Essay on Hacking and Prevention

The ‘original’ hackers were computer professionals who, in the mid-sixties, adopted the word ‘hack’ as a synonym for computer work, and particularly for computer work executed with a certain level of craftmanship…. Then in the seventies, assorted techno-hippies emerged as the computerized faction of the counterculture of the day…. What characterized the second wave hackers was that they desperately wanted computers and computer systems designed to be useful and accessible to citizens…. Finally, in the second half of the eighties the so-called cu emerged, appropriated the terms ‘hacker’ and ‘hacking’ and partly changed their meaning. To the computer underground, ‘to hack’ meant to break into or sabotage a computer system, and a ‘hacker’ was the perpetrator of such activities.

In the most seminal piece of work on hackers to date Levy (1984) describes three generations of hackers who exhibited to various degrees qualities associated with the hacking’s original connotation of playful ingenuity epitomised by the earliest hackers, the pioneering computer aficionados at MIT’s laboratories in the 1950s and 1960s. These aficionados formed the first generation of hackers defined as those who were involved in the development of the earliest computer-programming techniques. The second generation are defined as those involved in bringing computer hardware to the masses with the development of the earliest PCs. The third generation refers to the programmers who became the leading lights in the advent of computer games architecture. The phrase hacker is now almost exclusively used to describe an addition to this schema: the fourth generation of hackers who illicitly access other people’s computers.

To the fourth generation of hackers can also arguably be added a new group: the microserfs. This generation represents the co-optation of hacker skills by commercial computing. Whilst there were still elements of this commercial acumen in hacking’s second and third generations, they kept the positive connotations of the hacker sobriquet because their activity still retained the pioneering qualities and associated romanticism of ground-breaking technological endeavor.....................

ESSAYS ON TECHNOLOGY