Author Says It's Time To Stop Glorifying Hackers

First time accepted submitter Geste writes "Diane McWhorter pleads in this NYT Op-Ed piece that it's time to stop glorifying hackers. Among other things she rails against providers' tendencies to 'blame the victim' with advice on improved password discipline. Interesting, but what lesson are we to learn from someone who emails lists of passwords to herself?"

Author is s twat

[scorp1us]

He *emailed* himself his own password list then whines when his account gets hacked.
NO SURPRISE HERE.

Maybe it's time to take away her soapbox

[Akratist]

There seems to be no end to pinheads like this who run around and pontificate about crap they know nothing about. And, oh, hey, nice try impressing us with how sophisticated you are..."Oooh, look at me! I was at the museum of modern art! I'm ever so much better than you!" And, of course, she is part of the media class which spends a considerable amount of time glorifying violence to bring in entertainment dollars. The reality is that dumbshits like her owe most of their modern existence to "hackers" such as the Royal Society and others who refused to accept what they were told as conventional wisdom of the day and began "hacking" science and the natural world, producing great advances and inventions, and so on. I'll stop the rant now, and just say that useless flapjaws like her are the reason I ignore the major media...reading virtual fish wrappers like her column just wastes time I could spend doing more productive stuff which will actually help improve the lives of people instead of just making me look stupid in front of a national audience.

Re:You keep using that word

[Aighearach]

"Hackers" are called Makers now. We lost that language war, but we have a new term now.

Re:You keep using that word

[Rinikusu]

I currently have over a dozen passwords I have to keep memorized for accessing various systems (each with their own unique login IDs and passwords), many of which are changed every 3-6 weeks and do stringent checks on previously used passwords. That's just for work, and not including the dozen or so username/passwords I use online in my personal time. Seriously, it's time to rethink passwords because if you don't like that I write all this shit down in a spreadsheet that I print out and stuff in a binder, well, it beats the other guys post-its on their monitors.

Re:Also time to stop

[wagnerrp]

Alignment has nothing to do with anything. "Hacking" is a constructive operation. You hack together a piece of code. You hack together a server. You hack together physical objects that have nothing at all to do with computers. "Hacking" is the process of building something new and useful without the full blown structure and overhead of a traditional engineering. Or, it could be violent coughing. Or, it could be chopping down a tree. Hacking has been around long before computer security was even a thing. Suddenly (well, over the past 20 years), hacking has become something evil, and all those old meanings are forgotten.