Swartz, Weev & radical libertarian lexicon (Re: Jacob Appelbaum in Germany - Aaron Swartz)
James A. Donald
jamesd at echeque.com
Tue Jan 7 12:05:00 PST 2014
On 2014-01-08 04:51, rysiek wrote:
> Neither does it fit 1. -- he did not break any kind of security systems,
> cracked passwords, etc., he just put a laptop on a network that had access to
> these documents and downloaded the documents. That's all.
You are perhaps saying it frequently requires no skill, other than fraud
or burglary, to muck up someone else's network. Indeed it does not.
Nonetheless, mucking up someone else's network by such simple means is
hacking in the first meaning of the word, hacking as an aggressive or
criminal act.
Because hacking from a distance requires skill, particularly if a
network has some halfway competent defenses, the word "hack" has also
come to mean some impressively clever stuff done with computers, but the
original meaning was simply bad stuff done by computer - and, in the
early days of the internet, it was possible to do bad stuff by computer
with very little skill.
And even today, it is possible to do bad stuff by computer with very
little skill if one physically accesses a network that is not intended
or expected to be accessed by outsiders.
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