http://www.techweb.com/wire/news/1997/09/0915hackers1.html (09/15/97; 9:00 a.m. EDT) By Douglas Hayward, TechWire With every public release of the newest browsers from Microsoft and Netscape Communications, hackers around the world scurry to their PCs, route out bugs, and report them to the vendors. Simultaneously, network administrators around the world are shoring up their defenses, hoping to keep some of these very same hackers out of their systems. Hackers: Are they public servants or malicious criminals? The answer may depend on which side of the PC you're sitting. "Hacking is a state of mind, not just the activity of breaking into computer systems," says Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch former hacker who now helps manage an ISP. "It can mean sitting behind a computer all night to see if you can make a clever program to perform some useful or useless function." Not any more. During the past few years, hacking has irreversibly become equated with criminality and malicious damage to IS systems. Hackers have been mythologized, demonized, and blamed for a spectacular range of cybercrimes and invasions of privacy. Some hackers argue that there's a distinction between harmful and harmless hacking. The latter is the cyber equivalent of zero-impact camping on someone else's land, and is sometimes known as "look-see" hacking. Hackers say that unauthorized entry to a network doesn't have to involve harming that network or stealing intellectual property. "Assuming we use the traditional definition of hackers as people who love to explore the hidden depths of computing systems, we can distinguish between harmful and harmless hacking," argues Andrew Rathmell, deputy director of the International Center for Security Analysis at London University. "The dividing line comes when hackers disrupt other people's uses of computing systems, in which cases they may be doing harm to others. But while harm is easy to define at one extreme -- causing physical or logical damage to systems, denying service, and so on -- it is harder to define at other levels," Rathmell says. "For example, does making [unauthorized] use of a network's unused computing power harm that network?" Part 2: Should hacking be considered a civil or criminal offense? [See site for rest of article...] -o- Subscribe: mail majordomot_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Dimensional Communications (www.dim.com)
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