Hackers: Under The Hood

jyre writes "ZDNet Australia has a special report that profiles and interviews five hackers over the next five days. Day 1: Raven Alder's page is up now (inludes photos). Day 2 will be Attrion.org creator, Jericho. Day 3: Adrian Lamo. Day 4: Kevin Mitnick and Day 5: L0phtCrack creator, Mudge."

Comments

Re:THOSE FUCKS ARE NOT HACKERS !!!

[BlackHawk-666]

You can find the real defintion of the words hackers and crackers at the jargon dictionary. Here's an excerpt for those who need to brush up on the meanin g of this word:

hacker n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a Unix hacker'. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence `password hacker', `network hacker'. The correct term for this sense is cracker.

There is no such thing as a "hacker"...Maybe.

[Mitleid]

I remember getting into it with a friend of mine back in high school about the fact that there weren't any "real" hackers. His argument (though not so eloquently spoken at the time) was that the term "hacker" was essentially a media creation, and something only used to get ratings. In other words, whenever someone was brought out into the media as a hacker, they instantly and graciously accepted all the attention, therefore making themselves quite the celebrity. At the time of the argument, I disagreed with him. But now, it doesn't seem to be anything less than the truth. I mean, you gotta think of where these people come from. All this attention is what they crave; getting caught to them is all part of the fun. They might profess themselves to be "liberators of information" or whatever the hell they want, but when it comes down to it they love having their face in the spotlight. It's been my belief that the "hackers" are the ones that NEVER get caught; they know sure as hell what they're doing is illegal and they DO NOT want to get nailed for it. The real "hackers" are the ones we'll never hear about. These folks, on the other hand, just see like people dying for attention. They rely on the uniformed, computer un-savy media and viewing public to place them on pedestals as computer geniuses, when in fact all they are doing is exploiting a few security flaws here and there.