Swartz, Weev & radical libertarian lexicon (Re: Jacob Appelbaum in Germany - Aaron Swartz)

[James A. Donald]

On 2014-01-08 04:51, rysiek wrote:
> Neither does it fit 1. -- he did not break any kind of security systems,
> cracked passwords, etc., he just put a laptop on a network that had access to
> these documents and downloaded the documents. That's all.

You are perhaps saying it frequently requires no skill, other than fraud 
or burglary, to muck up someone else's network.  Indeed it does not.

Nonetheless, mucking up someone else's network by such simple means is 
hacking in the first meaning of the word, hacking as an aggressive or 
criminal act.

Because hacking from a distance requires skill, particularly if a 
network has some halfway competent defenses, the word "hack" has also 
come to mean some impressively clever stuff done with computers, but the 
original meaning was simply bad stuff done by computer - and, in the 
early days of the internet, it was possible to do bad stuff by computer 
with very little skill.

And even today, it is possible to do bad stuff by computer with very 
little skill if one physically accesses a network that is not intended 
or expected to be accessed by outsiders.