------------------------------ From: Toxic Shock Subject: Another view of hacking Date: Sat, 06 Oct 90 03:04:57 EDT ******************************************************************** *** CuD #2.06: File 4 of 5: Another View of Hacking *** ******************************************************************** {The Toxic Shock group forwarded the following over to us--moderators.} The Evil That Hackers Do ------------------------ "I am a hacker." If I ever told that to anyone, it would immediately be assumed that I am a malicious, vandalising, thieving, pseudo-terrorist out to take over the computers of the world for personal gain or quite possibly to glean some morbid satisfaction from deleting megs upon megs of valuable data. Excrement of an uncastrated male bovine. "I am associated with the computer underground." If I ever told that to anyone, there would be a flash flood of foolish associations in that person's mind between myself and The Mafia, with Saddam Hussein, Syria, Libya, Abu Nidal, and who knows what else. More excrement of an uncastrated male bovine. Almost universally, among the ignorant majority, we hackers are considered to be dangerous thugs whose sole purpose in life is to cause as much damage as we can in as little time as possible to the largest number of people. Need I repeat my picturesque opinion? Sure, there are those little kiddies (mental and physical) who call themselves "hackers" and fit the above descriptions. There are also people who call themselves "human beings" that rape, murder, cheat, lie and steal every few minutes (or is it seconds, now?). Does that mean that all "human beings" should then be placed in prison? Perhaps the term "hacker" has become a misnomer, but for my purposes in this file, I will use that term to describe the way I view us hackers. A hacker is always two things: curious and bored. The boredom of a hacker is spawned by a society whose educational system is designed mainly to get X number of students through the schools with the average scores of X on tests; tests whose hardest challenge is to maintain consciousness throughout the taking thereof. There is no challenge in balancing the same binomial equations over and over and over again. There is no challenge is learning to print your name on a screen in BASIC, or PASCAL for that matter. There is no challenge in being spoonfed such little bits of information as to make it almost not worth one's while to even bother continuing education. The lack of challenge, the minute bits of knowledge actually given to us, is like a stake through our hearts. We are curious...So intensely curious that we border on being nosy...They teach us NOTHING in schools. What is passed off as education is nothing more than learning by rote. They pound the same things into our heads, the things we learned the first time they pounded it, and they pound and they pound, as if trying to knock our thirst for knowledge right out of our heads! We HAVE to be curious because we want to LEARN! Colleges take three semesters to cover material that should take only three WEEKS! We cannot depend on our educational system to quench our thirst, to satisfy our need for more and more information! We are addicted to information and knowledge, and our drugs are withheld from us. We are forced to seek our precious information and knowledge elsewhere. We have to find challenge somewhere, somehow, or it tears our very souls apart. And we are, eventually, forced to enter someone's system... Why? Because the system is new, unknown. How does one get in? What can be found within? These are questions we can ask, with answers we must find for ourselves...Oh, so different from school already! Our boredom disappears as if it never existed. Our little spark of curiosity becomes a bonfire within our minds. We have an open challenge to our intellect, an opportunity to learn SOMEthing, and we cannot turn that challenge down. It doesn't happen like Wargames shows it. Oh no, it is so much different. The geek in the movie....he had it so easy. No real hackers would exist if it was that easy (perhaps therein lies the solution to the "problem"). No, we hack and hack at a system, like a man on a safari, clearing away the vines of the jungle with his machete, trying to forge ahead to a destination he cannot yet see. We keep on, torturing our brains and pounding our fingers on the keyboard until at last...oh at long, sweet last... we are in. We have already learned something...we know how to get into the system, we know what kind of security the system has. We should, by now, have a general idea how intelligent the operators of the system are or are not, and what kind of information might be found within. Something the nerd from Wargames could get into probably won't have any new AI techniques, or other such things that help us to better our own programming skills. And at this point, many people assume we would then proceed to copy everything we find and then trash the system so we could then sell the only remaining copy of the data to the highest bidder, preferably a foreign agent or the richest competitor of the company... It makes no sense. We thirst for knowledge and information, and then you can possibly think we are going to destroy that which is sacred to us? To take away someone else's chance to succeed in getting in as we did? To fuel an already terrible reputation and increase our chances of getting caught and thus have our lives and careers effectively ruined? Are you really THAT..DAMN..STUPID??? We value information as much as we value our systems, which is almost as much as we value our lives, if not more so. We would no more destroy data than we would chop off our own heads because we value our brains! Most, if not all, of us think information should be exchanged freely... If everyone is kept abreast of the newest technologies, techniques, what have you, then everyone can benefit...The more each of us knows, the fewer past mistakes we will repeat, the greater knowledge base we will have for future developments. Can you really believe that we are so hypocritical that we would SELL that which we demand the free exchange of? But, even as I type this, I begin to realize just why we are such a feared group of people... We are misunderstood by the majority. You cannot understand someone who is driven by the thirst for knowledge, not for money and power. You cannot understand someone who wants to learn, and to teach, instead of putting away more and more money into a bank account. You cannot understand someone who judges others by what they say, think, and do, rather than how they look or how large their income is. You cannot understand someone who wants to be honest and sharing, instead of lying, stealing, and cheating. You cannot understand us because we are different. Different in a society where conformity is the demanded norm. We seek to rise above the rest, and then to pull everyone else up to the same new heights. We seek to innovate, to invent. We, quite seriously, seek to boldly go where no one has gone before. We refuse to be herded like the sheep which make up this society. We choose to think for ourselves. We demand the respect of our individuality. And we are slandered and shunned, condemned without a trial, because of these things. We are misunderstood, misinterpreted, misrepresented. All because we simply want to learn. We simply want to increase the flow of information and knowledge, so that EVERYONE can learn and benefit. And that is the terrible, evil, malign thing that we truly are. Intelligent and inquisitive. Seeking improvement in the lot of all mankind. Seeking equality. Seeking respect for individual freedom. Oppression is our only reward....yet if it were not for people like us, all of you who wake up each day to an alarm clock, or drive to work in your fine new car after cutting on your security system, while drinking that cup of coffee you didn't have to get up to prepare, would still be living in a cave, somewhere near Africa, grunting and reproducing, eating the raw meat of some beast you hunted down with clubs, trying to ignore the cold that seeps in through the animal skins you wear, and wondering when some curious person with some intelligence, creativity, and ingenuity would come along and invent the wheel. *************************************************************************** >> END OF THIS FILE << ***************************************************************************