Who is a hacker? Explain what is meant by “the hacker ethic” with the help of a contemporary example.

Hacker is a term that has been used to mean a variety of different things in computing. Depending on the context, the term could refer to a person in any one of several distinct (but not completely disjoint) communities and subcultures:

• A community of enthusiast computer programmers and systems designers, originated in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This community is notable for launching the free software movement. The World Wide Web and the Internet itself are also hacker artifacts. The Request for Comments RFC 1392 amplifies this meaning as "[a] person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular."
• People committed to circumvention of computer security. This primarily concerns unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication networks such as the Internet (Black hats), but also includes those who debug or fix security problems (White hats), and the morally ambiguous Grey hats. See Hacker (computer security).

Today, mainstream usage of “hacker” mostly refers to computer criminals, due to the mass media usage of the word since the 1980s. This includes what hacker slang calls “script kiddies,” people breaking into computers using programs written by others, with very little knowledge about the way they work. This usage has become so predominant that the general public is unaware that different meanings exist. While the self-designation of hobbyists as hackers is acknowledged by all three kinds of hackers, and the computer security hackers accept all uses of the word, people from the programmer subculture consider the computer intrusion related usage incorrect, and emphasize the difference between the two by calling to security breakers “crackers” (analogous to a safecracker).


Gary McKinnon (born 10 February 1966) is a Scottish systems administrator and hacker who has been accused of what one US prosecutor claims is the "biggest military computer hack of all time," although McKinnon himself states that he was merely looking for evidence of free energy suppression and a cover-up of UFO activity and other technologies potentially useful to the public. After a series of legal proceedings in England, McKinnon is currently awaiting extradition to the United States.

Hacker is a term that has been used to mean a variety of different things in computing. Depending on the context, the term could refer to a person in any one of several distinct (but not completely disjoint) communities and subcultures:

• A community of enthusiast computer programmers and systems designers, originated in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This community is notable for launching the free software movement. The World Wide Web and the Internet itself are also hacker artifacts. The Request for Comments RFC 1392 amplifies this meaning as "[a] person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular." See Hacker (programmer subculture).
• The hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s (e.g. the Homebrew Computer Club) and on software (computer games, software cracking, the demoscene) in the 1980s/1990s. The community included Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates and created the personal computing industry. See Hacker (hobbyist).
• People committed to circumvention of computer security. This primarily concerns unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication networks such as the Internet (Black hats), but also includes those who debug or fix security problems (White hats), and the morally ambiguous Grey hats. See Hacker (computer security).

Today, mainstream usage of “hacker” mostly refers to computer criminals, due to the mass media usage of the word since the 1980s. This includes what hacker slang calls “script kiddies,” people breaking into computers using programs written by others, with very little knowledge about the way they work. This usage has become so predominant that the general public is unaware that different meanings exist. While the self-designation of hobbyists as hackers is acknowledged by all three kinds of hackers, and the computer security hackers accept all uses of the word, people from the programmer subculture consider the computer intrusion related usage incorrect, and emphasize the difference between the two by calling to security breakers “crackers” (analogous to a safecracker).

McKinnon is accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers over a 13-month period between February 2001 and March 2002, using the name 'Solo'. The computer networks he is accused of hacking include networks owned by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defense, and the US Air Force.
The US authorities claim he deleted critical files from operating systems, which shut down the US Army’s Military District of Washington network of 2,000 computers for 24 hours, as well as deleting US Navy Weapons logs, rendering a naval base's network of 300 computers inoperable after the September 11th terrorist attacks. McKinnon is also accused of copying data, account files and passwords onto his own computer. US authorities claim the cost of tracking and correcting the problems he caused was over $700,000.
McKinnon has denied causing any damage, arguing that, in his quest for UFO-related material, he accessed open, unsecured machines with no passwords and no firewalls and that he left countless notes pointing out their many security failings. He disputes the damage and the financial loss claimed by the US as concocted in order to create a dollar amount justifying an extraditable offence. While not admitting that it constituted evidence of destruction, McKinnon did admit leaving a threat on one computer:

US foreign policy is akin to Government-sponsored terrorism these days … It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand down on September 11 last year … I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels …

US authorities claim that McKinnon is trying to downplay his own actions. A senior military officer at the Pentagon told The Sunday Telegraph: "US policy is to fight these attacks as strongly as possible. As a result of Mr McKinnon's actions, we suffered serious damage. This was not some harmless incident. He did very serious and deliberate damage to military and Nasa computers and left silly and anti-America messages. All the evidence was that someone was staging a very serious attack on US computer systems.


