[lug] Hacker story in the Denver Post

[Patty Laushman]

> Lori Reed wrote:
>
>> ... Have you ever seen a journalist for a major non-technical publication 
>> use the term "cracker" correctly?
>
> The article defined "cracker" thusly:
>
> "...a "cracker," or a hacker with criminal motives,..."
>
> That's long been my basic understanding of the word.
>
> Or are you referring to good old southern white boys? :)


LOL!  No, I mean he really used it correctly. The definition, from 
www.dictionary.com, which I know all of you wil enjoy, is thus:

cracker
<jargon> An individual who attempts to gain unauthorised access to a 
computer system. These individuals are often malicious and have many means 
at their disposal for breaking into a system. The term was coined ca. 1985 
by hackers in defence against journalistic misuse of "hacker". An earlier 
attempt to establish "worm" in this sense around 1981--82 on Usenet was 
largely a failure.

Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion against the theft 
and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. The neologism "cracker" in this 
sense may have been influenced not so much by the term "safe-cracker" as by 
the non-jargon term "cracker", which in Middle English meant an obnoxious 
person (e.g., "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears / With this 
abundance of superfluous breath?" -- Shakespeare's King John, Act II, Scene 
I) and in modern colloquial American English survives as a barely gentler 
synonym for "white trash".

While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some playful 
cracking and knows many of the basic techniques, anyone past larval stage is 
expected to have outgrown the desire to do so except for immediate practical 
reasons (for example, if it's necessary to get around some security in order 
to get some work done).

Contrary to widespread myth, cracking does not usually involve some 
mysterious leap of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the 
dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit 
common weaknesses in the security of target systems. Accordingly, most 
crackers are only mediocre hackers.

Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than the 
mundane reader misled by sensationalistic journalism might expect. Crackers 
tend to
gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little overlap 
with the huge, open hacker poly-culture; though crackers often like to 
describe *themselves* as hackers, most true hackers consider them a separate 
and lower form of life, little better than virus writers. Ethical 
considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who can't imagine a more 
interesting way to play with their computers than breaking into someone 
else's has to be pretty losing.

See also Computer Emergency Response Team, dark-side, hacker, hacker ethic, 
phreaking, samurai, Trojan Horse.

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Patty Laushman
President
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The Uptime Group, Inc.
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