In the pages of national magazines, in television dramas and movies, in novels both pulp and prestige, a stereotype emerged: the hacker, an antisocial geek whose identifying attribute is the ability to sit in front of a keyboard and conjure up a criminal kind of magic. In these depictions, anything connected to a machine of any sort, from a nuclear missile to a garage door, is easily controlled by the hacker’s bony fingers, tapping away on the keyboard of a cheap PC or a workstation. According to this definition a hacker is at best benign, an innocent who doesn’t realize his true powers. At
...more
