Awhile back I described my effort find a hacker to search the IRS’ Exempt Division’s private emails and to publish them on the Internet. This publication is vital to expose the greatest case of government corruption in American history.
It turned out that hackers are too young to make it possible for my contacts to work with them. Hackers can’t trust a person older than they.
Which is my reason for a paean to hackers. ‘Hacker’ is a word that should be applied to our language retroactively.
Nearly all the improvements in the automobile came from home workshop mechanics. The same was true for telephones (I met the inventor of the touch tone system in his garage). It was true for many inventions including the computer. John (Cap'tn Crunch) Draper was a phone freak who taught Steve Wozniak about computer circuits and himself invented the earliest word processing system. One Briarpatch member was the homebrew fellow who created the popular digital phone-computer connection program.
What is significant about modern hackers is that the word should disappear now. Writing code for smartphone apps is done by millions of young people worldwide who are inventing the future. They owe their inspiration to the legions of hackers who went before.