Why it's a 'Summer of Hacking'

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2602854,00.html

By Joel Deane, ZDNN
July 12, 2000 6:41 PM PT

If you want an exercise in semantics, randomly ask five wired people
to define the term hacker.

Their answers will vary wildly, I guarantee. An old school techie may
insist a hacker is a black-belt computer programmer or engineer. A
belabored Webmaster may look upon the barbarian hordes trying to
stymie his site with denial-of-service attacks as hackers. An AOL user
may consider hackers to be Lex Luthor-like super criminals, such as
how Kevin Mitnick has been popularly portrayed. Law enforcement,
depending on its point of view, may consider hackers to be the proxies
of corporate spies and nefarious foreign governments or modem-enabled
gangsters. And a journalist, being a journalist, may throw up his or
her hands and say, "They're all of the above."

Whatever definition you chose, you're spoiling for a fight.

ZDNet News, for a number of reasons, and to the chagrin of some of our
readers, does not use the term "cracker" or "cracking" to refer to
illegal hacking activities. Instead, we call it hacking, or, depending
on the story and our access to a thesaurus, cybercrime, computer
crime, electronic theft and the like. Naturally, some devotees of old
school hacking are not amused by such muddying of the sacred waters;
as a writer and editor I've received more than one e-mail that, much
as an adult would to a dimwitted child, explained the difference
between hacking and cracking.

I appreciate the remedial e-mails, but, info-catholic that I am,
refuse to divide the hacking universe into good and bad, hacker and
cracker. Hacking, to me, is a broad church that can and does
incorporate everything from such alternative coding houses as the Cult
of the Dead Cow and the L0pht to the most juvenile of script kiddies.
It can be outside the law, but, more often, is a diverse
counterculture operating outside the tech mainstream.

Or is it?

During the next 16 days, at the apex of summer, thousands of people
will attend two of the world's biggest hacker cons, in New York and
Las Vegas. Starting Friday, H2K, 2600 Magazine's biannual shindig in
the Big Apple, will be a continental affair, with a sizeable European
contingent visiting from across the pond. At the end of the month, DEF
CON, the annual bacchanal in Vegas, will be, well, DEF CON (read:
utter chaos). And, sandwiched between H2K and DEF CON, there'll be the
Black Hat Briefings -- the corporate stepchild of DEF CON.

You'll find all kinds at those three gatherings. Corporate types with
surgically-implanted Nokias, script kiddies in Chekovian black
T-shirts, mild-mannered sys admins, a busload of evangelical feds,
more journalists than you'd see at a free buffet lunch and, maybe,
just maybe, a real old school hacker like Mudge. And expect H2K and
DEF CON, these supposedly alternative high-tech conferences, to gather
more mainstream media attention than just about any corporate show on
the calendar.

It's easy to see why hacker fests like DEF CON have galvanized the
media. They are simply the best conferences on the high-tech circuit
-- give me a choice between a Bill Gates demo of Windows 2000 and the
Back Orifice 2000 launch and I know where I'll be.

Invariably, important, if not core tech issues, are raised at these
supposedly alternative conferences. Issues -- such as digital privacy,
regulation of the Net, corporate responsibility for shoddy software,
and electronic piracy -- that are often shafted at product-focused
conferences. With that in mind, ZDNet News has launched Summer of
Hacking -- a special report in progress that will cover the hacking
culture in general and H2K, Black Hat and DEF CON in particular.

We could have called it Summer of Hacking and Cracking, but I'd miss
the e-mail.

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