Rock, Paper, Shotgun

13/06/2011 at 20:05 Wulf says:

The bad thing about this is that it tends to give all hackers a bad name. :| I have a friend who’s essentially a ‘hacker’ because that’s his field of work – it just is for some people. Sometimes ‘hacker’ can simply imply a person who does unusual things with technology, things that weren’t intended to be done with it. One of my favourite instances of this was using repurposed code from a 3D game to create the most accurate robotic arm ever. That was… well, amazing, frankly.

But it’s always the bad ones who give everyone else a bad reputation, isn’t it? All it takes is a few bad eggs to create a sensation, then the Internet is against you. Some hackers are working for security firms in order to stop this sort of thing from happening, some quietly poke the big companies and tell them about holes before they become news, some do genuinely bizarre things with technology which advances what we can do with it, and some of them act upon their ego and do nefarious things. The latter being considered to be black hat hackers. Of course, the vast majority of people aren’t going to be able to tell the difference between a black hat or anything else.

And that just kind of makes it worse for everyone, since the nature of humanity is to overgeneralise, and what I’m afraid that things like this are going to do is create a culture of prejudice towards all hackers. And if that happens then it’s going to set the Internet back decades. The bad thing is is that if that happens and everyone starts alienating the people who do do things the right way, then they’ll have no inclination to continue hacking. And thus more and more web software suites will go with holes and issues undiscovered, and the problem with black hat hacking and information destruction/leaking will become so, so much more worse.

Hacking is just an aspect of the ecology of technology these days. But I worry that the hacker is going to go the way of the bee. Bees are necessary, but because they can be pests, and they can sting, there are pesticides thrown about which can kill them. Of course, this creates the problem of an absence of bees. But bees are brothers, they’re pretty much the primary pollinators and all life on earth depends on them, but you won’t convince the people just spraying around pesticides of that, and thus the bee population will continue to drop.

The problem is is that the vast majority will remember a tiny inconvenience (these hacks, and especially the PSN hack) much more vividly than they’ll remember a lifetime of help from hacking groups who pretty much keep the Internet together and stable by patching its holes. Hackers are the bees of the Internet, pretty much, but because of these black hats I can see some starting to spray pesticides. And then everything goes downhill from there.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens because of the likes of LulzSec, but to be honest, I can’t say that I’ll be surprised at the outcome. And the real victims here are the hackers who do keep the Internet together, stable, and secure.