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Hackers and Heroes: A Tale of Tech Communities In Two Countries (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: "Hackers" — people who non-maliciously test the limits of technology — have a very different societal standing depending on the country they live in. To illustrate the concept, consider the history of hackers in the United States versus those in Germany. Both communities have their genesis with the telecom systems of the 1980's, when hackers were called Phone Phreakers and traded secrets on telephone system exploits. These groups were the earliest to test the security and vulnerability of the burgeoning Internet, but their paths diverged. Hackers in Germany formed political parties while in the US they were targeted by law enforcement. The result is two very different communities filled with highly skilled individuals, but one must fly under the radar while the other enjoys much wider open acceptance.
>> Hackers in Germany formed political parties while in the US they were targeted by law enforcement
Can we mod the article as +1 Funny? Hackers ARE also targeted by law enforcement in Deutschland...
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=german+ha...
I was involved in some of this...at least knew some of the people mentioned in teh summary, and this is crap. Why is slashdot trying to push politics into everything?
For a site full of nerds, there are a lot of dimwits here who don't understand how language works.
The meaning ascribed to words is directly controlled by the speakers at large of that language.
Y'all lost the fight over the word hacker. You start spewing 'cracker', nobody's going to take you seriously unless you're talking about Donald Trump.
Deal with it.
MIT Railroad Club?
Thomas Edison?
Probably Zog the Wheek Maker too.
Someone has lost a lot of history.
Infuriate left and right
The big difference tinks from previous generations didn't really have the capability (or at least weren't considered to) to substantially subvert existing power structures.
Now we are a point where a small group of people could have a devastating affect worldwide. Personal power has grown exponentially compared to expansive powers of money and influence.
Smarter people try to corral hackers to serve their own ends, while others simply play-out threat scenarios to their logical conclusion.
...Hacking away at code late at night.
You must be referring to "Crackers".
The youth these days!
when you can buy one?
In the US, tech wealth has lead to massive political power that Germany's CCC and other political groups can only dream of.
Networking as a computer function was more an elite educational project that had to be granted per seat access too. Vetting, an academic feel to well educated students ensured only the people with trust would be allowed near emerging, advanced networks.
To upset that trust would be to remove or risk the access granted after years of good grades and study. Security clearances also acted as top down academic gate keepers. The university could lose funding, grands and staff access to advance projects with never ending or questioned funding.
Staff looked after their own projects, status, gov grants and funding to ensure that many did not even know of advanced projects until mil/gov or commercial release decades later.
The Vietnam war also played its part in shaping US academic freedom and access to advanced gov funding computing projects. A lot of top US academia got a lot of funding as contractors for advanced networking, communications systems, global digital computer links in the 1960's to 1970's.
Random students, the press, political leaders did not get a look in on that emerging mil and gov data collection and networking.
The only private global network that was easy to access was the phone network.
This was a time when other very advanced nations still used paper index cards and had a few networked super computers.
ie the US was going to let the wider world discover the "internet" and global digital databases a decade or two later.
No US student was going to get to sit down, understand, play with and then write a paper on the US mil side of US academic networking.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This enormously influential book by Cliff Stoll pretty much set the negative perception of "Hackers" in the United States. Stoll exposed a Spy Ring loosely affiliated with... wait for it... The Chaos Computer Club, in the 1980's. "Wargames" was fiction of course, and everybody knew it. "The Cuckoo's Egg" scared the hell out of a lot of people.
Note that I am a "Hacker" from way back. The "Good" kind, and the University holds the Patents. It's the Lids, Kids, and Space Cadets that ruined the name.
You know the article's a crock when it garners only 21 (now 22) comments. Apathy FTW!
Hackers were not called Phreakers. Hackers were called hackers, which had nothing to do with malicious activities. It was the mainstream media that twisted the term because they didn't understand the difference between hacking, cracking and whatever the idiot script kiddies thought they were cutting and pasting at the time.... When I was starting out in Unix in the 80's you weren't allowed to call yourself a hacker unless someone who was a master of their craft called you that first. I'll never forget the first time that my mentor, a hacker working for Motorolla in Hong Kong introduced me at a conference in front of a large audience as a Unix Hacker. It was, and should still be a point of pride. Hacking is a method and philosophy of learning and problem solving that flattens hierarchies and cuts across disciplinary borders whose roots date back to the days of WWII project based weapons research and development.