Random Access — November 1997
It turns out that the Ateneo server crash I mentioned in my last column was caused by a hacker who gained entry into the system. Now this came as something of a surprise to me. The only knowledge I’ve ever had of hackers until now has been limited to a movie with the same title (a movie I found horribly deficient as far as story and technological accuracy were concerned). I never realized that Ateneo had its own really serious hackers, who actually affect the school tangibly, namely by the disruption of the school’s already poor Internet service.
Hackers have gained much notoriety for their activities, a reputation magnified by media stereotypes. Professional hackers may dispute my terminology, preferring to label illegal hackers as "crackers" (that is, criminal hackers), but that is esoteric jargon. There is no denying the ubiquity of the term "hacker", and the image it has come to be identified with: that of a young computer whiz who makes a hobby of gaining access to closed or private computer systems and wreaking informational havoc on them, whether for profit, or just for amusement. To the detriment of computer professionals, the term "hacker" has inevitably stuck to crackers. And the cracker-hackers are hacking into Ateneo.
And is it any wonder? Read this hacker literature: "One of the safest places to start your hacking career is on a computer system belonging to a college," says a character who calls himself The Mentor of the Legion of Hackers, in a 1989 article I found on the web. "University computers have notoriously lax security, and are more used to hackers, as every college computer department has one or two, so are less likely to press charges if you should be detected." Eight years since then, and Ateneo has firewalls and passwords and other security features, but the hacker mentality is still the same: this looks easy, I’ll hack it!
Many hackers support a free-information ideology, believing that they must hack against the "gluttonous corporate oppressors" who put a price tag on information. Many other hackers hack just for the fun of it, seeing as recreation the challenge of disrupting a system or obtaining files from it. Either mode of thought shows an undeveloped sense of morals: the one believing he is responsible for hacking his way to a "perfectly free" world; the other showing an immature self-centeredness, thinking the world is his cyber-playground. Worse is the latter, who does not even have an ideology, and merely plays with his toys for the thrill of the destruction they cause.
There is a motto in the Hackers movie, something to the effect of "There is no right or wrong, just fun or boring." Not all hackers are gullible enough to embrace the saying, but there are some who actually believe it, and who are perfectly willing to hack into another system and even crash it with a custom virus if it will give them a good time.
It is easy enough for one to respond to the hacker problem by requesting that Ateneo beef up its Net security—which in fact it has already done, and that helps greatly—but it is no impregnable solution. For thrill-seeking hackers, new security measures are no deterrent; they simply provide a new challenge, a new lock to pick: a harder lock, but never so impervious that it is not pickable.
What cracker-hackers need now is a bursting of their bubble. Hacking is not a noble or glamorous activity. It impresses no one and amuses no one but the perpetrating hacker himself. Any hacker who sees no wrong to this statement, and believes that his own amusement is enough reason to continue, suffers from a narrow and severely undeveloped world view. Whoever infiltrated and crashed the Ateneo server may have heartily congratulated himself—or themselves—for a splendid hack, but it helped no one. Perhaps we are dissatisfied with the school’s Internet service, but that is no reason to try and destroy it.
It is also important to consider that all of us—including the hackers—have already paid for the service, however reluctantly, and hackers who goof around and crash the system are taking expensive Net time away from the common students. I think five hundred pesos a semester is a lot to pay for the destructive antics of a few computer geeks.
I know that Internet chat over Telnet and the web-based Parachat have gained a lot of popularity. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there are certain groups of people who use Internet chat for hours on end, simply chatting with each other. It’s a very annoying sight.
The Internet is a powerful tool that spans the world, and all the students
have paid for it. Whimsical chatters are wasting Net time and students’
money on the titillation of doing to a keyboard what they can easily do
at their tambayan. Can the Internet rooms please prohibit barkadas
who take up whole rows of terminals at a time just for the fun of chatting
with each other? It’s as shallow as cybersex, and deprives other students
of their Internet time.