Hi As,

I guess I made that same gender assumption...of course I come from a generation where names were clearly defined...all Kelly's I knew were girls...like the Johnny Cash song ' A boy named Sue ' not too many parents gave boys girl's names.

On one side you have a group of people who see nothing wrong with breaking into systems and calling themselves "hackers" , while on the other side the good side you have a group of people who spent a good amount of time selling you snake oil ... difference being ???
Like I said...it is cloudy...if these Hackers would all start utilizing their talents to put spammers, virus/trojan writers, crackers, phishers, child pr0ners, etc...out of business...the perception of the term Hackers would greatly increase as being associated with ' the good guys '...but when you have people like Milnik calling himself an ex-hacker in reference to being ' one of the bad guys ' then of course the general public is going to see the term Hacker as a bad thing.

Eg