Am I a hacker?

Do you want to become a hacker? Before you email me, read this entire essay, and then read my essay on how to become a hacker. Do NOT ask me for help in doing something illegal or immoral. I won't respond.

I used to call myself a hacker all the time. That was before the term was usurped by a different breed of people. Maybe I should back up and explain.

If you read Steven Levy's book, Hackers, it paints a picture of people who love and understand the technology they use. These are people who can "hack" together a solution to a problem with a soldering iron and a few paper clips. People who modify operating systems because they don't like the way they work. People who follow the "hacker ethic" that information should be free.

If that's a hacker, that's me.

I love the technology. I've designed ICs, written an operating system, created a programming language (well, sort of), toggled in machine language programs from front panel switches, written software in numerous programming languages, sysopped three BBSs (one of them my own), created a dozen web sites, and run sections of two different forums on CompuServe. Obviously, I love this stuff.

(Update 12/9/98 - I wrote a shareware game, too.)

The hacker ethic part applies, too. In high school, I managed to appropriate almost 200 student account passwords, which I gave to the administrator to convince her that security was bad. In college, I created a little underground programming group. We broke into the admin accounts on the school's computers, created our own accounts, scattered unauthorized games throughout the systems, and generally had fun. I never, however, damaged information, messed with school administrative data (e.g. grades), or broke into commercial (non-school) systems.

Other people, however, decided that the mere act of breaking into a computer system made you a hacker. Idiots with barely enough knowledge to turn on a computer could dig a password out of a garbage can, and the press would call them hackers. People would get wardialers and password crackers written by someone else, follow step-by-step instructions to run them, and the first time the program worked, they called themselves hackers.

I began to shudder at the term.

Then these self-proclaimed hackers (what we used to call "crackers") began doing more than just peeking around in systems. They began vandalizing the systems that they broke into. They deleted data. They sold data to foreign governments (see Cliff Stoll's book, The Cuckoo's Egg). They crashed systems. We're not talking about hacking your own system or playing with the school anymore. We're talking about criminals.

If those people are what you call a hacker, then I ain't one of them. If you call hackers people who love technology and have an understanding of how it works, then I'd be proud and pleased to be called a hacker.

You make the call.