Front page, above-the-fold, of today's Boston Globe:

Where agency sees attack, MIT students talk of constructive exploration

This article doesn't really break any news, particularly for those who were at DEFCON or who followed the recent threads. But they did make room for this explanation:

"I've always been interested in electronics," said Anderson, who grew up scouring alleyways for discarded machines. "Ever since I was a little kid, I would take things apart to see how they work."

These days, he proudly calls himself a hacker.

"If a lot of people think hacker, they think of someone who illegally breaks into systems," he said. "I don't at all think that's what hacker means. I think hacking is a culture of curiosity and exploration and learning and building and creating new things."

From the archive:

The Craftsman continues an argument begun in the 19th century, when writers such as John Ruskin and William Morris extolled the crafts remembered in our surnames (Smith, Cartwright, Thatcher, Mason, Fletcher) while lamenting the mind-numbing and soul-destroying labour of the industrial process which was replacing them. A long line of thinkers, from Hegel and Marx to Sennett’s teacher Hannah Arendt, have sympathised with the argument. But Sennett does not think that craftsmanship has vanished from our world. On the contrary: it has merely migrated to other regions of human enterprise, so that the delicate form of skilled cooperation that once produced a cathedral now produces the Linux software system. Linux, for Sennett, is the work of a community of craftsmen “who embody some of the elements first celebrated in the (Homeric) Hymn to Hephaestus”.

The spread of Enterprise Systems has resulted in a declining emphasis on creativity and ingenuity of workers, and the destruction of a sense of community in the workplace by the ceaseless reengineering of the way businesses operate. The concept of a career has become increasingly meaningless in a setting in which employees have neither skills of which they might be proud nor an audience of independently minded fellow workers that might recognize their value.

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

T hacking exposes a deeper clash