I was watching some thing about hackers and how they are evil terrorists worse than Osama Bin Laden on TV the other day. I've seen so much media coverage of Kevin Mitnick and hackers in general and it's all the same story, no facts. They just bable and bable about the "fact" that hackers use illegal means to do EVERYTHING. ex.(exageration)-"evil hacker criminals hack into grocery store computers, disable the alarms and steal milk and cereal for their breakfast!!!!, then they hack into hotel computers and illegaly book reservations for free so they can eat there!!!!"
Not really but the media gets really wild sometimes. I heard a phrase the other day that caught my interest, "hackers of many different colored hats". Were they trying to allude to Red hat/black hat(as in bad guy) or something? I doubt it, that would suggest that they actually did some research on what hackers do and use to do it.
I heard some news guy say that hackers use illegal means to acquire source code so they can crack systems. I think they are using the Kevin M. scenario to generalize hackers, most hackers do everything they can to keep their education processes LEGAL! and alot of source code is free BTW. After all, our goal is simply to learn! why would we break the law to do so if we dont have to???
Any feedback on this or examples of what the media has said about "hackers" in general?