From: Bob Stratton <strat@intercon.com>

Hi all...

I was at the latter part of the Washington 2600 meeting, feel free to ask me questions if you want.

By the way, today's article about the event was yet another example of the media promoting hysteria about technologically competent people. The whole article was of the "A hacker is someone who breaks into systems" model. It makes me sick, and I think that the crypto community (the part NOT employed by DoD) is next for this sort of misrepresentation.

Pardon, but isn't 2600 magazine a magazine by crackers for crackers? 2600 is named after frequency of the disconnect tone used in blue boxes, isn't it? What I'm afraid of is that I will get confused with one of them -- I'm not sure they are necessarily being misrepresented. The tragedies come when idiots raid Steve Jackson Games and sieze copies of "Cyberpunk" instead of shutting down the infants breaking into TRW. Blurring the distinction between hackers and crackers is the last thing we need. Perry