Hackers. Crackers. Script Kiddies. And all the media disinformation to result after John Markoff chased ratings by vilifying Kevin ‘The Condor‘ David Mitnick in the New York Times. So what’s what and why the big deal?
Hackers are good guys. Hackers are not only the guys that play with networks and dig for information that different entities try to withhold from the public [not trade secrets but secret agendas.] Torvalds, Stallman, Raymond and Wozniak are only some of those great thinkers that have made such a serious impact to life through technology that we’re only beginning to feel it ripple through - and we’ll keep doing so. As a term, it is not even limited to technology - the act of hacking is, of itself, an expression of one’s passion and skills, in any field, by putting together things that have relatively little to do with one another and coming up with a great solution to some problem. It’s about thinking inside, outside and without the box at the same time.
Crackers are usually malevolent hackers looking after some financial gain, political outcome or some other form of material gratification. Some of these guys are incredibly smart and the only distinction between them and hackers is the former group’s lack of ethics. In most popular [i.e. non-technologically oriented] media, these guys make up for anywhere between 80% to 100% of all ‘hacker’ mislabelling. They are also, more often than not, backed by various crime syndicates and occasionally by governments.[Historically, crackers have been the ones to remove copy-protection from commercial software. They are not equivalent to nowadays' crackers in that they do not seek any form of material gratification; the Macintosh scene - the oldest one still existing - is now using 'kracker' to label these people as a means to differentiate from the malevolent kinds.]
The not-so-smart crackers usually blend in with the skiddie crowd. This is made up of your wannabe-hackers that have a very limited understanding of technology but, through sheer stupidity and a desire to impress, try to create havoc, break into systems and steal passwords. These guys make up for another large percentile of the ‘hacker’ reports and - to the real-deal hackers - is by far the most offensive misappropriation of the term. These guys are peons, spammers for mafia-backed cracker outfits at best and societal parasites on average.
Hackers do break the law. There is, a lot of times, a great deal of confusion about their motives to do so and many argue that these are only poor attempts to defend the actions of one groups while deriding another. To this, each must make their own decisions. Some hacktivist groups need to push the envelope to get a message across - part of their actions, in themselves, are illegal without being immoral. Some say revolutionaries, others say terrorists, as it usually goes. At large, hackers break rules where these rules restrict their freedoms yet they do not, willfully, attempt to cause damage to anything or anyone. If Boeing thinks they’re losing $xM over some system break-in, that’s because they want to scare the media into doing more of ‘the Markoff’. They usually have a hard time proving this in court.
Why is this of any importance? After all, a rose by any other name… Plus, labels are bad, right, they restrict our understanding of people and place prejudice on groups where none is warranted. So we should strip away all labels and deal with facts. Yes, we should. But the way I see it, it’s worse to so blatantly mislabel groups of people than to, at least, partially misrepresent the individuals because they all get lumped under one big badge. And, as always, this damage comes to real hackers, not crackers or script kiddies, so the good guys suffer. It’s as if, as a [global, if you want] society we begin to stiffle innovation and deride intelligence by stigmatizing those that show it the most. Nobel Prize Winners don’t do what they do because of the [possibility of the] title, but it sure as heck feels nice to be awarded that distinction. If every second grader or terrorist leader were awarded same [for Peace or, new category, Mass Destruction] than the reverse would be true. While being a ‘hacker’ is not the same as being a Nobel Prize Winner, the comparison still holds.
It’s about respect, recognition and communication.
