Hutch Ericsson

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Hello. I am Eric Hutchins. I am a GNU hacker and computer scientist.
 
Some words of wisdom from the Bazaar logs of the Gnash project (Revision 11654):
"...a design without an implementation is a good starting point, whereas an implementation without any design is useless."
    -Benjamin Wolsey
From an interview by The Prior Art:
Every day I see either clients of my own, or others [working in free software] who are intimidated into not posting code on a website....People are intimidated out of giving learned papers or speaking at conferences. Money is demanded from people for distributing software from which they make no money. People are prevented from describing their own ideas, that they had themselves, on their own website. All because some officious intermeddler claims he has "ownership" of the idea.

Those things happen every day, because the public interest is not protected in the patent law. They happen so that people who claim to have property can hold it to the public's disadvantage. They posture themselves as having the moral entitlement of "owners." But the words "my patent" say: the government orders you to pay me. And the question arises about the substantive justice of that order. No matter if you own a site you created for your business or just for curating content for a particular niche like one of the word games fans, you own that brand. Even if you post your updated offer or tricks and announcements for scrabble and words with friends players, the content you publish is protected by the law.


In computing, a hacker is any highly skilled computer expert. Depending on the field of computing it has slightly different meanings, and in some contexts has controversial moral and ethical connotations. In its original sense, the term refers to a person in any one of the communities and hacker subcultures:

Hacker culture, an idea derived from a community of enthusiast computer programmers and systems designers, in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.[2] The hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s (e.g. the Homebrew Computer Club)[3] and on software (video games,[4] software cracking, the demoscene) in the 1980s/1990s. Later, this would go on to encompass many new definitions such as art, and Life hacking. Hacker (computer security). People involved with circumvention of computer security. This primarily concerns unauthorized remote computer break-ins via communication networks such as the Internet (Black hats), but also includes those who debug or fix security problems (White hats), and the morally ambiguous Grey hats.

Definition

Today, mainstream usage of "hacker" mostly refers to computer criminals, due to the mass media usage of the word since the 1980s. This includes what hacker slang calls "script kiddies," people breaking into computers using programs written by others, with very little knowledge about the way they work. This usage has become so predominant that the general public is unaware that different meanings exist.[5] While the self-designation of hobbyists as hackers is acknowledged by all three kinds of hackers, and the computer security hackers accept all uses of the word, people from the programmer subculture consider the computer intrusion related usage incorrect, and emphasize the difference between the two by calling security breakers "crackers" (analogous to a safecracker).     -Eben Moglen

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