In an effort to stave off boredom, a group of teens in the middle of the Canadian prairies teach themselves how to system hack, code crack, and phone phreak while snowmobiling on the side.
As their antics progress, they come closer and closer to “the edge” with law enforcement while the world wakes up to the possibilities and dangers of the Internet.
(This true story is anonymized to prevent incriminating its primary characters.)
Hackers is a 1995 American crime film directed by Iain Softley and starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Renoly Santiago, Matthew Lillard, Jesse Bradford, Lorraine Bracco, Fisher Stevens. The film follows the exploits of a group of gifted high school hackers and their involvement in a corporate extortion conspiracy.
Made in the 1990s when the internet was unfamiliar to the general public, it reflects the ideals laid out in the Hacker Manifesto quoted in the film:
“This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch […] We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. […] Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.” Hackers has achieved cult classic status.
Though we often associate Hacking with criminal activities, hacking does not always mean breaking into computers.
There are different definitions:
Originally Hacking had nothing to do with breaking into other’s computers. It was primarily tinkering away with hardware to make things work. And this strain of hackers are still out there in multitude! (Like Perseus / Lurker)
http://thocp.net/reference/hacking/hacking.htm << History, Timeline, and More
http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html
The Author says:
Out in the traditional world of print, The Hacker Crackdown is ISBN 0-553-08058-X, and is formally catalogued by the Library of Congress as “1. Computer crimes — United States. 2. Telephone — United States — Corrupt practices. 3. Programming (Electronic computers) — United States — Corrupt practices.” `Corrupt practices,’ I always get a kick out of that description. Librarians are very ingenious people.
The paperback is ISBN 0-553-56370-X. If you go and buy a print version of The Hacker Crackdown, an action I encourage heartily, you may notice that in the front of the book, beneath the copyright notice — “Copyright (C) 1992 by Bruce Sterling”
But this book is not public domain. You can’t copyright it in your own name. I own the copyright. Attempts to pirate this book and make money from selling it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl. Believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of such an action, it’s really not worth it. This book don’t “belong” to you. In an odd but very genuine way, I feel it doesn’t “belong” to me, either. It’s a book about the people of cyberspace, and distributing it in this way is the best way I know to actually make this information available, freely and easily, to all the people of cyberspace — including people far outside the borders of the United States, who otherwise may never have a chance to see any edition of the book, and who may perhaps learn something useful from this strange story of distant, obscure, but portentous events in so-called “American cyberspace.”
This electronic book is now literary freeware. It now belongs to the emergent realm of alternative information economics. You have no right to make this electronic book part of the conventional flow of commerce. Let it be part of the flow of knowledge: there’s a difference. I’ve divided the book into four sections, so that it is less ungainly for upload and download; if there’s a section of particular relevance to you and your colleagues, feel free to reproduce that one and skip the rest. Just make more when you need them, and give them to whoever might want them.
Now have fun.
