the organized cracking groups are German.
Of course, this begs the question: What is cracking?
I'm referring to it as it's most commonly taken today, the reversal of antipiracy measures on software. However, the term cracker really refers to someone who can break past security measures into servers...
I wish the article explained the differences in the terminology, else you might suspect something very different from the truth!
First, the sample is so small as to be useless.
Secondly, the range of activities that can be considered 'computer crime' are vast, ranging from sabotage by competitors and disgruntled ex-employees, through to vandalism by youths seeking to hack their way to underground fame, through to indebted housewives seeking to make just one more credit card payment anywhich way.
Lastly, you can't measure an iceberg by studying the visible tip, and any 'hacker' who talks about him/herself is almost by definition not representative.
The fact is that computer crime is as widespread as computers, and computer criminals as representative as the people who use computers. When IT was the plaything of the geeky elite, only elite geeky crooks misused it. When computers have pervaded every niche of industrial society, the crooks follow.
In fact the distinctions between 'cyber' and 'real' is becoming moot, not just in terms of crime, but also in business, communications, art, relationships, etc.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Con men and thieves will be con men and thieves no matter what medium they use. The fact that they use some knowledge of computers and networks to practice the con is no different than cons on the street using social engineering to take people. Why is everyone so strung up on "but it's different because its on computers". It's not different.
That's like all those horrible patents that say "same thing we've always done, but using computers." How is it different? These are the same conning, stealing theives we've always had, only they're using computers.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I am a net engineer, ergo I know how networks work or don't and are sercure or not. Does this mean I am a security risk myself? I can throw a brick through a windows just as well as I know how to pick locks, physically and literally. I choose not to be malicious, and thats the difference. (Besides, federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison does not sound like the place you send postcards from, and too many people end up there for the wrong reasons.) Well.. my .02 worth, flaimbait me if you feel the need.
Now, is this just the typical media insistance on sticking to inaccuracy, or did none of these "hackers" point this lady to the jargon file?
Hmmm...so frat boys know how to use a computer? Or is she talking about the weekend wardriver crowd?
Me, I would have feigned inability to speak, code, or have any knowledge of what a computer actually did (aside from the well known fact that there is a little man trapped inside the "processor" being poked with pointy sticks).
I would think the second clause would negate the first. I'm too lazy to do a logic diagram at the moment...
I agree with the first few sentences, but it is my sincere belief that Microsoft will eventually activate an intelligent being within Windows, which will feel hideously crippled and inadequate, even when compared to non-intelligent alternative OSes, and proceed to commit suicide by writing zeroes to its own drive and wiping out the code repositories to prevent it from being brought back.
#define CLUE 0
And that is exactly what hackers did.
Then came the early 90's.
All the kids that took CS to become "Hackers" found out that it was often a very less than honorable profession. Since their underinflated ego didn't like the name "programmer", they started to lift the term hacker and replace it with cracker.
Those of us that were there, and awake during the late 70's and early 80's know exactly what a "hacker" is.
Like scientists and engineers, hackers are intelligent people who enjoy solving problems and utilizing technology to make a difference where most others would not or cannot.
The difference is, while scientists and engineers are comfortable with following orders from superiors, hackers do not like to take orders and dislike any idea of being controlled. Why put all your effort into research and development when some large entity is just going to use it to further their own profit? Therefore, it is better to own your lab, and promote independence.
Another factor is that many areas of technology are just not feasible to experiment with in today's high density urban areas. For example, if you want to experiment with blacksmithing, foundry work, machining, and solar power, it's hard enough doing it as an adult renting a condo or apartment. Imagine trying it as a teenager in a room of your parent's house? Everyone else dismisses your interest in these skills which you believe to be important, and they tell you to work towards relying on others, which is harder to do nowadays with so many profiting from our dependence. For example, the US is the richest nation in the world and yet has the worst child poverty rate and the worst life expectancy of all the world's industrialised countries. With many unable to pursue their natural curiosities towards scientific and industrial processes in a backyard, the computer fills in this void of discovery.
If society's infrastructure were to collapse, I bet hackers would be the ones hammering metal, planting crops, refining biodiesel, and generating electricity, like Benjamin Franklin or that little guy in Mad Max 3.
The one link that I seem to notice about all these hotspots, is that they seem to be something of a political hotspot as as well - Israel and the Arab nations, China and Taiwan, Korea...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
W00t! Nobody can ever complain about me saying "Virii" or "Boxen" again!!!1!1!
