How to catch a cracker in the US?

Tue Mar 18 02:10:06 UTC 2014

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 10:21 AM, Sholes, Joshua
<Joshua_Sholes at cable.comcast.com> wrote:
> On 3/13/14, 7:35 PM, "Larry Sheldon" <LarrySheldon at cox.net> wrote:
>
>>Not sure I can agree with that.  I have been in this game for a very
>>long time, but for most of it in places where the world's population
>>cleaved neatly into two parts: "Authorized Users" who could be
>>identified by the facts that they had ID cards, Badges, and knew the
>>door code; and "trespassers" who were all others.
>>
>>Then you new kids came along and (pointlessly, in my opinion) divided
>>the later group into the two described above.
>
> See, the way *I* learned it was that part of the creed of the "hacker"
> involved "why would I want to play with your systems, mine are much
> cooler.";  that is, by definition a "hacker" is in the first group.
>

The point is that 'computer security' involves innovation as much as
is done at hacker spaces (which can be geared to hardware or computer
security or whatever). I think the difference you're trying to argue
is the legality and not the task or process. I think calling the
illegal form of the study of computer security "cracking", the legal
form "hacking" and people who are "cracking" who don't know what
they're doing "script kiddies" is irrelevant, useless, and causes
useless debates (that I started) like this.