310 DEAR HACKER

310 DEAR HACKER

We have a riddle for you: Who cares?! Get with it, please. For some reason, none of the people complaining about this page seem capable of grasping the fact that we had nothing to do with hacking it. We just reported it. You were looking at other hacked pages and enjoying them so obviously you have some sense as to how the collection is set up. Or do you believe different rules should apply when a religious site gets hacked?

Dear 2600:

I was thinking about subscribing, but I won’t because: 1) Why should I have to pay a premium to subscribe? (It’s $4.50 an issue, which works out to $18 per year at the bookstore.) 2) You get all of my money up front when I subscribe—you can never be sure that I will buy all four issues so that should be worth something to you in the form of a discount. 3) How do I know that you will be around for the next four issues? You can do better.

Sandy You must be a real fun person to hang around with.

Dear 2600: The computer underground should not be self regulating. The recent

joint statement by various groups, including 2600, condemning the Legion of the Underground’s actions sickened me. LoU’s members should be applauded for the personal risks they took to highlight an issue that they felt strongly about. Instead, they have been met with derision. Putting your name to that statement was a disservice to the hacking community matched only by your publishing of Justin Peterson’s article. How you can claim the moral high ground in Kevin’s campaign and then give credibility to somebody who assisted the FBI in putting him in prison is beyond me.

OUR BIGGEST FANS

The sad fact is that if we don’t watch over ourselves, somebody else will do it for us. It would have been irresponsible to remain silent while people did something destructive in the name of hackers. The members of LoU themselves realized this and acted responsibly to repair the damage. We have no regrets at all on how this came about. As for printing Agent Steal’s article, we’ve printed pieces from the other side of the fence before and we most likely will again. It is not up to us to judge the moral character of our writers before we print their material. But we cer- tainly didn’t try to hide it. As it happens, that article proved to be very informative and useful. We should point out, though, that your logic is colliding with itself. You don’t want us to condemn things in the community that we feel are wrong but you don’t want us to print things from people who you’ve already condemned as wrong. That is a Class A fallacy.

Dear 2600: I’ve been viewing your site and your mag for quite some time now,

and something is troubling me. You often claim, rightly so, that the media has mangled the word hacker to mean a criminal who operates with technology. The correct term for this is “cracked.” Yet you refer to the cracked pages on your website as “hacked.” What’s with this? Are you along the same lines as the media and need the yellow journalistic values to attract viewers, or what?

Matt Lesko We knew this was going to come up eventually. Over the years, there has been

a movement to create a new word that basically means “evil hacker.” This was a misguided effort on the part of some early hackers who resented the categoriza- tion with current day hackers, whose rebellious attitude and agenda sometimes rubbed them the wrong way. (The parallels of early and current hackers are all too often lost on both groups.) The word they came up with, after much debate, was “cracker.” Brilliant. (Previous attempts at this same thing included such words as “worm,” “phracker,” and “hackerphreak.”) The main problem with creating such

a word is that it basically transfers whatever problems existed with the first word over to the second one. But it’s worse because now all of a sudden you have a word that only has negative connotations without a clear-cut definition of what the negative connotations are. This is easily provable by talking to people who define