It happened one night, a portal opened to a whole new world…
Streaming through the optical fibres like amphetamines through an addict’s nerves,
a digital pulse was transmitted over a router and a refuge from our hopeless existence was found at last.
This is it… this is where we belong. A parallel universe composed of circuits and chips.
The breath-taking poetry hidden underneath the code.
The conformist crowd never acknowledged our divergence.
We fought and we suffered but never did our tribe surrender on this limitless path.
They could stop a few of us but they could not stop us all.
Yes, I am a criminal.
My crime is that of curiosity.
I am a hacker1 and this is my manifesto.
(Inspired by the original “The Conscience of a Hacker” published on phrack in 1986)
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Definition of a Hacker:
(from the Jargon File 4.0.0)
hacker /n./-
A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
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One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
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A person capable of appreciating hack value.
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A person who is good at programming quickly.
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An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in “a Unix hacker”.
(Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)
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An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
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One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
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[deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence “password hacker”, “network hacker”. The correct term for this sense is cracker.
Note that the media have a disturbing tendency to use the deprecated sense 8. When I use the word to refer to people, I’m using the other senses… ↩
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