5 ms·
Pastebin: How a popular code-sharing site became a hacker hangout
- Luyt 15y agoI'd say a 'cracker hangout', but that's just me, not willing to let the popular media bastardize the true meaning of hacker.
- anateus 15y agoThe proper modern term is busticati.
- shareme 15y agoI thought it got changed to anonymous?
- lepht 15y agoCame here to say that -- Although it has been my perception lately that we've been making progress in stealing the term 'hacker' back.
- hvs 15y agoOnly to have it co-opted to mean doing anything. "Hey, I just hacked my resume together in Microsoft Word!", "I just hacked dinner together with some pans and some food!", "That was a great hack putting together that email!"
- eli 15y agoOh, c'mon. You lost that fight at least 15 years ago.
- dorian-graph 15y agoAnd have been completely obliterated lately due to all the "Someone hacked my Facebook" people -- what actually happened is they left it logged in and some intelligent fellow posted some horribly amusing and unique status message.
- Jach 15y agoAs long as programmers know the difference, I think that's all that matters. The media will do what it wants.
- Hawramani 15y agoI wonder if publicly calling yourself a hacker could be used as proof by law enforcement that you admit to engage in illegal activity.
- duck 15y agoThis was brought up last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595066 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595066
- code_duck 15y ago'The code was originally written to operate from a single open-source PHP file with the code posted publicly so that users could hit “view source” to see how it operated.' Is this true, they put their PHP source into the HTML document? Or is this just an instance of a confused reporter?
- nerfhammer 15y agoThere would have been a link somewhere on the page to the .phps copy of itself
- p4bl0 15y agoEarlier this year Pastebin was under heavy attack by a hacker. This person was creating about 500 new pastes per second, all which were very much alike. Each item contained an email address and a message saying that I had to contact that email address if I wanted this attack to stop. The requests came from thousands of different IP’s, but I managed to stop it for a few minutes until the hacker came up with another type of attack. Eventually I contacted the person in question. He replied that he was very impressed with my infrastructure, and that he wanted to know on what kind of hardware and software I was running. He was a big fan of Pastebin, and simply wanted to test the infrastructure. Of course I was fuming with anger at the time of the attack. Funnily enough, over time we got to know each other, and since then he has helped me guard off various other attacks. This quote from the story is the more important to me. It's a great example to explain to people what is a hacker when all they know about the word is what the television says.
- leon_ 15y agoSo a hacker is someone who fucks up your website till you do what he demands? I don't think this is a good example of what a hacker is.
- p4bl0 15y agoNot exactly what a hacker is, but why he does what he does. Here it was simple curiosity and the fact that he actually liked the service (spare the rod and spoil the child), not at all an evil plan. I think it's a good example to give while trying to explain what a hacker can be (rather than "is", given that there are multiple valid definitions), but I agree that this text on its own it's clearly not sufficient.