Mail from Malaysia

Love the stamps....

I Am Not a Hacker

The media tells you that hackers are either unsupervised teenagers who break into computer systems an steal credit card numbers to use at pornographic websites, or scum of the earth anarchist rebels who write viruses designed to destroy ATM networks and shut down the evil corporate system.

The truth is that hacker, as a title is dead. The title conveys an eclectic sense or rugged nobility from a bygone era to call some on a hacker is to call them a true old school master, an IT professional. It simply doesn t make sense to refer to any one as a hacker if they can t remember a time before desktop computers. There is no Internet era equivalent of hacker or if there is, I can t think of it. The PC Revolution is over, the dot com bubble has burst. Technology is no longer the final frontier.

All your ideas of who I am are wrong. But I don t suspect you ll care enough to challenge yourself.

I don t wear a white, black, or gray hat. I don t type my sentences using numbers and punctuation marks instead of letters. I won t teach you to hack, I don t hack in to computers, my goal is not to hack the planet.

I am many things in many ways. I am a young and old, I am male and female, I am Christian, Taoist, and Atheist. I am Black, White, and every color in between. I am college educated and a high school dropout. I work in a large corporation, part time at the mall, and am unemployed. I am everything you can think of, but nothing you can understand.

I so what I do because I love computers. I believe that information is amoral on its own, and that what I do with it is my own decision. What I do is whatever I find interesting at the moment, I don t worry about right of wrong, profit or loss, reputation or credibility. There have been countless nights that I have stayed up past 3 am working on something that has no inherent value other than the knowledge I gain from doing it. What I do goes beyond interest, beyond hobby, beyond obsession. Can you say the same about anything, anything that you do? If you can t, then you have done through your life missing something.

I don t care what you think of me or what I do. I don t care what I think of you or what you do. I am not a zealot, bent on converting the world to my way of thinking if I do something that interests you, I am happy to tell you about it if you ask. If you do some thing that interests me I will ask you about it. My goal is to learn, which I will do with you but I con do just as well without you.

Call me a selfish bastard, call me a philosopher, call me a dreamer, an idealist, call me a criminal, call me a geek. Call me whatever you like.

Just don t call me a hacker.

Mirrorshades