Stallman on Hacking

http://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html

by olalonde • 16 years ago

82 38 16 years ago

stallman.org

icandoitbetter• 16 years ago

Let's apply a single term to everything until it loses all of its meaning!

whatusername• 16 years ago

But if RMS calls Lady Gaga a hacker then she must be one. It's RMS!

acabal• 16 years ago

Do you think RMS hacked his lunch by adding a little extra salt?

chime• 16 years ago

Only if adding salt was somehow forbidden, would push the boundaries of known human experience, or playfully exciting in some way. I do think the Chefs on Planet Green's Future Food are hackers in their own way: http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tv/future-food/meet-chefs.h... - a while ago I saw them cook food with liquid nitrogen and preparing numerous dishes using nothing but road-side weeds spiked with miracle fruit.

lukeschlather• 16 years ago

The essay defined hacker in a clear and focused manner. Clearly it's broader than the definition than you would choose, but I suspect it might also exclude things you might define as hacking.

My impression is that people expect hacking to require the use of technology, but that doesn't necessarily mean what we would expect it to. A chopstick is after all a technological tool.

We might restrict it to electricity, but then that might preclude mechanical devices, so perhaps we allow machinery in general, but then a pair of chopsticks might be a sort of simple machine...

angrycoder• 16 years ago

Lets all forget that the word hacker had nothing to with programming and was popularized by a bunch of dudes fiddling with toy trains.

mixmax• 16 years ago

In the footnotes he proposes that Lady Gaga is a hacker.

The definition is getting a bit shallow isn't it?

pak• 16 years ago

No, he is using it in exactly the sense the article goes to great lengths to illustrate: approaching any situation by thinking outside of usual conventions. As far as clothing goes, you can't argue Lady GaGa doesn't think outside of the box. Some of the items she has turned into clothing probably took a lot more creativity than finding a way to use three chopsticks in one hand.

rms' definition of hacking doesn't necessarily involve technology. That was the whole point of the chopsticks story.

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

I always find it a shame to focus on her clothes; she is first and foremost a music hacker. And a really really good one.

singular2• 16 years ago

True, but there is no denying the conventionality of her actual music; she's a product of the same old awful music industry machine, producing meaningless trash, whether or not she 'hacks' weird outfits which get her attention.

There is a sense that RMS has dropped that one in to seem more 'down with the kids' than he really is, which doesn't speak of pride as a hacker...

parenthesis• 16 years ago

> As far as clothing goes, you can't argue Lady GaGa doesn't think outside of the box.

Her outfits draw heavily on the prior art of performers like Grace Jones, David Bowie and Madonna. There's a very extensive history of music performers wearing crazy outfits. Some further examples are Elton John, Jayne County, Kiss, Gwar, Divine.

DanielN• 16 years ago

No offense to Stallman, but isn't it the definition of anti-social to be at a dinner table and proceed to play with everyone else's utensils disregarding their desire to use them for, you know, eating?

stuhacking• 16 years ago

He hacked etiquette.

wahnfrieden• 16 years ago

That's not his worst - he has a history of "food hacks": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ

Estragon• 16 years ago

Propriety is not a strong point of his.

erikb2• 16 years ago

Why do these people always try to convince the world, that their chosen word has another meaning then everybody knows. Seriously, is that just too hard or asks for too much playfulness?

Btw to describe a person in German, who is breaking computer based security systems, you call him a "Hacker".

vog3• 16 years ago

> Why do these people always try to convince the world, that their chosen word has another meaning then everybody knows.

Historically, the hackers at MIT chose the term "hacker" to simply describe themselves and other people with a similar attitude. Later, the mass media misused this term to describe solely criminal actors, which then became the mainstream understanding of the term.

So the mass media, not the hackers, were using the term with another meaning than everybody else (at that time).

> Seriously, is that just too hard or asks for too much playfulness?

I'd put it the other way around: Is is just too hard for the mass media or asks for too much playfulness to respect a (minority) group's self-chosen name?

> Btw to describe a person in German, who is breaking computer based security systems, you call him a "Hacker".

Small correction: This is true for the greater part of the German population. However, within groups like the CCC or FSFE, the term "Hacker" has a much broader meaning, quite similar to what RMS describes.

