That long and growing list of hackers who end up getting hired as security experts notwithstanding.

I hacked phones in high school, using hammond organ tones and the famous Cap’n Crunch whistle until I realized that having perfect pitch meant one could also just whistle ‘em up once you learned to whistle one tone while humming another, also learned how to phone Central Offices in other cities and get open international lines, but I outgrew the passion after turnin’ 18 — and knowing full well that a black guy would be viewed as public enemy number one and the white kids got the pass. You know the drill.

I guess we show them that as long as they don’t do any real damage, we’ll give ‘em a pass.

The hackers break in and show where the holes are, thus they can be plugged.

Presumably there will be a day when there will be no more such holes.

The CERT exists for this very reason.

My fear is the crackers in places like Russia, Romania, Belaruse, etc. that steal information. Last week it was reported that a ring of these crackers stoled over 40 Million credit card numbers and info. The good guy hackers are the ones that tracked them down.

bdunbar, I admit that for the longest time I made no distinction between the two camps but I have learned otherwise after getting to know someone who used to do cracking and is now completely on the hacking side of things.

And I do agree with the idea of harsh treatment for them. If not executions, then at the very least they should be treated just as if they broke into someone’s home.

A hacker is guy or gal who delights in knowing how a system works. As a result they can’t help but try and make them work better and faster.

When I put a sniffer on a web server to see what kind and how much traffic it is sending to an application server, it’s because I want to know why the serves and applications are doing what they do – I’m hacking. When I craft a shell script to download my company’s phone book from it’s web site to my local computer so I can use quicker – I’m hacking.

A cracker is a guy or gal who breaks into computers for malicious reasons. A hacker might crack, but never with malicious intent.

Note that both groups share tools – but so do other professions. A mechanic uses a pry-bar to wedge open things, a thief uses one to break open a window.