HACKER ETHICS :

Hacker work is, in the words of the hacker Linus Torvalds, "interesting, exciting, and joyous", "intrinsically interesting and challenging" and "goes beyond the realm of surviving or of economic life" . That these features are intrinsic to the work, rather than being a subjective attitude on the part of the individual, is demonstrated by a comment from an employee of Microsoft. The company competes with the work of hackers, often attacking them, and so charged an employee with the task of investigating the competitiveness of the hackers' work. Without any bias in favour of hackers, he wrote that when hacking on their software, "the feeling was exhilarating and addictive" (OSI, 1998).
It is important to note that when hackers talk about intrinsic motivation they almost always use adjectives like "fun", "passionate", "joyous" and "entertaining". In contemporary society we maintain a distinction between work and leisure, and are acutely aware of when work erodes the time we usually dedicate to leisure. To hackers, the distinction is a non sequitor. Hacking on some challenging code is every bit as entertaining as playing a game of football or reading a book, albeit in a different way. Not all play is "something wasteful [or] frivolous", and can be "the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous person"; to hack "is to dedicate yourself to realizing your full human potential; to take an essentially active, rather than passive stance towards your environment; and to be constantly guided in this by your sense of fulfilment (sic), meaning and satisfaction" .
This guiding sense is apparent in hackers' approach to work management, and specifically in how they decide what to work on. The dominant factor, according to most theorists, is the desire to "scratch and itch", i.e. to satisfy a need . This need may be a functional one where the hacker needs a particular bit of software, or it may be a personal one where the hacker wants to try his hand at a particular technique. Most hacker work is entered into voluntarily because it is "intellectually stimulating", because it "improves skills" and because of the code's "work functionality" . If this is the case, then the adjectives given by Torvalds and the Microsoft employee should not be thought of as the sole motivations for work, nor solely as pleasant byproducts, but rather as factors that affect how a hackers prefer to scratch their itches.
This orientation around the activity and its inherent worth gives rise to a meritocratic form of organisation. According to Levy, "Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position." If a hacker wants to pursue a line of work, they simply start hacking and gain approval from other hackers when their work shows merit. Access to computing equipment and advice from fellow hackers isn't restricted by bureaucracy or unjust social arrangements . Of course meritocracies place demanding barriers to entry insofar as they require a certain level of skill and aptitude. They also fail to emphasise other aspects of personality or capability that we might find positive such as race and gender, which may be "deeply felt" by some individuals . This problem can be overcome simply by acknowledging the positive aspects of equal opportunities, and of social duties that help the less able; these suggestions are coherent with the hackers' work ethic.
Weizenbaum, an early critic of hackers, suggested that hackers work "without definite purpose". Unable to set long-term goals or analyse information in a teleological context, he claimed that hackers are aimless and disembodied. Compulsively scratching itches, Weizenbaum's hacker is like a hyperactive child who may engage passionately in frenzied activity without ever achieving anything. This is a culture that he describes as "instrumental rationality", the result of the belief that if some task is technically feasible then it is worth performing . For a work ethic to be truly fulfilling, truly meaningful, he suggests that it must account for some kind of worthwhile aim towards which the hackers' activity is directed. However, as Hannemyr (1999) has pointed out, hackers create products not only for the pleasure of the work but also for the utility and beauty of the products themselves. Hackers value "flexibility, tailorability, modularity and openendedness to facilitate on-going experimentation". The activity of creation may not be as aimless as Weizenbaum suggests, however one can still object that these aims are limited. Creating for the sake of abstract features in the product could still be characterised as a form of instrumental rationality, without wider personal or social goals such as the creation of tools that enhance personal life quality or that meet a pressing social need.
Wiezenbaum could reply that such a creative act would simply fetishise the role of information and activities that create it, without good reason to value them as abstract entities. He could further point out that such an attitude would have no objection to creating harmful products, such as software that facilitates anonymous online transfer of child pornography, if the creation of the product was particularly enjoyable and if the code was deemed to be beautiful. This lack of focus on outcome leads to an ambuguity in the work ethic: is it the case that hackers value characteristics inherent to the work and the code they create, or do they also account for the use value of the products? This ambiguity makes it difficult to say, given that they have a limited amount of time during which to hack, how they should spend it.
The hackers' work ethic, insofar as it concentrates on how one should work and why it should be motivating, invites the charge of self-indulgence. It argues for an autonomy in work that facilitates personal fulfilment without clarifying this ambiguity of values, and without accounting for social obligations that might reasonably abridge this autonomy. The Hacker Ethic does, however, encapsulate social obligations in part (c) mentioned above. These obligations can be most clearly studied in the free software movement, an applied example of the hackers' social ethic.
 


R Surender Naik
CH09B071