I used to be a staunch defender of the right of a person to "hack" under the broadest possible set of definitions for the term "hacker".

"Hacker": 1. A DIY person. 2. An unlicensed repairperson. 3. A person with the needed skills for a situation. 4. An umbrella term conglomerate with the skills of computer programming or scripting, phreaking, cracking, and a host of other skills involving physics, radio usage, metallurgy, anything under the sun, when those skills are applied in a unique fashion.

and then there's the popular definition:

"Hacker" (2) 1. A computer criminal: identity thief, password cracker, malware author.

And the debate is SO old. When I came on the scene in 1992, the debate was SO old.

DIY / engineering people wanted to reserve the term "hacker" with a presumed innocence, so they could call themselves and their friends "hackers".

And, basically, get away with it. Which I add, because the popular term is nothing like the term preferred by the DIY / engineering crowd who enjoy the use of the term.

In popular culture, "hacker" is a purely criminal term. And that includes law enforcement culture and the rest of the legal system.

Fighting the negative might seem like a jolly ride, but consider what you're ultimately doing to yourself by applying that label.

Now, in my life, personally, I stopped using the term for myself after, I dunno, high school? Thereabouts? Because, what's the point of applying the term, or of putting up the fight? Where in the spirit of DIY / engineering, does it say "oh, you should incriminate yourself in front of others, probably for the benefit of nothing more than looking cool and some desperately hoped-for but unlikely street cred."

Then, when I got to college, I found that telling people I'm pursuing a degree in computer engineering led to this statement (or a derivation thereof): "oh, you're a hacker!"

And no, they didn't mean "you're part of the ultra-hip, super-cool DIY / engineering squad of citizens who can do some McGyver shit and who stands up for causes like the misappropriations of terms by mainstream culture! Far out!"

They meant, "oh, wow, I bet you'd like if it I called you a 'hacker' right now, you fucking geek. God, if I was half as smart as you, I think I'd already be in prison. Here's hoping that you'll take the bait and open your stupid cocksucker like a real jabroni."

Or, sometimes, if they're really fucking stupid, they meant, "wow, that Hacking movie I watched last night is STILL kicking in with all this caffeine I can't stop ingesting. I hate my course of study and it bores the shit out of me, so I'll glorify this person's field of study and excite myself vicariously through that exchange, using my imagery from the movie I watched that also excited the hell out of my excitable, stimulant-addled ass. I'll be killing two birds with one frantic stone, I think! Maybe the person really IS a hacker! At the very least, I'll be able to suspend disbelief in Hollywood for a few more hours, perhaps even days!"

In either case, because you're not talking to a fellow member of the small segment of the population who fit in the DIY / Engineer / verbally jousting defender of the proper use and innocence of the term "hacker" / geek crowd, you're getting one of those two social situations, above. Take your pick.

Now, that's just in the context of running into social peers in the amazing world of "higher learning". Let's see what happens when an officer of the law, or a lawyer, or a judge, or a prosecutor, or a victim of computer crime asks if you're a hacker. What they really mean is:

"Are you one of these space-age freaks who's abusing their high priesthood secret knowledge of how the magical computer works, in order to redirect our credit, steal our identities, crack our passwords, read our email, threaten and or blackmail us, watch our laptop webcams, blow up our smart toasters, and to otherwise exploit our weaknesses?"

And the thing is, THAT is the majority of the population. And the other thing is, the peer group scenario outlined previously is also the majority of your peer group, unless you ONLY socialize with DIY / engineering geeks, in which case you're a lost cause, just ... just go hide in the shame of your cheetos belly and KY-besmirched keyboard already. And don't worry about what happens to you. Somebody else will worry about that, for you.

Do you catch my drift? If you're the only one keeping up the fight, and if the fight is meant to be a social fight, then forget it. You're not making any progress. NOBODY has made any progress with this "the innocence of the hackers" battle, ever. It has been downhill, a losing battle the entire fucking time. So give it up.

So, my conclusion on the matter of the arrested hacker is, GOOD. You don't do anything positive for yourself by knowingly associating yourself with the undeniably negative image of hacking that is cast on the term by the mainstream -- meaning, everybody else in the population of your country, except for you and a few denizens of the local IHOP.