In other words: Even in Germany, the people who are usually called "Hacker" use themselves the term in a broader sense. I think this is simply an international phenomena.

erikb2• 16 years ago

edit: decided to delete all that tl;dr stuff

My point is this: Hackers are still great hackers, if they call themself differently. And then they would spend considerably more time solving "hard" problems "playful" instead of discussing about words who actually don't matter at all.

Mass media calls people whatever makes the most money for them. They are happy with that. And they have won the masses in this case. So hey, let's go on to the next fight.

Luyt• 16 years ago

And this is how that happened:

"Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think."

blaenk• 16 years ago

I agree with this sentiment. I've been hearing the 'hacker vs cracker' argument for years and it gets old. Move on. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that the media has defined or changed the meaning of words in our language. Languages change over time. Stop trying to fight the current. If you prefer one definition over another, cool, but your time and energy is better spent fulfilling its definition rather than proselytizing to strangers on the Internet over the semantics of a word.

vog3• 16 years ago

What exactly do you mean with "move on"? The article dates back to 2002. It's more an historical artifact than the current state of discussion.

danielha• 16 years ago

Everything is hacking and so can you.

Tarski• 16 years ago

At lunch yesterday I held my fork in my right hand and knife in my left. I was very pleased with myself afterwards...

sukuriant2• 16 years ago

Is it hacking to do something because you want to call it a hack? Or proclaim that you're hacking? This sort of practice has sort of peeved me a little. I may not be a hacker in the proper sense, and perhaps that's my problem, but when someone thinks to themselves "I wonder if I can make a hack out of this" in regards to chopsticks, it seems like less of a hack than "I wonder if I can use all 6 at once!"

The distinction, in my mind, is "intent to hack" vs "intent to do/achieve/circumvent".

It was such a miniscule part of what he said, but that part sincerely rubbed me the wrong way :/

vog3• 16 years ago

It is the other way round: The term "a hack" appeared after the terms "hacker" and "hacking".

sukuriant2• 16 years ago

"I did not know any way to do that, so I realized that if I could come up with a way, it would be a hack. I started thinking. After a few seconds I had an idea." I'm referring to this part, at the very beginning. "I realized that if I could do this, it'd be a hack". I don't know, it just seemed like he was trying to do something because it would therefore be called a hack. That's how I perceived what he said. This is all personal, and that sort of thing rubbed me the wrong way, as though he was trying to do something just to prove he was a hacker, not wanting to do something to see if he could and that happening to be a hack. It's a subtle distinction, but seems to result in very different things.

And yes, I know this is Richard Stallman we're talking about. There is no question of his hacker-ness.

mtkd• 16 years ago

I've been coding since the 80s and as far back as I can remember hacking has always meant breaching security, it wasn't until the 90s that I started hearing people trying to 'reclaim' the use.

Clearly some tech communities were using it earlier amongst themselves, but language evolves, expecting the world to use another term is just arrogant.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=-VsrAAAAIBAJ&sjid=4...

tjr• 16 years ago

I have here a copy of the first edition of The Hacker's Dictionary, published in 1983 (same year as the newspaper article cited).

Under the definition for "hacker", it lists multiple possibilities, including #7:

A malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover information by poking around. For example, a "password hacker" is one who tries, possibly by deceptive or illegal means, to discover other people's computer passwords. A "network hacker" is one who tries to learn about the computer network (possibly because he wants to improve it or possibly because he wants to interfere -- one can tell the difference only by context and tone of voice).

I don't see anything indicating that this was considered a wrong or invalid definition at the time, just not a primary one.

The current incarnation of The Hacker's Dictionary, perhaps now better known as the Jargon File, seems fairly direct about the distinction between hacking and security breaching.

visakhcr• 16 years ago

"You can help correct the misunderstanding simply by making a distinction between security breaking and hacking—by using the term "cracking" for security breaking. The people who do it are "crackers". Some of them may also be hackers, just as some of them may be chess players or golfers; most of them are not."

Well, in golf, being a hacker is an insult. From http://golf.about.com/cs/golfterms/g/bldef_hacker.htm

Hacker:

A very bad player. Somewhat synonymous with "duffer" in that they both apply to poor players. But "duffer" is sometimes used to denote weaker players in general, while "hacker" is often applied to a single golfer as an insult. Hacker is a little bit stronger than duffer, in other words.

Stallman on Hacking

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