Duncan Geere's Blog
The difference between hacking and hacking (and hacking)
12 July 11
Comments 4Over the past months, there's been a glut of news stories about hacking. We've had the News of the World phone-hacking allegations. We've also had Lulzsec hacking into Sony, PBS, the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the US Senate, among others.
I'm not convinced that the general public knows the difference between the different types of hacking, and the methods, motivations and repercussions for the victim couldn't be more different. Let's change that.
First, if you'll allow me to patronise those of you who already know the difference for a second, the phone-hacking story is about professional journalists paying private investigators to break into the voicemail accounts of individuals so they can splash their troubles over their front page. It's horrific to be the victim of, and it can ruin lives.
The hacktivism story, on the other hand, isn't anywhere near as personal. It's about larger corporations and public bodies having their websites defaced or databases accessed, either for political reasons or simply for the challenge of it. While details are often published onto the web, a single person is merely one line in a mountain of passwords and email addresses. It's still not pleasant to be the victim of, but worlds apart from the experience of a typical victim of voicemail hacking.
Then there's software hacking. The term "hacker", which is often worn as a badge of pride by many in the tech community, has suddenly become associated with murdered schoolgirls. Once upon a time you'd be able to tell your dad you were going to a Hack Day and he'd just look puzzled and smile. Now, he may think that you're intruding into the private lives of celebrities, politicians, and perhaps even those killed in the 9/11 attacks.
Delving deeper, there's the difference between hacking for good and hacking for disruption -- the white-hat / black-hat distinction here isn't well understood even among the technology community. Still further, there are more niche activities often discussed under the umbrella of hacking, such as software cracking and even hardware modding performed by the likes of Ben Heck and Arduino enthusiasts.
This is all a particularly big problem for organisations like the Guardian, which has been at the forefront of the "phone-hacking" revelations, yet simultaneously hosts a number of Hack Days in its offices. To the uninformed observer, that looks enormously hypocritical.
For us however, it's an opportunity to educate, and we clearly need some better terminology here, in the same way that computer hacking was originally differentiated from phone phreaking. Now that the latter has essentially died out as a practice, could we resurrect it to refer to voicemail intrusion?
Or how about we come up with a new term for voicemail hacking entirely? A quick gathering of opinion around the Wired.co.uk office yielded "cellbreaking", "voicejacking", "eavesniffing" and "phracking" as potential neologisms for the practice.
We want your opinion on those, as well as suggestions for better names for other types of hacking. Hack them into the comment box below.
Poll
What should we call voicemail hacking?
Thursday, 14 July 2011
The difference between hacking and hacking (and hacking) (Wired UK)
via wired.co.uk
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