As a 2600 fan, that's hard for me to admit, but only a tiny, tiny little bit hard, in a place in my heart that should be drowned like an unwanted puppy, to spare the rest of the litter (the litter of puppies being my heart).

So much so, that last year when I was in an Anthropology course, and we were doing the first week classroom meet and greet, and we had to say what we are going to college for, I got to enjoy two moments of social ostrocisation: being the only person in the classroom who said "computer engineering" (or anything with the word "computer" or with the word "engineering" for that matter), and then the teacher saying out loud, in front of the class: "OH... SO... YOU'RE A HACKER?"

To which I responded with rather frightened silence, which opportunity the teacher took to imply that my silence was admission of guilt.

So you see, it's already TOO MAINSTREAM. You can't WIN that sort of battle against that sort of cultural force.

I wrote to the teacher and explain to her, explicitly, that my silence was due to being shocked and appalled, and that she must never refer to me as a hacker in public again or that we would have to speak with the dean of her department.

I didn't get any more crude "hacker" jokes. But the point is, the battle is already lost. You can't argue without any credibility and credibility is already lost as soon as you admit, socially, that you "do computer stuff". There have been no exciting movies about programming computers, building your own directional antenna, or encrypting codes by hand for sending over HAM radio. There never will be. Society will never see you in the exciting light that you see yourself in.

So grow up! Be a REAL hacker. Stop using society's term for you and use something more specific to your favorite fields of study or areas of expertise. If you want to use several, go ahead, bore the shit out of the other person by listing all the cockamamie things you do that sound like Latin to them. But there's just no real reason to call yourself a "hacker".

I don't know how many other different ways I can say it, so I'm done.

This: http://www.explodingrabbit.com/

Didn't face nearly as much opposition. It was up for months and Nintendo never really gave a care. Only when the author wanted to sell a version did Nintendo strongly suggest that he invent his own characters. But you can still play Crossover for free.

Nintendo seems picky and choosy about this stuff. Sort of like Atari!

I want to get one just for that reason. Sitting down and spending hours tweaking the settings of an XPadder setup to get a controller working "hrnnn kinda sorta" with a game meant for mouse and keyboard rarely pays off the way it feels like it should.

A controller like this takes care of all that.

Whoever that guy is, he should be laughed down by the serious IT and security world for his stupid "input".

If your security solution requires that you pass a law making it illegal to break your security, then it's not a solution.

lol

the comments on this are outrageously hilarious.

yours almost makes me feel like i'm in irc right now

i now wish i hadn't joined in with what little i have to say based on what little i know or care about silk road or any of this

otherwise these mod points would be modding parent up

can it be coincidence that both "characters" have advanced chemistry backgrounds specializing in the formation of crystals

can it be coincidence that the bust comes right on the heels of the federal government almost seemingly without sanity declaring bitcoin "real currency"

can it be coincidence that all of this comes just as the show "breaking bad" is coming to an end?

there's coincidence, then there's synchronicity.

(this)

hilarious, lmao in fact

where did my ass go! whoops!

Dem Darn Feds! *rioutous laughter*

will the judge, at sentencing, have to have a computer monitor displaying the current value of bitcoin, and gavel it in and speak the value aloud, JUST at that moment?

or will they press charges on his 3.6 million dollars of bitcoin even after it's worth a wooden nickle?

It seems to me that three counts of conspiracy can be thrown out of court or at worse will not represent a very firm sentencing.

I don't think this guy should get a hard sentence any way. He's just a merchant.

This is more like an experiment for the FBI to see if it's possible to seize this new form of asset, and to see how valuable it is once they've seized it.

Recall, that bitcoin was recently upgraded to the designation "actual money". VERY recently.

It's all basically in tandem. Hard to have pressed charges on him or his friends if they're just wildly playing russian roulette with a bunch of digital thingamabobber whatsits.

Entirely different if it fetched the grand master 3.2 million dollars of actually now-recognized "real currency".

i bet these hornets are more of a worry in canada than in the united states.

no matter where they hide in the united states, unless it's death valley, people are going to run into them and report the fact that bugs the size of their head have been spotted.

if these go into canada and can survive there, they can easily find plenty of space to reproduce for many generations unnoticed and undisturbed. by the time they're encountered they'll be numerous.

i imagine they will move into the giant beaver dam that's up there. and eat all the beavers.

