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eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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Punks Slashing Tires

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 11:00am on 2004-06-30

Most of y'all probably ought to have seen this already, but if as many of you as I think are like me and forget to check the LiveJournal status page when LJ starts acting odd, then you might have missed the nice poke the admins took at script-kiddies' egos. ([livejournal.com profile] silmaril had to point it out to me this morning.)

While I'd prefer that they reserved "hacker" for the creative programming enthusiasts in the hacker subculture as described in The Jargon File (aka The New Hacker's Dictionary) and used "cracker" for the folks who break in where they're not supposed to be, I must admit I'm sufficiently pleased with the analogy they used to cut them some slack this time.

At 5:27 am GMT on Wednesday, June 30th, A LiveJournal admin writes:

Many users are experiencing difficulty accessing the site right now, due to a flood of malicious traffic. Please note: it's not "hackers" taking us down. If hackers were people who hotwired cars to steal them, these people are just punks slashing tires with shiny knives they didn't even make. We're working with a number of people to get this stopped, including the FBI. We're very sorry for the inconvenience.

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There are 4 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] lothie.livejournal.com at 08:26am on 2004-06-30
Well, dunno -- I think of Nick Cage's character in Gone in 60 Seconds as a hacker. Many hackers have and do break into systems. It's WHY they do it that makes them, in my mind, a hacker or not. Hackers do it for the love of systems, like Memphis did it for the love of cars.

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siderea: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] siderea at 11:02am on 2004-06-30
Seconded.

I feel they used "hacker" correctly. Speaking as someone who, in the course of her MIT education.... Wait, what's the statute of limitations on B&E?
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mneme: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] mneme at 10:33am on 2004-06-30
I think their usage of "hacker" is correct, if incomplete -- people whose knowledge is good enough that they can root a system (via some method other than a rootkit, if you please) tend to be hackers; it's just that just as the kiddies launching DOS attacks aren't usually hackers, nor do all hackers generally engage in computer intrusion.
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zenlizard: Because the current occupation is fascist. (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] zenlizard at 10:52am on 2004-06-30
>We're working with a number of people to get this stopped, >including the FBI.

I like the way this sentence implies that they're working to get the FBI stopped.
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