[pp.int.general] Hackers

[Jaromil]

On Fri, 08 Feb 2013, Zbigniew Łukasiak wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 10:19 PM, Johan Karlsson <johan a landslide.nu>
> wrote:
> > @everyone,
> >
> > Please dont confuse hacking with cracking. It makes me a bit upset
> > when you do so.
> >
> > http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/cracker.html

While it holds true, we can go even deeper than that and observe that
cracking is also not "just bad", but is a gateway practice to the art of
reverse engineering which, while some regard it as not so "pure" as a
practice when compared to designing things with free software, its also
a valuable knowledge and ability, as well described by Fravia
http://fravia.2113.ch (RIP)

off to (us) Hackers...

> Yeah!  I've started this thread not without thinking about the
> previous discussions on the questions: who are the Pirates, what is
> the special thing that we bring to politics?  And I'd like to present
> an answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

good pointer and nice thread :^) I think the book "The Hacker Ethic" by
Pekka Himanen is a good start, also this book in South American Spanish
language has interesting pointers http://ur1.ca/cq4a5

I think is wrong to assume the political views of the hacker community
overlap with the PP, especially because hackers are very diverse and
have different political beliefs (even more than pirates) and their
communities are older and bigger.

What happens is that the Pirate Party is the first political institution
to defend the interests of the hackers, which is even more evident in a
situation in which often the political beliefs of hackers are
marginalised and criminalised. Some hackers are even hunted :^(

Still, hackers are pragmatic people: dislike the idea of lobbying, don't
like voting (even when in minority, they'll hardly stay still) etc. so
it is unrealistical to think they are "in arms" for the PP. at least at
this point in time and, even in future, hacker culture at large cannot
be seen as such.

Speaking about the Italian hacker community, where I come from, even
party politics in general are a no-go. As one of those I came closer to
the PP because I've been hanging out with proto-Pirates for long :^) and
admired the work of Bo Leuf; then it comes also the need for my culture
to be represented, plus also the curiosity of reading a very important
personality for hackers like RMS writing here. Overall I'm pleased with
the discussions and I even ended up involving myself *technically* with
the building of the PP-IT since a year now, but strictly refusing to do
anything public since I dream of a party that rotates representatives
and acts as... "masked" on behalf of a collective intelligence.

In my experience the disgusting bit for a hacker in being involved into
something like the PP is mostly constituted by lame micro-power dynamics
of alpha males wanting to dominate and certain people that have nothing
to share with either Pirate or Hacker ethics trying to gain the hegemony
of the party. But with great pleasure at least in Italy I've noticed
that such dynamics are contained by the agency of the collective
intelligence, especially if its a large assembly and not simply a board
to take decisions - in our case, that's why we adopted LQFB and so we
are seing the confluence of larger communities of hackers that see the
situation as viable, at the price of loosing some arrivists and
politicians in this process, but then they have plenty of more parties
to make a career with!

just my 2 BTC ;^)
ciao

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