The argument isn't about whether Beto was a part of hacker culture at all. Clearly, he was. It just wasn't the hacker culture the OP was referring to.
> The meaning connoted by cDc is the the one from the movie Wargames
cDc engaged in much more than run-of-the-mill systems exploits. They produced a lot of literature and overall espoused hacker culture as an inclusive one. I'd be very interested to hear what each of them think about how broadly the term "hacker" can be applied, and I'm willing to bet they don't all share the same view.
> The argument isn't about whether Beto was a part of hacker culture at all. Clearly, he was. It just wasn't the hacker culture the OP was referring to.
You can't do that. You can't say "both definitions are valid" and then bristle up when someone doesn't use your preferred definition.
For what it's worth, and not apropos whatever that debate is, I'm very comfortable with how I'm characterizing cDc and what cDc members would in general think about what I'm saying, albeit that the Boston ones would claim that I am not giving them enough credit for also going to weird Boston nerd culture places like the MIT hackers did.
What debate exactly do you think I'm making up? This entire discussion stems from a disagreement about what qualifies as a "hacker", which is all that I have addressed.
I'm saying: there's the Steven Levy notion of "hackers", about exploration and getting extra slots on time-sharing computers and ordering sweet-and-sour bitter melon, and there's the Markoff and Hafner notion, about breaking into DEC for source code and owning up a sizable portion of the NSFnet Internet.
cDc is from the Markoff/Hafner side of "hackerdom".
(That's not a moral argument; there were good people among the Markoff/Hafner-type hackers, and holy shit were some of the white hats in the mid-1990s complete pricks).