It's total bullshit to blame a handful of relatively anonymous California grade school teachers for the failure of an Apple security feature. You might as well go all the way and blame them for several "immutable laws" of information and security.

Including the costs of a keyboard, a stand, a tiny piece of (potentially unreliable solid state) flash to make up for the "32GB" model really coming with 16GB of remaning capacity, the price point compares to a fairly decent, new, fully featured laptop.

That doesn't include the cost of realistically including a large, cheap flatscreen monitor to view without having to slouch.

I can't understand somebody like yourself who embraces new technological gimmicks without thought. The tablet isn't "the new PC", yet. It has seen barely a year of proving ground and so far hasn't been exactly the major success the uber-geek insists it is. There are, meanwhile, still people who purchase towers. My room mate is steadily convincing a friend to buy a laptop instead of a tower, but the friend still lives in the 90's and doesn't understand that the laptop is about as customizable as, realistically speaking, his beloved tower.

I had mentally excluded microSD from the criteria of "removable media" because when I showed her what a microSD looks like, she said "forget it". So, sorry chum but sometimes size does matter. And I, for one, have to agree with her. I don't think anybody should be reliant on something so important being so small, let alone the profit-minded producers of tablets. There are numerous practical reasons why not to consider microSD for anything but cameras, ipods, and other tiny devices that you don't really intend to remove it from. And a customer's size preferences aside, I would never try to sell somebody a computer meant for serious, daily use where the sole removable media was some sort of chip. As you well know, when you purchase new software in a store, you don't receive it on SD cards.

And you could suggest that software be obtained from online, but not everybody is in "the cloud" at this point in time, especially not certain customers. Especially not people who ask questions about their right to the software. When I told this particular customer (my room mate) that the Office 365 she was so interested in was a 2-year subscription, she abruptly lost interest. Telling her that she could conveniently download it online over her slow, overpriced internet did nothing to bring her back to M$'s weird new idea.

Well, perhaps you're one of those stodgy types who shakes their fist and insists that the latest, fastest, and smallest devices not only have to be adopted, but will be adopted. But I look around and I still see CDs and DVDs are the de-facto main media in use everywhere and that they obviously will be so for probably another decade.

Meanwhile, the computer she chooses has to be able to burn CDs for the purpose of business presentations at her workplace. Despite anything else, that is a requirement.

God, you look like such an ass, now, telling somebody else not to be so presumptuous when that's exactly what you're doing.

As it turned out, the roomie's bad experience with purchasing her first ever brand-new computer online left a sour taste in her mouth about the whole idea of buying a computer online. It's hard to reason with superstition. And, since I'm not somebody she knows very well, I wasn't able to convince her to try any other online avenue. She was firmly set on the brick and mortar route, and was too impatient for me to call around to the almost a dozen local computer stores looking for a deal. So off we went to Best Buy. I was at least put in charge of selecting the computer based on the price window, and for roughly $60 more than the notebook she sent back I managed to nearly triple the purchased processor speed, I believe double the hard drive capacity, increase the screen width by roughly 1.50 times, and add certain amenities like HDMI, USB 3.0, chip reader, the latest multi optical writer standard, etc. She was surprised was you can get by not trying to save the most money in an attempt to obtain something that looks similar to what you already have and assuming that newer means faster. She was quite surprised that there's an entire world of hitherto meaningless statistics and other data to take into consideration. Ah, the bane of computer illiteracy faced with the need to spend money wisely.

Meanwhile, she espied the large tablets, the newborn technology I was warning her about. She is dead set on purchasing basically a large flatscreen to port around with her. I asked her if she intended to affix it to a large CNC, blueprint copy, elevator directory, or other machine that would benefit from having such a console as opposed to physical push-buttons. She didn't get it.

I don't see any purpose in the attempt to market touchscreen tablets, essentially overgrown iPods, to everyone in lieur of productivity. It's just profit-seeking behaviour, much like how you can easily get a thorough response on a forum like Slashdot by mentioning that you have money to spend.

Isn't this what the physicists hoping to "test" whether or not the universe is just a huge simulation, were saying would "prove" that theorem?