October 9, 2024

"Hacking" Revisited

I wrote yesterday about the degradation of the term “hacking”. Today, the perfect illustration of my point turned up: a Hacker’s Hall of Fame published by The Learning Channel. It includes legitimate uber-programmers like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, along with computer criminals like Kevin Mitnick and Vladimir Levin. Putting those guys on the same list is an insult to Thompson and Ritchie.

Comments

  1. New Hacking Blog

    Ed Felten writes about the Freedom to Tinker, “the right of technologists and citizens to tinker with technological devices.” Anyone who has ever pulled something apart and tried, successfully or not, to put it back together understands the freedom Fel…

  2. Ack – look at the first entry:

    “Richard Stallman

    Handle: None (nothing to hide!)”

    Yeah, we’re all C@@L D@@DZ here … later, SDMIguy, from 1201man.

  3. This is real hacking 🙂

    http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/

  4. “War-Driving” suffers from the same stigma…

  5. the funny part is under their “lingo” section, they get the definition right…

  6. Chip Christian says

    Not to mention… I love John Perry Barlow,
    in all his guises, but under what twisted
    definition of hacker does he qualify?