11:22, Thursday 10 Oct., 2002 Link

From Real Hacking Rules!, a speech given at Def Con 10, the hacker's conference: "But the game of building and cracking security, managing multiple identities, and obsessing over solving puzzles is played now on a ten-dimensional chess board. Morphing boundaries at every level of organizational structure have created a new game. In essence, hacking is a way of thinking about complex systems. It includes the skills required to cobble together seemingly disparate pieces of a puzzle in order to understand the system; whether modules of code or pieces of a bigger societal puzzle, hackers intuitively grasp and look for the bigger picture that makes sense of the parts. So defined, hacking is a high calling. [...] In addition to computer hackers, forensic accountants (whistleblowers, really), investigative journalists ("conspiracy theorists"), even shamans are hackers because hacking means hacking both the system and the mind that made it. [...] It is abstract thinking at the highest level, practical knowledge of what's likely, or might, or must be true, if this little piece is true, informed by an intuition so tutored over time it looks like magic". Yes.