One of my main beefs with ESR has always been his extremely hostile views on infosec hackers, or as he pejoratively calls them "warez d00dz". The technical pro

One of my main beefs with ESR has always been his extremely hostile views on infosec hackers, or as he pejoratively calls them "warez d00dz". The technical proficiency of infosec hackers can be remarkably high, particularly since it requires knowledge in all layers of the stack. To say that someone like Michal Zalewski is not a hacker, is absolutely foolish. But, according to ESR, if you're more concerned with "breaking" things than "building" them, you're just a juvenile who's gonna get to five to ten in the slammer after realizing you're not too bright. Under this definition, a person with sophisticated reverse engineering and exploit development skills is not a hacker, but someone who bootstraps Rails on a free Unix, is. I also disagree that not using your real name is for losers, but that one is pretty controversial.