Easy big fella. You may be in violation of the patriot act with that
admission!
What are your coordinates.....
Joe
Michael Redler wrote:
Good point Chandan.
I guess I'm a hacker too.
Here's
the 'Hacker' entry in Eric Raymond's The Hackers Dictionary (aka the
jargon file):
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html
Having been deep in that world for a while now, I see today's hacker
community as a highly heterogeneous community with a variety of views
revolving around knowledge, creativity, freedom, and individual rights
(primarily as these relate to software and systems, but hey, "freedom"
frequently looks similar in different contexts, and "bio-diesel hacker"
should be a very honorable description for someone making bio-diesel
and thus defending one's freedom to not use fossil fuel).
Notice that the sense of "malicious meddler" for "hacker" has been
deprecated (obsolete) and demoted to 8th place in the THD entry for
hacker (but retained for historical reasons). So the rogue elements
are not really part of the hacker community. THD is maintained by
"hackers", so this can be considered a self-fulfilling assessment. Our
definition of the hacker community can be as loose as we want, but as
long as the basic elements of knowledge, creativity, freedom, and
individual rights are included in it, it should be very hard to find
similarities between the post-modern hacker community with a beast like
the CIA. If anyone tries to throttle the internet to death, the hacker
community will create workarounds quickly and without fail (an instance
of the second superpower defending itself against unprovoked
aggression). Hakuna matata.
Chandan
Michael Redler wrote:
...
"Would you include the hacker community in the
Second Superpower? (Or do they all work for the CIA these days?)"
I find it extremely interesting how a society which is
developing on an entirely different plane (and without any political
hierarchy) can so closely resemble one which we are so accustomed to in
the physical world.
The hacker community has taken on behaviors which also
resemble those of the CIA (for example). Both act on a certain
ideology, are motivated largely by a resistance to be controlled (i.e.
"sticking it to the 'man'"), feel a sense of community and pride. Last
but not least, the intelligence community of every superpower is
somewhat troubled by various rogue elements. I don't want to portray
hackers as people I admire - only as people who show familiar patterns
of behavior when looked at in groups.
One of my favorite examples is how they collectively express
their position on Microsoft and during the earlier days of the
Internet, how so many government and large corporations were the main
targets.
Mike
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