Thursday, July 7, 2011

hackers are everywhere. panic!

Could they be false flag events to help the government regulate the Internet

When is the last time you can recall so many news items about hackers? It's become a massive meme within society as a whole. Hardly a day goes by without some discussion or news about hackers.

And, I should mention this right off: If there was ever any attempt to soft-pedal the word hacker versus cracker (with hacker meaning a guy who likes to fool around with his computer to discover new things and the cracker meaning the evil, black-hat criminal), well that definition is done. The hacker today is now the cracker for all practical purposes of discussion.

Now that I have that definition out of the way, let me try and figure out what is going on here.

First of all, there is no real outbreak of hacking. None of this is new. It's just that, for some reason, the media has decided to get on the bandwagon, and now not a day goes by without some sort of hacking story. And, of course, we have to have our hacking "bad guys." This means Anonymous, 4Chan, LulzRaft and LulzSec, among others. You can go into the sociology of these groups on your own time. You can research hacktivism and Lulz for starters.

From my perspective, the only reason the media is all over this is because there are group names attached to various attacks and this makes it easier to write a story. The fact is the hacking scene with many of the exact same players goes back decades. It's just that nobody was paying attention.

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