Dette er en ganske kjent tekst skrevet av "The Mentor". Veldig bra Lesestoff.

The Hacker Manifesto

Written by The Mentor 8. january 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, this crap they teach us bores me...

Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."

Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. 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, cheat, and lie to us and 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.

Her er litt om Hack Value:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hack value is the notion among hackers that something is worth doing or is interesting. This is something that hackers often feel intuitively about a problem or solution; the feeling approaches the mystical for some.

Doing something others think difficult or impossible, or solving a problem, and doing it in a way that has finesse, cleverness, or brilliance implies the solution has hack value. So creativity is an important part of the meaning. For example, picking a difficult lock has hack value; smashing a lock does not. However, being the first to work out that super-cooling an "unbreakable" high-tensile steel lock with liquid nitrogen makes it possible to smash has hack value.

By way of another example, proving Fermat's last theorem by linking together most of modern mathematics has hack value; solving the four color map problem by exhaustively trying all possibilities does not (both of these have now in fact been proven). Writing a program to solve the four-color map problem exhaustively, however, does have hack value (as generating all the possibilities is itself potentially difficult).

The physicist Richard Feynman had a keen appreciation of hack value, and was a keen safecracker. At the Challenger Space Shuttle accident inquiry, he performed a classic hack, demonstrating the potential of O rings for causing the disaster by freezing an O ring in his glass of ice water and showing its failure to the audience, which included the press.

Om Hacker Ethic:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In modern parlance, the hacker ethic is either:
the belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and computing resources wherever possible; and/or
the belief that system cracking for fun and exploration is ethically acceptable as long as the hacker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.

Both of these normative ethical principles are widely, but by no means universally, accepted among hackers. The first, and arguably the second, emerged from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory during the '60s and '70s.

Most hackers subscribe to the hacker ethic in the first sense, and many act on it by writing free software, giving the user permission to study, modify, and redistribute it. A few, such as the Free Software Foundation, go further and assert that it is immoral to prevent computer users from sharing or altering software, as is typical with proprietary software.

The second sense is more controversial: some people consider the act of cracking afoul of the government itself to be unethical, like breaking and entering into an office. But the belief that 'ethical' cracking excludes destruction at least moderates the behavior of people who see themselves as 'benign' crackers. On this view, it may be one of the highest forms of hacker courtesy to (a) break into a system, and then (b) explain to the SysOp, preferably by email from a superuser account, exactly how it was done and how the hole can be plugged; effectively acting as an unpaid (and unsolicited) tiger team.

The most reliable manifestation of either version of the hacker ethic is that almost all hackers are actively willing to share technical tricks, software, and (where possible) computing resources with other hackers. Huge cooperative networks such as Usenet, FidoNet and the Internet itself can function without central control because of this trait; they both rely on and reinforce a sense of community that may be hackerdom's most valuable intangible asset.

Og til slutt om selve Hackeren og det bli kalt Hacker:

Written by The Mentor

[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]

1: 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.

2: One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.

3: A person capable of appreciating hack value.

4: A person who is good at programming quickly.

5: 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.)

6: An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.

7: One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.

8: [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence "password hacker", "network hacker". The correct term is cracker.
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The term `hacker' also tends to connote membership in the global community defined by the net. It also implies that the person described is seen to subscribe to some version of the hacker ethic.

It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you'll quickly be labeled bogus).
Things hackers detest and avoid:

IBM mainframes. Smurfs, Ewoks, and other forms of offensive cuteness. Bureaucracies. Stupid people. Easy listening music. Television (except for cartoons, movies, the old "Star Trek", and the new "Simpsons"). Business suits. Dishonesty. Incompetence. Boredom. COBOL. BASIC. Character-based menu interfaces. Anything Microsoft.

- From the Jargon file (more or less).

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