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Forbes Offers a Sympathetic Portrayal of Hackers
selain03 sends us to Forbes for a surprisingly tolerant article on the recent Defcon. The reporter spoke to several of the event organizers and faithfully conveyed their characterization of the community as motivated by curiosity about technology. The article quotes a Department of Defense cybercrime guy: "Run-of-the-mill individual hackers are just noise as we try to focus on the real problem. We have to investigate every threat, but we're often dealing with ankle biters." A refreshing perspective to read in the mainstream media.
As shown in the past, it's often the very very simple hacks like finding an unprotected machine and installing sub7 on it that brings down the giants. A high level of technical experience is NOT a prereq. for a serious hack
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Who better to design safes than professional thieves?
The game.
Some of the Defcon guys thought it would be hilarious to hack a major media outlet and place a sympathetic story about themselves on it. Mission accomplished!
A Forbes article that isn't hyper-sensationalist and pro-status-quo?
What, was Daniel Lyons too busy impersonating Steve Jobs to do the piece?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Because that doesn't sound like a sitcom or anything...
You're forgetting pwn-ography never makes it to mainstream tele.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Why didn't the more interesting story about the evil undercover reporter who got pwned made it to the mainstream media? There's no justice in this world for hackers... Won't somebody think of the hackers? ;_;
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
But, of all the places, why Forbes? Couldn't they have picked some respectable outlet?
Maybe Forbes was the only site they had any luck with, since, having alienated techies so thoroughly, they couldn't hire a competent webadmin.
All it has is 3 things: (1) Articles that state the obvious (2) Shit load of Rolex and Lexus ads (3) Those top 10 lists like 'top 10 affordable vacation getaways' where their definition of affordable vacation is something that costs between $30k and $100k.
Sometimes it is almost like they are taunting the reader, saying "look, drool and weep".
Even in this article, their 'discovery' is that serious hackers are curious about technology, script-kiddies are just a nuisance.
Color me surpised...
Hacker originally meant anyone who dabbles with ANY code. Not necessarily bypassing security, and not necessarily on someone elses computer, and not necessarily without consent.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Umm, no. Being a hacker has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to break into somebody's computer, be it for fun, profit, or whatever else.
Being a hacker has everything to do with having talent at and taking delight in learning how large, complicated but internally consistent systems work and then using that knowledge to solve problems, overcome limitations and make improvements. A hacker is somebody who instinctively wants to take things - most often computer systems/programs - apart, tinker with them, put them back together again and in doing so learn something, so that they can do really clever things with that knowledge later: and who gets off on doing all of this.
Hackers existed before most computers were connected to any other computers to break into.
I've often heard what you call a 'hacker' called a 'white hat hacker' and what you call a 'cracker' called a 'black hat hacker'.
When I was just starting learning security stuff circa '95-'97 the term 'cracker' referred (in most stuff I read and by people I talked to at the time) to people who modified binaries on their own system to do things they weren't supposed to (such as a no cd crack or adding new features to a binary - it didn't have to be illegal), while hacking usually referred to gaining unauthorized access to anything, be it local or over network.
It all depends on what crowd you gained your definitions of hacking and cracking from. I prefer these definitions because they seem to have more precision. You can hack for multiple reasons (good or bad, white or black hat), you can crack for multiple reasons (good or bad, white or black hat).
A company I worked for had a lot of cracked copies of their software circulating the Internet and I spent some of my time for them reverse engineering and preventing one of their more mysterious and unsolved cracks - I'd call that white hat cracking.
Uh no.
Way back in the day, Hackers were and still are the folks creating the scripts.
"script kiddies" were little wanker wannabes that logged into an IRC chat or usenet session
and eavesdropped, glommed, or begged scripts out of real programmers. They then ran these
scripts thinking they were so 133t! This may have changed, but if you're actually writing or modifying
code call yourself anything other than a script kiddie.
Most of these so called script kiddies I've met couldn't code themselves out of a paper bag.
But they were so awesome when they stole someone else's script, broke into the local phone system, got caught and went to juvie.
It's not breaking into things, it's figuring how things work.
Mod me redundant, because this should be repeated 10 times down the list by the time I post.