Re:Letting Bird’s scooters fly free
by ThrowawayR2 on Thursday October 24, 2019 @08:40AM
(#21344053)
Enabling people to steal scooters by showing how to hack them is not part of the hacker ethos at all, except for the black hat hackers.
I think the hacker ethos mostly is about intent, not about consequences. Teaching people how locks work and about lock picking, for example, is within the hacker ethos, even though that knowledge can be used for stealing stuff.
Giving people a device they can use to pick locks without having any understanding as to why it works, on the other hand, is not considered part of hacker ethos.
The original hackers typically shared hacks freely. It just happened that, in their circles, people were way more interested in satisfying their curiosity than in money.
That is an interesting distinction, because historically, the hacker ethos has been about the pursuit of the latter at the expense of the former.
For example, phone phreaking. Or the Morris Worm.
Stealing scooters and reselling them is just theft. Hacking a scooter for the pleasure of finding out how they tick, or for fun, is still stealing, but it’s also hacking in the original sense.
That doesn’t justify it, but given that we are arguing this point on a forum named after hackers and which celebrated the hacker ethos in its early days...
I suggest we at least understand and appreciate the second definition of “cool,” even if we aren’t going to let go of recognizing that it doesn’t meet the first definition.