[Asterisk-Dev] Is anyone thinking anymore?

[Kevin Walsh]

Greg Boehnlein [damin at nacs.net] wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, Steve Szmidt wrote:
> > Actually hacking is the activity of getting into and working inside a
> > computer, usually to fix it. However you can hack with criminal intent
> > and it's still hacking. Cracking came about as people who hacked but
> > did not want to be associated with the criminal activity, started
> > calling it cracking. Either one is correct, though one is more
> > descriptive, but less used. (This is something some people will start a
> > flame war over.) 
> > 
> > Then we got white, gray and black hats etc... Going too far off topic
> > though. 
> >
> Hacking is gaining unauthorized access to resources you aren't supposed
> to access. Used to mean computers, but it has been expanded to include
> hacking hardware or non-computerized systems.
> 
> Cracking means defeating the copy protection of a piece of software to
> allow duplication. Such as removing the DECCS encryption from a DVD so it
> can be copied. 
> 
I'm afraid you're all wrong on this way off-topic thread. :-)

Hacking is what hackers do to code.  Hackers are programmers.  I hack
code every day, so that makes me a hacker.

When cracker was caught and claimed to be "just a hacker", learning
how to code on a machine he couldn't possibly afford, the popular
press jumped on the term "hacker" as a neat buzzword.  The hijacking
of the word has never really gone away, which explains why I get weird
looks when I describe myself as a hacker to people who don't know any
better.

Now you get various security consultants, and other script kiddies
(with their multi-coloured hats) all claiming to be hackers.  This,
combined with misinformed individuals such as yourselves, means that
the hijackers of the word are unlikely to give it back to its rightful
owners any time soon.

>
> Such as removing the DECCS encryption from a DVD so it
> can be copied.
>
By the way, you can't remove "DECCS" encryption from a DVD, but you
can use DeCSS to read a DVD that was encoded using CSS. :-)

Again, way off-topic.

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