Hackers, having started as toy railroad circuitry designers in the late fifties, are completely new people now. Once turned to computers, they became gods and devils. Nowadays holders and users of the World Wide Web hide their PCs under passwords when the keyword “hacker” is heard. When and how did this change take place? Why are we so frightened of Hacker The Mighty and The Elusive?
One of the legends says that hackers have changed under the influence of “crackers ” – the people who loved to talk on the phone at somebody else’s expense. Those people hooked up to any number and enjoyed the pleasure of telephone conversation, leaving the most fun – bills – for the victim. Another legend tells us that modern hackers were born when a new computer game concept was invented. Rules were very simple: two computer programs were fighting for the reign on the computer. Memory, disk – space and CPU time were the battlefield. The results of that game are two in number and are well known: hackers and computer viruses. One more story tells that the “new” hackers came to existence when two MIT students that attended the AI Lab found an error in a network program. They let people, responsible for the network, know but with no result. The offended wrote a code that completely paralyzed the network and only after that the error was fixed. By the way, those students founded The Motorola Company later.
Today, when the Internet has entered everyone’s house there’s no shield between a hacker and your PC. You can password yourself up, but then either hackers will crack your PC anyway or nobody will enter your site, because passwords kill accessibility. If your PC is easy to access no one can guarantee what’11 happen to your computer – hackers, you know them.
Monsters? Chimeras? Not at all! Every hacker is a human being and has soft spots: good food, pretty girls or boys (it happens both ways), classical music, hot chocolate at the fireplace, apple pie on Sunday. Hacker is first of all a connoisseur, a professional with no computer secret out of his experience. And what is the application for skills depends on him, God, and Holy Spirit.
2017-12-30