29 lines
1.8 KiB
Plaintext
29 lines
1.8 KiB
Plaintext
hacker ethic
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n. 1. The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and
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that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing
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open-source code and facilitating access to information and to computing
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resources wherever possible. 2. The belief that system-cracking for fun and
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exploration is ethically OK as long as the cracker commits no theft,
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vandalism, or breach of confidentiality. Both of these normative ethical
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principles are widely, but by no means universally, accepted among hackers.
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Most hackers subscribe to the hacker ethic in sense 1, and many act on it by
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writing and giving away open-source software. A few go further and assert
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that all information should be free and any proprietary control of it is
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bad; this is the philosophy behind the GNU project. Sense 2 is more
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controversial: some people consider the act of cracking itself to be
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unethical, like breaking and entering. But the belief that ethical cracking
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excludes destruction at least moderates the behavior of people who see
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themselves as benign crackers (see also samurai , gray hat ). On this view,
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it may be one of the highest forms of hackerly courtesy to (a) break into a
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system, and then (b) explain to the sysop, preferably by email from a
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superuser account, exactly how it was done and how the hole can be plugged
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acting as an unpaid (and unsolicited) tiger team. The most reliable
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manifestation of either version of the hacker ethic is that almost all
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hackers are actively willing to share technical tricks, software, and (where
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possible) computing resources with other hackers. Huge cooperative networks
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such as Usenet , FidoNet and the Internet itself can function without
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central control because of this trait; they both rely on and reinforce a
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sense of community that may be hackerdom's most valuable intangible asset.
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