[NetBehaviour] How To Become A Hacker.
marc
marc.garrett at furtherfield.org
Fri Dec 22 16:09:28 CET 2006
How To Become A Hacker.
By Eric Steven Raymond.
There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and
networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the
first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments.
The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built
the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today.
Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are
part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in
it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.
The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture.
There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like
electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels
of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits
elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the
hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker
works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills
and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared
culture that originated the term ‘hacker’.
There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but
aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of
breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers
call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real
hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very
bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a
hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive
engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled
into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real
hackers no end.
The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.
If you want to be a hacker, keep reading. If you want to be a cracker,
go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the
slammer after finding out you aren't as smart as you think you are. And
that's all I'm going to say about crackers.
more...
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
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