Date: Sat, 18 Nov 1995 17:54:30 -0500
To: fors-discuss@teleport.com
From: Steve Pacenka <sp17@cornell.edu>
Subject: Industry press coverage


We've been talking "hacker" vs "cracker" in FORS, and so has Dr. Dobb's
Developer Update, vol 2, no 3, December 1995.  From the lead article: "The
Perl of Wizdom" by Ray Valdes.  A section is woven around Randal of both
Perl and legal fame.

(Full text will be online any day at http://www.ddj.com/dddu/dddu_top.htm.
Our website will contain a pointer eventually.)


    Culture Clash

    [paragraph about the Just Another Perl Hacker exercise]

    The term "hacker", of course, is used in the original sense of
    the word -- someone who is expert at quickly divining the 
    inner nature of complex systems from the most mundane details,
    and who can use this intuition to make these systems behave in
    transcendent or unexpected ways.  The mass media confuse this 
    term with "cracker," which means someone who breaks into 
    computer systems, possibly for malicious or illegal purposes.

These definitions are better than the almanac ones I posted a few days ago.
Valdes also uses "wizard" and "guru" to refer to Perl and Unix experts
respectively.

We get more directly relevant too:

    Perl is a superb tool for both sysadmins and hackers: Both
    are often concerned with the same things.  A constant concern
    of both has been password maintenance.  Schwartz's Learning Perl
    introduces the Perl language in Chapter 1 by writing a simple
    program to guess a secret word.  Likewise, the longest program
    in Programming Perl, coauthored by Schwartz, is a program called
    "passwd," that tries to make sure a user's password is not easily
    crackable.

That passwd program was my first encounter with deliberate computer security
beyond what a user sees.  I almost cited it in my letter to the judge.


    Schwartz, who worked for five years as a sysadmin for a
    multibillion-dollar chip manufacturer, was recently convicted
    of three felony counts of computer crime for running a 
    password-cracking program on a machine he had an account on
    (and had served as sysadmin for) at that chip manufacturer.
    You can get more details on this case by sending a blank
    e-mail message to fund@stonehenge.com.

About 90,000 "professional software developers" receive this via snail mail,
and since it's the lead article ...   Hope that the infobot is healthy,
Randal :^)


    The details of Schwartz's case are not germane to this article,
    but one general conclusion we can draw from this case is that
    a culture clash is in the offing, as Perl moves away from the
    free-form hacker culture from which it sprung, and as 
    mission-critical uses are found for this language in straight-
    laced corporate America.


I have to call this a misleading coda, since Perl itself is only a minor
footnote (part of Randal's duties) in the legal case.  Substitute "Internet"
and tack Perl on as a major enabling tool of the Internet (as other parts of
the article do) and the fit seems better.

-- SP