Warning : Explicit Content - Reader Descression Advised Ethics vs. the IT Industry The Conscience of Hacker by The Mentor Written on January 8, 1986 Another one got caught today. It's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"... Damn kids. They're all alike. But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world... Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, and this crud they teach us bores me... D ...view middle of the document...
We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert. This is our world now... The world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore...and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge...and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, Without nationality, without religious bias... And you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs... You wage wars... You murder... You cheat... You lie to us... You try to make us believe it's for our own good... Yet we're the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you... Something that you will never forgive me for... I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all...We're all alike...The Mentor, said to be one of the most poetic hackers of his day, and still his words are echoed on every message board, every hacker's website, and every aspiring guru's desktop. But what does it tell us? That to some people expanding your knowledge, and exploring is more important than other people's work, and that is pure question of ethics. However, hacking is not the only computer ethic problem today. There are many, many problems in the IT industry "ethicswise." One of the biggest problems today, is the free software dilemma that almost everyone is guilty of. This is a question of ethics. "Its not hurting the company, they've made a lot of money of the software as it is, and its a faceless, power hungry business anyway.." But you have to put yourself in thier position. They've already spent majority of thier budget on paying the programmers, paying for advertisement, and the budget is set on the projected ammount of money they will be making off the end product, in this case being the software that YOU did not pay for. If you wrote a program that you were proud of, it did everything you wanted...