Forwarded from: edison <edisonat_private> Thomas, Thanks for the comments. I'm inclined to agree. Back in my day, 'cracking' was bypassing software security on the Apple ][ or the Commodore 64. 'Hacking' was exploring computers and/or networks (such as they were back then). There were hackers that were purely motivated by curiosity and a desire to learn how things work. And there were hackers who were power hungry or out just for bragging rights. And back then, you had to at least be in the former group at one point to ooze into the second group, since there weren't ready-made hacking tools available for download. The cracking culture has retained the name it assumed in the 80's. Just find archives of Fravia's Page of Reverse Engineering or www.astalavista.com/library/. Anyone remember Bill Landreth? He wrote "Out of the Inner Circle" in 1985. His handle was "The Cracker", but he always referred to the art as hacking. Hacking is hacking, but like Mr. Greene stated, there are good hackers and there are bad hackers. I just wish I could put "Hacker" on my resume - it sounds soooo much sexier than "Penetration Tester". I dunno. Maybe I'm just and old fogie. I don't call the stuff coming out of the radio these days 'music' either. -edison <- my _hacker_ handle On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, InfoSec News wrote: > Forwarded from: Thomas C. Greene <tcgreeneat_private> > > i've always been dissatisfied with the vagueness of both terms, > hacking and cracking. neither says anything about motivation. since > i used to write about this stuff a great deal, i came up with a scheme > that makes sense - at least to me. i'd like to share it for what it's > worth. to give my own column some consistency, i decided that both > words should be neutral in terms of motive. that is, hacker or > cracker is not a synonym for 'computer criminal', but malicious hacker > or malicious cracker might be. [...] - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomoat_private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
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