self-proclaimed “hackers”

A humorous essay.

I could assure you: being young doesn't involve simulate to be an idiot.

You seem to fit nicely with this character Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers described in The Jargon File by Eric S. Raymond (aka ESR), even if probably you have not used a BBS ever:

From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local, MS-DOS-based bulletin boards developed separately from Internet hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of ‘pirate boards’ inhabited by crackers, phone phreaks, and warez d00dz. These people (mostly teenagers running IBM-PC clones from their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic jargon, heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang. While BBS technology essentially died out after the Great Internet Explosion, the cracker culture moved to IRC and other Internet-based network channels and maintained a semi-underground existence.

Though crackers often call themselves ‘hackers’, they aren't (they typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet expertise, nor experience with UNIX [not a real problem, Eric] or other true multi-user systems). Their vocabulary has little overlap with hackerdom's, and hackers regard them with varying degrees of contempt. But ten years on the brightest crackers tend to become hackers, and sometimes to recall their origins by using cracker slang in a marked and heavily ironic way. ...

Well, I must confess that I dislike even true hackers usually and the so-called Hackers' Culture. I suggest a viaticum, a cure for this juvenile disease: find a woman (or a man, if that satisfy your tastes) and do good sex.

Tunes suggests perdition, vice and pleasure.

But if you insist with this insanity, a suggested reading is How To Become A Hacker by ESR himself (although he makes some good points in 3. Boredom and drudgery are evil and 4. Freedom is good).

That's all, folks.


We wrote on our home page:

A message to all self-proclaimed “hackers” around here

If you intend to deface this site please at least read here before. Then go to Trotskyite Tunes. At this point, hopefully you will smile and regret your warlike intentions.

they answer somewhere on this wiki: but it didn't happen for us. Sorry

No, I am extremely sorry for you all, for your lack of sense of humour but, most of all, because you fail to realize that here there is nothing to break, no secrets to steal: CLiki is only an open collaboration system without pretenses of security, correctness and completeness; it is a "worse is better" product, an hack properly.. do you understand? You defeated a brittle product (no offense to Daniel Barlow intended) of your own "culture", what a win! That's pathetic, but typical.


This page is linked from: Sucker