I lol'd and got concerned about this...

[rockinup1231]

Hackers suck...

My friend has a forum about an online game, FSO, I think he said. Well one day he got to his site and found two extremely large gay pr0n pics on top of his site and his skin for the site was completely changed. Well, he tried to log in, and it worked, but he couldn't use the administrator panel. An hour later, and he couldn't get logged into the forum, period.

So he was freaking, and the members were discussing what was going on. Well, he had a tool availible outside administration that was to basically kick the hackers *** out of control. So he has it back now.

Hacker didn't manage to get to the passwords that were encrypted, so he didn't need to make account changes. I thought this was pretty funny. But seeing that the hacker didn't need passwords to get in, and my forum is the same type of engine (phpbb) I am kinda concerned. I don't have that outside tool that he has.

[tuxv]

Hackers suck...

To know the real meaning of the word hacker read this article

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

[Vergil83]

Tuxv, this isn't directed at you (so don't take it personally )
<rant>Why is it that there are tons of people (we have had threads about this on this forum and on other sites) who deeply care that you use cracker = script kidde, hacker = computer guru def instead of the 99% world accepted hacker = bad person def, despite the fact that this is pure semantics. But if someone says GNU/Linux or free software (something that could have some real value) are labeled zealots? </rant>
Sorry, this is something that really pisses me off!

Getting back to the op, that sucks that some hacker (I am going to do it for the rest of my life to piss people off ) does stuff like that.

[benjamin20]

we try to reserve the term hacker and the act of hacking to be more of a positive term. hacking isnt a bad thing. with all the crackers out thee giving it a bad name, people think hacking of any form is bad. it would be like if street gang members started calling themselves warriors. they may be warring, but it is a negitive act. real warriors are usually suppose to be more honorable people.
or if drug dealers called themselves merchants. they are technicaly merchants but they are nothing like a store owner or anything like tat. its a way of keeping hacking sceen as a productive, good thing. rather than letting it be seen as a negative thing as a whole.

if someone asked, :how did you get that hardware working" and you responded "i hacked it" the apropriate thing for them to think is that you found out how the hardware works and wrote a driver for it. you wouldn't want them to think that you stole it or did something bad somehow.

its all about how people connect things in there minds, if all they hear is "the thief hacked the bank accounts" all the time they think hacking is something thief's do, rather than seeing it as something anyone has to do in order to understand something without official documentation.

[tuxv]

cheers benjamin20

[oz]

...and unfortunately, the news media does nothing at all to help in differentiating the terms hacker and cracker.

[Vergil83]

or if drug dealers called themselves merchants. they are technicaly merchants but they are nothing like a store owner or anything like tat.

That is completely different. 99% of the population doesn't call illegal drug dealers "merchants". If I tell someone that I am a merchant, they are not going to think I am a drug dealer. If I tell someone I am a hacker, they are going to think I write viruses. There is no point in stubbornly hanging onto a word that everyone else in the world understands to be something else. Why should we waste our time on something that is in the end pointless (words don't have some intrinsic value), when issues like DRM is much more important.

[tuxv]

That's the reason why we should let others know that hackers are good people. Then that 99% will know that hackers are good. And only 1% will think of hackers as evil creatures. Let's spread the news about good hackers

[benjamin20]

that was kinda my point. society doesn't call drug dealers merchants, but they do call crackers hackers. and we squabble over this because the public image of hacking is terrible. people are afraid of "hackers" getting into there computer.

[rockinup1231]

Well, would you want people searching through your stuff? I sure as hell wouldn't

. You could argue that a hacker has the ability to write drivers and to do what that one guy did to my friends forum. A cracker from my current understanding would be someone that abuses this knowledge, thus, are the same people.