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It seems odd to me that both 'can barely write simple code' and 'it is hard, if not impossible...[for Gonzalez] to conceptualize human growth, development and e
by harpastum 16y ago
It seems odd to me that both 'can barely write simple code' and 'it is hard, if not impossible...[for Gonzalez] to conceptualize human growth, development and evolution, other than in the language of building a machine' are applied to the same person.
It seems that Gonzalez is not actually a talented cracker at all — he just found relationships with people that did. In that way, he's more of a standard crime lord than a hacker (using the NYT's definition of hacker).
- dasil003 16y agoTo put it in mundane terms he's just more a sysadmin type than a programmer. Sometimes I think it's easy for programmers to have a bias against sysadmins because they aren't "creating", but the fact is that the scope of systems a typical sysadmin deals with is far greater than any programmer will ever program. Being able to grasp the scope of things and how they are working at both a high and low level is a special skill, and one that seems particularly applicable to the kind of hacks described in this article. The wardriving and SQL injection, that's kid stuff, right? But what do you do once you're inside the system? That's where he seemed to shine. The fact that he wasn't a great coder I think is more reflective of the fact that he didn't spend a lot of time writing code, but I don't think it reflects on his computer skills in general.