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Black hat down: What happened to the world’s most famous hackers?
Here’s an interesting little article by Sebastian Anthony from ExtremeTech.
Excerpt:
Hackers can be any shape, size, color, and creed, but they are all graced with a level of mental acuity that mere mortals simply do not possess. Physically, they are rarely exceptional. Philosophically and morally, they can vary from ultra-conservative to bleeding-heart liberal. Even by nature and nurture, there is no obvious way to discern whether someone will become a hacker or not.
But there is something that sets hackers apart from normal people. Hackers see things differently, and they tend to have a very different view of how the world and its constituent parts are put together. Instead of merely accepting something as true or workable or ideal, a hacker needs to know the why; a hacker needs to tear the construct apart until he can look upon the constituent parts and decide for himself how and why it works — or, as the case may be, why it doesn’t work.
Check it out. It’s a good read. 
Enjoy!
~Eric
1995 … Hackers, Zero Cool and Acid Burn … that was a fun movie albeit unrealistic in so many ways … and some very early acting for several who were in it.
Well written article over all.
Hate to see hackers lumped like that….yet again.
And hacking isn’t just technology, it’s everything. It’s life, everything in the hacker’s world whether it’s physical, mental, spiritual, technological, sociological, the planet
, etc., etc.
Another name for hackers could be builders, tinkerers. There would be no Internet or many other things without hackers.
Agreed. I was hacking stuff before computers were invented. I remember this little toy Diebold safe that I had as a child (it’s still on my dresser today – 45 years later). It had a little alarm in it, a mechanical bell, that would trip and ring when you opened the door on the safe. I hated that little bell alerting everyone around that I was opening my safe, so I hacked it. I used a paperclip to jam it in the off position. HA! Later I just removed the whole assembly. Now if you come over and crack my safe combo in an attempt to steal all my change in there, I won’t hear you do it.
I thought I was quite careful to not lump them together…! I explained what they were, and then proceeded to write about computer/network hackers.
Hello, Sebastian. Welcome to my little corner of the Internet.
Knowing LilBambi as I do, I doubt very seriously that she was criticizing your article in any way. She was just commenting, albeit slightly off topic, on the general negative usage of the word “hacker” these days (thanks to mainstream media). It was very well written, in my opinion; and it was obvious that you tried to separate the negative connotations from the piece.
Regards,
~Eric