Hi there, /me has his monthly "let's reclaim the word 'hacker'" drive Dnia wtorek, 7 stycznia 2014 23:15:52 Adam Back pisze:
On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 01:48:59PM -0800, coderman wrote:
Yes, annoying though that may be to those of us who were called hackers before that became a bad thing. But we're outnumbered thousands-to-one, and we're just not going to win that language war.
use the term "independent security researcher",
your legal counsel will thank you!
A cryptographically secure pseudonym would probably work even better. Weev didnt actually do anything wrong that I could see, by any sane interpretation of even something as egregious as CFAA and he's serving 41 months. A lawyer is a last resort, step #1 is not identifying yourself even for non-malicous research I suspect.
I draw different conclusion here -- people do not understand hackers (in the original, non-pejorative meaning of the term), and hence are afraid of anything "hacker-y". Weev went to jail not because he did something illegal, but because the jury was convinced he's an "evil hacker", and that they need to "send a signal". If we keep moving back, at some point we'll have nowhere to go. So instead, we should get people to understand and not be afraid. Show the value to the society (and there is a lot of value in hacking!), and always make clear distinction between hacking (which both Aaron and Weev had done quite a bit of, and I am not referring to their court cases and alleged transgressions) and committing crimes by means of a computer network or electronic device. As an added bonus, once we get to a point where everybody understands that crime is a crime, regardless of tools used in connection with it, we might finally get some *sane* laws around that topic -- instead of laws that make one get a smaller sentence if they steal stuff with a crowbar instead of downloading it via Teh Tubes. -- Pozdr rysiek