Hacking defined

You know, you would think that a magazine like CPU(Computer Power User) would be wise enough to ensure their stories are accurate. You would think a so called computer security specialist would also know better then to incite the anger of the collective white hat hacker community. I try not to be this truly anal as often as possible, but this time I am pissed. CPU's spotlight this month is on security, hacking and cracking. I was flipping through it and noticed a few articles of interest, and as the few points when we were not flooded were few, I did manage to finish reading the article on White versus Black Hat hackers. I am not pleased at all. I expected more of the magazine, that's for sure.

The piece was written by Steve Smith, and while it does a decent job of describing the difference between White Hat's, Black Hat's, the gray area's in between, as well as the little puss and pukes who have attached themselves to the title of Hacker there are problems, big ones. I know I have been lectured on this before, taking the opinions of a quoted source as the impression and ideals of the publication and author, but I wonder why CPU would publish the following line by Steve Branigan VP of engineering for Lumeta: "When an owner asks to be hacked, that's not hacking, that's a service," he says. He argues that by definition, hacking is illegal: entering a system without permission.

Now, yes, breaking into a system is illegal. Technically even if you have permission to do so, unless you are given a user name and password by the authoritative body, then it is illegal, service or not. I will, however, argue that hacking by definition is neither illegal, nor is it breaking into systems. Those are crackers. Cracking a server is illegal. Stealing passwords from a server you cracked is illegal. Hacking a program or the source code to a program to make it better is not illegal, or it shouldn't be with the right ethics and license. I had hopes that this magazine would get it right, and be smart, but it appears they are just like any other magazine in that they seem to only care about the splash of hacking sites and computers. I hope to hear something from them on this.