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All hackers know that main-stream media use the term “hacker'’ ( http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html ) instead of “cracker'’ ( http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/cracker.html ) to label a person who illegally cracks into computer systems and Networks. This mistake is kind of widely accepted by the hacker community by now –the reason being there are so many other hacker things media wrongly term and interpret and this is just one of them.

As per the definitions (see the links above), there are crackers who fall under the category of hackers because of their intelligence and creativity in doing computer programming though they use them for destructive things. But Asian School of Cyber Laws ( http://www.asianlaws.org/ ) got it all wrong!

On Feb 19, 2004 there was a workshop on Cyber Forensics held at Hotel Residency Tower, Trivandrum. We attended the workshop owing to the reason that we are in Internet security business. There we received a set of documents of which one was prepared by ASCL. We just flipped through that document and suddenly a list of names struck our eyes. It was a list of “World’s most famous Hackers.'’ I knew it for sure that what they meant was “World’s most notorious crackers'’ and I just went through the list:

Vladmir Levin [qualified to be the first in the list]

Johan Helsingius [again, well qualified]

Kevin Mitnick [yet, another]

Robert Morris [Google says a lot about him]

and … hold your breath! here comes,
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson

I was kind of shocked to see this. If DMR & Ken come to know about this, I’m sure, they will ask for an explanation. I was wondering, if ASCL happens to see RMS who always greets “happy _hacking_'’, they would call police and see him arrested right away!

It’s true that DMR & Ken are real hackers but not the kind of “hackers'’ ASCL thinks. And it is quite unfortunate that they are listed among a bunch of personalities known for the illegal things they did using computers. I think, I should write to ASCL to remove them from the list and not to dishonor them who gave us a wonderful OS and a killer programing language.

Related Links:
1. See ASCL’s document yourself here: http://www.asianlaws.org/cyberlaw/library/cc/what_cc.pdf
2. Those who prepared ASCL’s document seem to have referred this document: http://tlc.discovery.com/convergence/hackers/bio/bio.html

Posted by: Anil Kumar K. (anil at linuxense dot com)

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