This emblem represents an agreement with the hacker ideal, and sympathy for the hacker community. First, let me clear some misconceptions. “Hacker” and “Cracker” are two different things. A Hacker fixes things (or invents entirely new things.) A Cracker breaks things. This is an attempt to set the record straight.
“Cracker” is an abbreviation for “CRiminal hACKER”, and those are the script kiddies, posers, wannabes, and know-nothings who make the rest of the community look bad. Most hackers—as in, the vast majority—are working toward the common good. For instance, this site is running on WordPress, a blogging platform written in PHP.
Both the WordPress software and the PHP language it’s written in are what’s known as Open Source releases, meaning the code is available to anyone for modifying and improving. My site is using a modified version of the WP software. Also, most Open Source programs are provided free-of-charge. A lot of Linux distributions and some UNIX distributions are released as free, Open Source operating systems, which make great alternatives to Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X.
But the point is this: the reason I embrace the hacker community is because I believe in the spirit of Open Source. This ideal is the belief—and some even say that anything other than this is borderline criminal—that all software should be universally accessible and modifiable. And not only program code, either. Matthew 10:8 says, “… Freely you have received, freely give.” We’ve been handed so much from the hackers of yesterday. It’s practically our duty to pass the legacy on.
The slogan for the GNU Project is “Free as in freedom”. There are lots of arguments within the hacker community about whether UNIX or Linux is better, or whether this license is better than that one. I’m not getting into that. I only intend to point out that the hacking community has brought us nearly every digital innovation we have today. The internet is, after all, run by *N*X machines.
There are two sides to the hacker ethic. The one I embrace is, “The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and computing resources wherever possible.” There is another side to hacking, however, and I’ve already touched on it.
That second “ethic” is, “The belief that system cracking for fun and exploration is ethically acceptable as long as the hacker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.” Okay, this is false on so many levels. Spam is unethical. Spyware is unethical. Fone Phreaking is unethical. For a person to assume that these types of activities are acceptable he must also possess an inherent lack of moral stability.
These two ethics are polar opposites, and can’t possibly coexist. That’s the reason for the forceful segregation between the hacker community and the more well-known crackers. In fact, the latter term has come to be known as an insult. One could argue, however, that there is a place for this second ethic, and it lies in conjunction with the Japanese Samurai code of ethics.
A Samurai in this sense is one who is skilled in the methods of breaking into a system, but chooses not to do so for ethical reasons. He is loyal to his employer, opting to leave his tactics in the sheath. And these people have at times been hired by a company to actually break into that company’s system, showing them where the flaws are. Instances such as these are the only context in which the second Hacker Ethic holds water.
So, am I a hacker? No. Primarily, I’m not skilled enough to hold that title. And one never assigns himself that title; it is always given to him through someone else in the community. I’m not even a member of the community, aside from what hacking I do on my website software. However, I agree with the spirit of true hacking: collective progress for the common good. That is why I display the Hacker Emblem.
~Jonathan
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