Forbes Offers a Sympathetic Portrayal of Hackers

selain03 sends us to Forbes for a surprisingly tolerant article on the recent Defcon. The reporter spoke to several of the event organizers and faithfully conveyed their characterization of the community as motivated by curiosity about technology. The article quotes a Department of Defense cybercrime guy: "Run-of-the-mill individual hackers are just noise as we try to focus on the real problem. We have to investigate every threat, but we're often dealing with ankle biters." A refreshing perspective to read in the mainstream media.

Re:Hackers and Crackers

[someone1234]

Hacker originally meant anyone who dabbles with ANY code. Not necessarily bypassing security, and not necessarily on someone elses computer, and not necessarily without consent.

Re:About Forbes

[Animats]

May be it is just me but I find Forbes to be like women's "Cosmo" magazine for dumb guys and wannabes.

Forbes went downhill after Malcom Forbes Sr. died. Forbes Magazine used to do some hard-hitting investigative reporting. Malcom Forbes Sr's attitude was "Go ahead, sue me for libel. I'm a billionare". They've gone soft since the son took over.

Business Week, which used to be the cheering section for big business, has improved a bit.

It's not clear what will happen to the Wall Street Journal under Murdoch's ownership, but it's not looking good. The WSJ has gone downhill in the last few years, anyway. The fundamental problem is that its classic functions, stock charts and major stock-related events, are all on line now. Nobody on Wall Street needs to read the Wall Street Journal; anything that affects trading was on their Bloomberg long before.

Re:The world is not fair...

[LordLucless]

Sydney Morning Herald, one of Australia's largest newspapers, had a fairly pro-Def Con article about it too. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/08/04/11856481 97448.html [smh.com.au]

Re:Hackers and Crackers

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, no. Being a hacker has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to break into somebody's computer, be it for fun, profit, or whatever else.

Being a hacker has everything to do with having talent at and taking delight in learning how large, complicated but internally consistent systems work and then using that knowledge to solve problems, overcome limitations and make improvements. A hacker is somebody who instinctively wants to take things - most often computer systems/programs - apart, tinker with them, put them back together again and in doing so learn something, so that they can do really clever things with that knowledge later: and who gets off on doing all of this.

Hackers existed before most computers were connected to any other computers to break into.