NEW YORK CITY HACKERS

Durée : 10:56 Pris le : 20 mars 2007 Lieu : Liberty Village Toronto, Canada

Hackers hold a special place in Western culture. Today they are viewed as dangerous subversives, likened to terrorists without an ideology, surfing the Internet with malice on their mind. But hackers have not always been viewed in a negative light. In the early seventies hacker was an honorary term among computer programmers.

In the eighties, when the home computer became a household item, hackers were seen as pioneering technologists brandishing an anarchistic attitude (Levy, 1984). But during the nineties something changed, and they were viewed as criminals. The popular notion of hackers today is that of a teenage boy sitting alone in the middle of the night, hacking his way into corporate or governmental mainframes and wreaking havoc amidst the stored data (Chandler, 1996).

Or someone who steals your credit card code and use it to steal your money. Or the ones who deface websites with obscenities that seem to have no motivation but destructive ones (Peneberg, 1999).