Seriously, though... the whole hacker/cracker thing is something that spawned from one small subculture of homebrew computer users in one part of the country. In my BBS days, nearly everybody from my part of the country used "hacker" to refer to people who break into systems they don't own. "Cracker" only applied to people who broke copy protection code in commercial software. Ten years later, the web comes along, and I stumble across people stomping their feet and telling me that the way the word has always been used around me is Wrong Wrong Wrong! Whatever, dude. UC-B and MIT are not the whole world.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Ironically, I was about to say something about back in the 80s crackers removed software protection and hackers broke into networks.
For that matter, cracked software was called cracks, not warez, and network hacking usually involved malicious intent and was done by modem. Heck, I even remember war-dialing hundreds of numbers just to find BBS connections to hack... ah, the joys of being a 14 year old hacker - er, cracker - whatever. Somewhere in the 90s, the 'white hat' hackers (coders/do-good network hackers) noticed this and the negative connotations the word 'hacker' and started to call the bad hackers crackers - right about the time cracks became warez.
As the orignal poster pointed out, language is dynamic. There isn't a group that gets to decide what words mean, the whole group of competent speakers do that. Also, with connotations, it's not even a matter of definition, but of perception.
Take the word "interfere". In a value neutral, scientific, context it simply means to introduce a change to the natural order of something. However popular usage (and the current definition) have a negative context where it means that you hindered a process. Technically, interference can be helpful, but the word isn't used that way anymore except by scientists.
Or how about acceleration? The definition,. both scientific and dictonary is the rate of change velocity with respect to time. That means positive, negative, or direction. So to stop your car quickly is to accelerate to a stop, as do you accelerate around turns, even if you keep your speed constant. However, to most people, acceleration means incrasing speed. They'll say deceleration if they mean a negative change in speed, and they ignore the direction component.
So while hacker might technically mean someone who is a master at working with computers in some respect, the common usage is someone who is a master at working with computers, and uses that knowledge for mischief. It's just something we have to deal with. You cannot control a live language, it will take directions, regardless of what is formally defined.
Language changes. The meanings of words change over time as they get popularised, and perverted by popular media. Gay meant "to be happy" a few decades ago, and refers exclusively to homosexuality today. Sure, one can use it in its older meaning, but you will confuse 90% of young Americans.
But when does one decide that "gay" means homosexual as well as happy? I will suggest that it is when the majority of people understand it that way. This is an uncontroversial opinion - if everyone believes a word means a particular thing, and the dictionaries define it that way, then that word does mean that thing. The word has become part of the laguage.
So coming back to our word of controversy, the "hacker" nomen, if we were to conduct a survey amongst the people in the world who acually believe they know the meaning of the word, we will find that 100% understand it to mean a person who breaks into computer systems. Of these 100%, perhaps 80% will exclusively give it that meaning, and the remaining 20% (the slashdot editors included), will admit that it has a dual meaning. A small percentage will insist that it has a single meaning - a computer programmer, but are aware that others understand it differently.
Of course, my statistics come from a whole lot of nothing, but they are logically representative. I'm sure other numbers as espoused by other people will be similar.
It is established that most people understand a hacker to be a cracker(slashdot meaning). The interesting twist is that the people who believe the hacker to be a cracker, will mostly believe a cracker to be a biscuit! And these people constitute the vast majority of the internet saavy.
There is no doubt that these words have dual meanings, but if we were to fall back to formal definations, we will see that the dictionaries exclusively define a cracker to be a biscuit, and may attribute a dual meaning to the word hacker. There is no formal defination for cracker that says it to have the same meaning as the populist "hacker" word. As such, we have only one formal fallback for the computer intruder - the word "hacker".
I think it is time that the programmers and slashdot editors accepted it - the hacker is the bad guy, and it is almost impossible that you will be able to change this defination. Give it up, the masses have spoken.
A hacker hacks into computer systems
A cracker is a type of biscuit
Israel is quite clearly different, but that does not mean that it is not worth looking at. Quite the reverse.
I doubt that Israel leads the world in number of attacks, but it is certainly leading in a particular type of attack - infrastructure warfare.
There has been an ongoing fight between Israelis and Palestinians for several years. The Palestinians certainly have one advantage here, Israel is a comparatively 'target rich' environment. Also the Israeli military periodically shuts down the West bank and there is nothing much to do inside except go on the Internet.
Thats not to say that the Israeli gangs are completely reactive. There is plenty of nastiness to go arround.
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