Hackers, Good And Evil

11 Pages 2666 Words

a quick check with another station in Asia and as they speak the Internet traffic recovers from the incident as fast as it occurred. The team lightens up and feels good that they were able to catch it on time. This kind of anomaly is what the team most fears, an electronic Pearl Harbor (Hackers: TLC).
Over the past twenty years, our world has evolved into a more complex society and simultaneously people have been evolving as well (Himanen vii). There is an overall, new culture, new technology and different languages that conforms a digital community holding all kinds of people: pirates and thieves, delinquents and law enforcers, dreamers, heroes and villains. Even though they operate all over the world, their true home is cyberspace. “These diverse breed of people are known as hackers”(TLC).
Unfortunately, the press uses the term hacker incorrectly when describing illicit access on computers with malicious or criminal purpose. The Atlantic Magazine, Feb. 17, 2002 par. 1 “It has been widely noted that last week’s attack by hackers against the Internet sites Yahoo, Amazon…” and it continues, “the fact that hackers were able […] to cripple these major sites…” How can such important magazine permit such barbaric mistake? Many other important publications and periodicals follows the same mistake. “ Stopping hackers from malicious breaking into computer networks is often a game of cat and mouse”, “Every attack on a computer by a hacker leaves traces” said Paul Eng from ABC News.com.
Since the start of the computer era, the term hacker has been used to describe its pioneers, defining their motivation to explore in detail how computer systems and networks function. In the early sixties, small groups of Stanford and MIT’s programmers started to call themselves hackers. Interested only in analyzing systems and writing programming code, they never got involved in any criminal activities, malicious intents or in ...