Famous hackers

Hardware hackers appeared as a strongly distinctive subtype of each other in every subculture. As an example, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) was named as the most influential association of hackers in Germany.

Although security issues are the major field of employment and politics, industry, press, data protection and banking for this, he coined the phrase: A hacker is someone who tries to find a way how to prepare a toast and coffee. In the early days it was the strongest cultural connection in the development of the home computer scene.

Similarities and differences

The hackers at MIT were just such technology enthusiasts who with the hackers of the early home computer scene on the West Coast of the United States, differed fundamentally in their attitudes and goals. While the former were shaped by their background and education (they were educated elite), they usually had no interest in improving their knowledge to pass on to the “ordinary people”, this was entirely different for the latter.

John T. Draper, was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club and had been active in the environment even before the founding, and Steve Wozniak, who was working together prior to his membership with Draper in the phreaking environment and had with him Blue-built boxes.

Two particular sub-cultures have sometimes conflicting views on the question of who can legitimately be called a hacker: There is a moral dividing line between the “good” inquisitive exploration within the academic hacker culture and the “bad,” selfish evasion charges, as set out within the culture of phreaking.

However, in Levy’s “Hackers – Heroes of the Computer Revolution” there is ample evidence that this dividing line in such clarity does not exist. The research and application process was rather dubious practices by the then hackers in both cultures. Nevertheless, they are primarily among the followers of the academic hacker culture, hackers who want to see themselves distanced from the phreaks.

The academic hacker culture differs from the computer security hacker culture in that the academic community of hackers created a new and improved existing infrastructure in the foreground, especially within their own software environment.

Computer security is not a relevant issue. A basic knowledge on computer security, however, is also common in the academic community of hackers. For example, Ken Thompson noted during his Turing Award speech in 1983, that it is possible to install in the UNIX login program a back door, so that while the normal password is accepted, a general password is also needed. He called this the Trojan horse.

Thompson argued that one of the C compilers for concealing the whole could change when translating the login program, that this backdoor automatically added. The C compiler is itself a program that is compiled with a compiler, where you could then insert this compiler change automatically when compiling the compiler itself, without such manipulation even from the compiler source code.

It would thus only be available in translated compilers and so would translate purely into programs passed without a trace in the source code base.

Thompson however, clearly distanced himself from the activities of the computer security hackers: “I would like to criticize the press in its handling of the ‘hackers’, The 414 gang, the Dalton gang, etc. The acts performed by these kids are vandalism at best and probably trespass and theft at worst. I have watched kids testifying before Congress. It is clear that they are completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts.”

Another prominent case, the overlap between these two cultures is Robert T. Morris, belonged to the hacker community at the “AI” host at MIT, but in spite of the Morris Worm said The Jargon File hence called him “a true hacker who blundered” (”a real hacker, has failed”). The academic hacker community sees the secondary ring of security mechanisms as legitimate if it is done to remove concrete barriers in the actual work.

In special forms it is a possible expression of imaginative intellectual experimentation. Nevertheless, the supporters of the academic subculture tended to negatively evaluate the preoccupation with security holes and to distance themselves from it.

Usually, they call people who do this as crackers and reject any definition of the term hacker in principle, including an emphasis on activities relating to the circumvention of security mechanisms.

The computer security hacker culture is different than the other as they are generally not as strict as the two subcultures. They restrict the use of the term cracker to their categories the script kiddies and black hackers instead. In the field of computer security for example, parts of the CCC, the academic hacker conservative movement is a fraction of a single larger, interwoven and inclusive hacker culture.

A key meeting between subcultures existed in the case of the KGB hack. A group of hackers who were close to the Chaos Computer Club broke into the computers of the military and academic institutions in America. They found the data and sold it to the KGB, one of them to finance his drug addiction.

The case could be clarified, because scientists from the environment of the academic hacker culture found ways to trace and monitor the intrusions. The film 23 shows the event (embellished with fictional elements) from the perspective of the attacker. Clifford Stoll, an astronomer who contributed significantly to the Enlightenment, in his book and in the odd television documentary The KGB, described the case from the other perspective.

Another difference is that historically academic hackers were working at research institutes and used the local computers. In contrast, the prototypical computer security hacker had access only to a home computer and a modem.

Since the mid-1990s, however, when home computers were common, they were suitable for Unix-like operating systems, and as the first low-cost Internet access for households were available, many people from outside the path of academic hacker community were attached.

All three sub-cultures have something to do with changing hardware. In the early days of network hacking they built Phreaker blue boxes and various similar devices. The academic hacker culture has legends about several hardware hacks in its folklore, for example, about a mysterious switch which was inscribed with ‘magic’, which was connected to a PDP-10 at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and on first glance, could in principle have no effect.

Early amateur hackers built their own computers together from kits. These activities were largely extinct during the 1980s, and became available as an inexpensive prefabricated home computer. At research institutions they were instead converted onto a central computer that was shared by all, whereby the Network hacking to the computer dialing was shifted by a modem.

Other associations with the word hacker

In general, there is a strong association between the concepts, ‘hackers’ and ‘geek’ or ’specialist’, but pointed to greater experience with these designations in the computer application, but without assuming the deep need for the hacker term. Also the people who showed an affinity for the hacker culture, happy, nerd or geek, was characterized in the context of a special type of computer geek.