Edit me! (hacky nerdstuff - hacks)
Hi,

A friend of mine asked me to write up 2 things for a book she is editing, to be called The Handbook of Alternative Media. She asked me to write some explanations of memes, and the differences between hacks, cracks, and pranks, for people who do not spend all day dorking around on teh intarnets. Just finished some drafts that I think are mostly there, and I request that all interested parties take a gander and give feedback. Feel free to crosspost to good editors and geeks you know. The audience will be part academic, part regular people looking to make media themselves. Thanks!!!

Hacks, Cracks, and Pranks: Fear and Goofing on the Internet, in the Basement, and at WTO Meetings

Hey, guess what? Not all hackers are evil, pimply, lurking teenagers with a poor sense of fashion and a great sense of disaffection. They are also not criminals by default, not necessarily computer geniuses, and some of them might even be people you'd have over for dinner. Conversely, some of them are one or more of those things, but consistently, they are easy targets for sweaty mainstream media, jonesing for the next sexy lead.




So what is a hacker? A hacker, in the broadest, and perhaps truest sense, is someone who makes things do stuff they weren't intended to do. Hardware hacking can be as simple as retooling garbage into art or workshop gadgets, or as heady as tinkering with consumer electronics to circumvent the restrictions of digital rights management. Social engineering is a way of hacking human nuture--of using people's assumptions, confidences, suspicions, or desires to gain information or access that would otherwise be off-limits. Hacking in a computer software and security context is based on the same idea, and can be used to violate and destroy, experiment and explore, or protect and repair. Thus, computer hacking itself is as ethically neutral as a hammer, a pen, a bulldozer, or any other tool.

A crack is a step below a hack. Maybe it's less clever, less original, less elegant, less repeatable, but in the meritocratic economy of hacker culture, its value tends to be lower. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, and sometimes it is as simple a reusing a well-known hack. Cracking is also a verb meaning to discover an encrypted password, and the name of a computer program that attempts to do it by repeated guessing. Password cracking is used by both intruders and security professionals to break in, or discover weak passwords to prevent break-ins, respectively.

To my mind, a prank combines the strengths of both cracking and hacking, and puts them into a performance context to satirize or spotlight the target of the prank. Pranks combine a sense of humor with a desire to push limits, as well as a sense of intellectual meritocracy. A good prank points out stupidity or ignorance on the part of the target, and the best pranks make the target into a public laughing stock without them ever knowing what was going on. But perhaps the BESTEST pranks are the most subtle ones, where neither the target nor the audience know that it is a prank. The Yes Men pulled off an extremely elegant culture-jamming prank when they convinced an audience at the Certified Practicing Accountants Association of Australia in Sydney that the WTO had decided to disband and reinvent itself as a new entity, the Trade Regulation Organization, which would focus on making corporations accountable to all people, not just the economic elite.

Of course, ask a hacker, cracker, or prankster, and you might get a different answer. These terms are fluid, and hacker linguistics are subject to a kind of hyper-evolution as common typing mistakes make their way into the parlance, as grammar that sounds mangled in standard English is used for humor or emphasis, and as definitions shift along with frames of reference. Hacker culture is extremely varied as well, from intellectual libertarians who loathe "stupid people" and take the meritocracy ethic to an extreme, to "hacktivists" who aim to open up technology to as many people as possible, especially communities on the underserved side of the digital divide, or even use cracks and pranks to break up social institutions they find philosophically abhorant. In the middle are a lot of normal people who happen to have some nerdy interests and enjoy finding like minds. What is common across the culture is rabid curiosity, a high premium placed on the strength of collaborative effort and sharing information, and a sense of intellectual ownership. Hackers demand the right to take apart, understand, and modify their tools to their liking. Thus, hackerism and the Free Software movement go together like solder and flux.

At MIT, hacking has a culture and a vocabulary of its own. The website hacks.mit.edu makes these distinctions:

"The word hack at MIT usually refers to a clever, benign, and 'ethical' prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community (and sometimes even the rest of the world!). Note that this has nothing to do with computer (or phone) hacking (which we call 'cracking')."

In the sense of roof and tunnel hacking at MIT, which other communities sometimes call urban exploration, utility conduits and sketchy passageways are a big playground, and who needs keys when you have a set of lockpicks? In the words of one MIT hacker:

"Sure, you don't need keys if you have lockpicks and know how to use them, but why do you want to go somewhere off-limits in the first place? There's a playground element, but there's also an element that involves simply wanting to understand. Some buildings are proprietary - they'll tell you how to use them, but they won't tell you how they work. It's really fun to find your way into a shaft and see how the water gets from one part of the building to another, or break into an elevator machine room and watch the relays as the elevator runs. Once you've seen all this, you understand the building well enough that you can modify it yourself. It's like seeing the source code for the first time."

So, anyone up for some hacking?