Putting a face on the 'underground'

[TheCotMan]

Re: Putting a face on the 'underground'

Perhaps a fake movie, kind of like, "Dateline NBC,":
"Hackers Among Us"
(Nasal voice-over)
"They are there when you go to the bank. They are there when you check your email. They are there when you use your Cell phone. They are even there when you drive your car. Who are they? Hackers. They are in the technology that you use everyday. In this episode of (something or other) we'll expose how Hackers have conspired to play various roles in your life through the technology you use."

"From the earliest of times, hackers broke rules, and defied contemporary thought, breaking ranks with contemporary thought police, demonstrating innovative ways to combine existing technology."

(Jump to scene of cavemen that saw fire and used it, but could not make it. Show "hacker" making fire with dry wood, dung, pressure, and friction. Then show other cavemen (script kiddies) killing the fire maker for being a witch. Then show several cavemen (script kiddies) repeating the fire making procedure procedure on their own, and one of them as an arsonist starting fires to burn down a forest.)

"Hackers have invented new technologies, and if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't have arsonists."

(Jump to scenes of late 1500's.)

"Hackers have used math and the scientific method to show how Geocentrism could not be supported with evidence." (Images of Galileo Galilei detained by force.) "If it wasn't for hackers, the Earth would still be at the center of the universe.

(Jump to scene of World War II, and Bletchley Park.)

"Hackers even helped to build machines to crack encrypted information, and help Allied espionage against the Axis governments. Who do these hackers think they are? Haven' they ever heard of invasion of privacy?"

(Jump to scene where Middle manager has decided to run a new program they found on their MS Windows Install CD ROM called, "Rollback.exe," and then gasped to see their happy GUI and interface go away. Now show "hacker" using forensics tools to diagnose the cause of file loss, recover lost files, and eventually help ensure none of the middle manager's work was lost, and tell them to not run applications from foreign media.)

"Yes. Hackers are even around today, helping to keep inept, unskilled, and bumbling managers from losing their jobs, instead of allowing their mistakes to force termination of employment. Hackers harm profits by allowing unskilled employees to remain employed!"

(Screenshots and review of each of the above.)

"Hackers continue to break with tradition, and seek out knowledge, information, and learn new things. They continue to experiment and break rules and convention. Maybe a hacker lives next door to you. Maybe they are a science teacher. Maybe they are leading a User Group attended by your children. Watch out for hackers!"

(Commercial.)

"In our next episode, we uncover methods used by hackers to expose security weaknesses in software used by banks and the government, and the secret disclosure system used by some hackers to keep this information secret until software vendors have a new patch available. Why do they conspire to hide the truth about weaknesses and limit access to this knowledge? Doesn't the public have a right to know?"

"To Catch a Hacker has been brought to you by the Illuminati, and a generous grant from Yoyodyne Propulsion."

[xor]

Re: Putting a face on the 'underground'

DEFCON 16 the Year of The Suit. Ok everyone we all should wear suits at DEFCON next year. I'm not making fun of you Renderman, you are to use an expression preaching to the choir. We could all wear pink boas, give to charity, become born again(yuk) and the media would find something bad or wrong with us. :)


xor

Then again I like being viewed as a bad seed. :) It's the bad boys that get the girls. :)

[renderman]

So I watched yet another news segment where they completely trash the hacker community as nothing but thieves and terrorists I wanted to slap the reporter silly.

They spent the majority of the time talking to 'professional pen tester' (a guy in a suit in and a porche) who was using the exact tools that this community helped develop to show the problems they were blaming us for (nessus, metasploit, netstumbler, kismet featured at various points).

Obviously this got me pissed off (which is not hard) because as we know, alot of Defcon folk in their day jobs *are* the 'professionals' in the suits. I wanted to slap the reporter silly and tell them to tell it to my/our face instead of talking about us behind our proverbial backs.

It seems to me that media can trash the 'hacker' label partly because there is no 'face' to the community to link us to the rest of society. The term 'hacker' is lobbed about as a vague term that imagination fills in as some malevolent hellspawn that is in no way human and can be treated as such.

I'm wondering and asking the collective masses here if it would help much to help put a face on the community if some stepped forward to show that we as a community are human. Wouldn't it be harder to use the brand hacker if it was shown/known that these same people have families, are productive members of society, spend their time helping keep things secure?

Often the only glimpse that the media and society and the public get is at Defcon where we often don't put on the best appearance (no offense to anyone, I'm guilty too of being in vacation mode and not wanting to wear a suit). The rest of the time we're regular citizens and live among the rest of the population quite happily.

Probably just a pipe dream but it seems to me that we need a human face on our culture to ease some of these tensions with the media and the rest of society. Am I wrong, crazy, stupid or all of the above?