Reply From: The Dark Tangent <dtangent@defcon.org>
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At 10:17 PM 5/29/98 -0600, you wrote:
>
> Editorial - Hacker Vs. Cracker, Revisited
>
> CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A., 1998 MAY 22 (Newsbytes) -- By Bob Woods,
>Newsbytes. If a person talks about or writes a news story regarding a
>hacker, one creates an image that is perpetuated in a Network Associates
>TV ad: the heavily tattooed, ratty looking cyberpunk who breaks into
>systems and posts proprietary information on the Internet for the same
>reason "why (I) pierce (my) tongue." The big problem, though, is that
>person is more accurately described as a "cracker," not a "hacker."
This stuff bugs me. A "cracker" is someone who cracks software protection
on software - else their would be no ware-rez groups. There were plenty
of crackers around before the IBM PC was even invented. I remember the
online debate to call evil hackers "Spiders" but then the WWW came along.
People were talking about "Spiders on the web", so people changed their
mind and kind of went with the current definition of a cracker being an
evil hacker. The problem is that all the lofty people debating the rename
of this term had never been a courier of the 0-day warez. USR wasn't
joking when it named its modems the courier.
I've got a solution. How about this:
We call a hacker a hacker.
We call this new "cracker" person a computer criminal.
We call software crackers a cracker.
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Received on Tue Jun 2 08:56:39 1998