Let's cut out this elitist "crackers" crap altogether. It's just a little bit too PlaySkool, a little bit too "_I'm_ not a third grader! I'm a _fourth grader_!" The people who put so much energy into advertising how they're different tend not to know what the fuck they're talking about, in my experience.

Well, I don't know about this guy, but there's something similar that occurred to me during the hackers conference. Some of the people on this list heard me express it badly, and I wanted to clarify. We always used to distinguish hackers from crackers. But cracking reveals the cracks in a way that nothing else does. It makes them real, sometimes laughably or painfully so. Electronic privacy is currently a joke. It's bad. You need to know what kinds of attacks you're trying to defend against. I used to think those arguments were rationalizations. Now I'm glad there are people who know this stuff, who are actually doing it. Some of "them" are on what I think of as the good side, and "we" need that kind of knowledge, if only as an occasional splash of cold water, a spur (to switch metaphorical, er, horses in mid, um, stream). -fnerd quote me fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham)