Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!hal!nic.MR.NET!tank!uxc!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!osiris.cso.uiuc.edu!goldfain
From: goldfain@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Complete CBS transcript...
Message-ID: <40000004@osiris.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 2 Nov 88 19:04:00 GMT
Lines: 13
Nf-ID: #R:<8810301724.AA01271@multimax.ARP:-34:osiris.cso.uiuc.edu:40000004:000:840
Nf-From: osiris.cso.uiuc.edu!goldfain    Nov  2 13:04:00 1988


I'll bet this whole  thing occurred primarily  because someone at  CBS who was
not fully computer literate wanted to cover a "hacker's convention" and looked
up  in a CBS handy  computer-terms reference to find  out  that "hacker" meant
that German who cracked into some military computing.

I agree that this is unfortunate and that CBS did an unprofessional job.   One
of the things *you* can do about it is to find a way of clearly distinguishing
your activities from those in the report, so the poor  public will  not remain
confused.  I think  the best approach is to  see to it  that another  term  is
coined for the  "cracker/mugger/virus-writer", or that  another term is coined
for your activities.  But what  exactly are those?  From what  I can tell, the
convention was actually an "anything-goes-computing-in-life-smorgasbord".