Really, politics don't interest me very much at all. However, there are some issues that involve me, and that I want to discuss or fight.
[ News 1998-10-05: I just discovered the Hacker Anti-Defamation League, with exactly the goals I'm trying to reach here. ]
I want to fight the growing tendency to mix up the terms "hacker" and "cracker". As everyone agrees on, the media is to blame. For some reason, they associated "hack" and "hacking" with the criminal act to break into computers and possibly do some damage, disregarding everything else that those words do mean. It is true that in the past, someone apt in breaking into computers was called "password hacker". As everyone can understand, apparently with reporters being the great exception, this is a very specific kind of "hacker".
In defence against this singlemindedness from the media and everyone who listens to their words, hackers around the planet have very quickly come up with the term "cracker" to describe the criminal individuals that the media is really talking about.
Let me cite from RFC 1983 (FYI 18, "Internet Users' Glossary", G. Malkin, Xylogics, August 1996):
cracker
A cracker is an individual who attempts to access computer systems
without authorization. These individuals are often malicious, as
opposed to hackers, and have many means at their disposal for
breaking into a system. See also: hacker, Computer Emergency
Response Team, Trojan Horse, virus, worm.
[...]
hacker
A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the
internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in
particular. The term is often misused in a pejorative context,
where "cracker" would be the correct term. See also: cracker.
I encourage everyone to stand up against the misinformation that the media is feeding to all the CEO's, lawyers, other non-hackers and even young hackers (yup, I've heard young hackers refer to crackers as hackers. Scary).
It's very simple. Each time you see an article refering to crackers as hackers, write a letter to the reporter who was apparently misinformed.
Write politely! It helps a lot more with a helpfull explanation than a flame. A flame is likely to just be tossed away.
I keep a page with links to articles where the term "hacker" has been misused.
1999-09-09: It's with great surprise that I find an article (in Swedish, sorry) written by a major newspaper that doesn't mess things up and that is actually quite sensible!