Security News > 2003 > November > Re: Cracking the hacker underground
Forwarded from: Jason Scott Wow, where do you start. First of all, I don't know where Tippett is getting 1993 as the year that "Hacking" is last called "Tinkering with Computers" and that it was the last decade in which the term is completely blown over to a criminal and malicious definition. Certainly the deadly lexicon-killing triumvirate of Time, Newsweek and People had a hand in that from 1982 onward, with a major amount of "blame" being laid at the feet of the PR machine surrounding the release of the film "Wargames" in 1983. The "battle" over Hacking as a friendly vs. malicious term flares for years past 1983, but like everything else, it's not until massive amounts of speculative cash start pouring into the industry in the early 1990's that the battle starts to gain the interest of anyone media-wise. Until then, it's on the level of Qwerty vs. Dvorak, TCP/IP vs. ATM, 40 columns vs. 80 columns: a relatively small battle among a tiny group of folks waving their fists in the air. It's only later when it becomes something that's the province of moneymakers that you see this sort of issue be treated as if it's "serious", when really, on the scale of things, it is not. The rest of the article is crap-tacular number-make-up crap. 16 of 4,200 vulnerabilities in use last year? 900 hacking "groups"? Teams of 5-10 "hacker trackers" with 20-30 "personalities" apiece? Woo hoo, where's my checkbook, let me sign up today. Does this sort of blustering still work with companies? Is there something about this individual I don't know or understand? Is this a BBC reporter needing to make deadline and going for a classic one-source no-backup article?