Having been involved in the community for most of my life, my very first thought was "oh that's cool he's one of us" and then I remembered that historically hackers have been phenomenally bad people to give any kind of real power to.
Yeah, no hackers from the 80s and 90s ever had any bad intents. /sarcasm
(I was a part of that scene as well).
Once the Internet became widely available there wasn't the same need for a culture to being able to do that (at least in theory). Who is considered a hacker therefor changes from people engaged in hacker culture to people who for example do information security. You can to some extent go to university, never talk to anyone and come out of there being considered a hacker. While previously being a hacker would be quite distinct from academia (though there would of course be overlap among people). As the point was that you were doing something different from what was already established. Whether that was coding, security or community.
I wouldn't personally judge someone who was consider a nefarious hacker when hackers were more of a subculture, as most of the activities would be considered relatively mundane today and there motivations often benign. I would judge someone for running a dark market, distributing malware or even just run an unethical data business today however.
As a further tangent, I do think it is curious how most people (myself included) thought that the plot of the movie "Hackers" was a bit ridiculous. But then 20 years later Maersk gets hit by ransomware.
I'm saying: there's the Steven Levy notion of "hackers", about exploration and getting extra slots on time-sharing computers and ordering sweet-and-sour bitter melon, and there's the Markoff and Hafner notion, about breaking into DEC for source code and owning up a sizable portion of the NSFnet Internet.
cDc is from the Markoff/Hafner side of "hackerdom".
(That's not a moral argument; there were good people among the Markoff/Hafner-type hackers, and holy shit were some of the white hats in the mid-1990s complete pricks).
The argument isn't about whether Beto was a part of hacker culture at all. Clearly, he was. It just wasn't the hacker culture the OP was referring to.
> The meaning connoted by cDc is the the one from the movie Wargames
cDc engaged in much more than run-of-the-mill systems exploits. They produced a lot of literature and overall espoused hacker culture as an inclusive one. I'd be very interested to hear what each of them think about how broadly the term "hacker" can be applied, and I'm willing to bet they don't all share the same view.
> The argument isn't about whether Beto was a part of hacker culture at all. Clearly, he was. It just wasn't the hacker culture the OP was referring to.
You can't do that. You can't say "both definitions are valid" and then bristle up when someone doesn't use your preferred definition.
For what it's worth, and not apropos whatever that debate is, I'm very comfortable with how I'm characterizing cDc and what cDc members would in general think about what I'm saying, albeit that the Boston ones would claim that I am not giving them enough credit for also going to weird Boston nerd culture places like the MIT hackers did.
What debate exactly do you think I'm making up? This entire discussion stems from a disagreement about what qualifies as a "hacker", which is all that I have addressed.
What a monster!
Can confirm. For me in the 80s it was about the writing and the friends, some of which I'm lucky to say I still have. Indulging in some phreaking when needed was about the extent of our "misuse" of technology.
The knowledge that hackers have is immensely powerful. Hackers know how to root boxes, take down networks, pick locks, impersonate people, infiltrate virtually any secure area, falsify records, circumvent protection devices... They can steal from banks, screw with the phone system... hell, they can hack into cars on the highway. The ones with government jobs can screw with entire countries' telecom systems, disable satellites, jam telecommunications, spoof and reroute individual communications, and cause rolling waves of disruption to the power grid across entire regions of a country. Hackers have the knowledge to systematically destabilize virtually all the infrastructure of our civilization.
But a small handful of people do dumb shit and suddenly all hackers aren't trustworthy? The fact that the world still operates at all is testament to the fact that they aren't abusing their power.
I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I'm a hacker, and I'd make a terrible president. I might make an excelled trusted advisor on matters of my expertise, but that doesn't mean I'd be a good president.
So much so we have seen tech enthusiasts fawn over hacking groups from time to time and ignore less desirable behavior ... until we realize in the end they're just not what we want them / imagine them to be.
I still like to think of there being some idealistic hackers one day that will change the world for the better, but I recognize they're still going to be just, people.
I'm confused... Doesn't that also apply to career lawmakers? Is there any statistically meaningful data to suggest it's better to have a lawyer or a judge than a hacker in a position of power?
As opposed to the paragons of virtue who wield power now.
Do you have any examples?
And most of what happens to people in this community occurs behind their backs.
"slowly amassed", perhaps?