My Latest Assault

First off, let me say that anyone who understands the reference in the title is clearly reading too much of the right websites.

Second of all, I’ve decided to declare a moratorium on the word hacker, or—better yet—non-technologically oriented people talking about hackers, hacker culture, or anything remotely related to the word hack that doesn’t involve a mustachioed explorer with a machete.

What set me off, you may ask? My dear friends, you can find the offending article here, scribed by one Jane M. Von Bergen. If you’re lucky enough to get the newspaper that published this piece of… writing, you can see something that the readers on the web cannot: the background for the article, which appears to be HTML markup interspersed with Lorem Ipsum—no doubt the hacker coding to which the article refers.

The public image of what a hacker actually is is already distorted enough, Ms. Bergen—why must you cloud it further? I will give her credit for trying to shift the general perception, despite the fact that her own perception is equally misguided. From the article: The hackers, by the way, are the good guys. The bad boys are known as crackers. Ms. Bergen, perhaps you mean to say white hats and black hats, which are generally the terms used to differentiate between those who attempt to breach a system’s security to help and those who do it for their own gain. If you must include the word hacker, a better way to put it might be ethical hacker and unethical hacker.

The article doesn’t stop there, though. The most egregious paragraphs are displayed below:

Most of the hacking coding is available on the Internet. The code patterns are called exploits, and they have signatures, which make them detectable by security people who know what to monitor.

Also available are the defensive lines of coding and, no surprise, there are easy ways around the defensive systems.

It really amounts to a diabolical chess game, with each side fully aware of the other’s moves.

So why isn’t everything hacked every day?

The first two paragraphs are funny—if nonsensical—the third is irrelevant, and the fourth disturbing. I assume that in the first two paragraphs, by coding she just means code, but in any event one does not necessarily need to write any code in order to breach a system’s security. Upon reading the fourth paragraph, however, I paused and wondered how such a question even occurred to her. Asking why everything isn’t hacked all the time is equivalent to asking that if burglars have the means to easily open a locked door, why every house broken isn’t into every day.

Read on further and discover the author’s lack of understanding of what a computer is (You plug one end into the keyboard and another into a computer processing unit - the big box next to most computers.). This is also disturbing in this day and age. I can understand that not everyone will understand how a computer functions, but certainly they shouldn’t be the ones writing about computer-related topics.

But perhaps most disturbing of all is the thought that people will be picking up the paper and reading this article—and treating the fallacies contained within as fact.