Hacker Attitude Quotes

Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on the FBI’s list. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them. Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

This is a global thing going on now, which does have very different, very decentralized cultural attitudes of Swiss, German, Italian hackers—and that is good. Italian hackers behave totally differently than German hackers—wherever they are, they need to make good food; with German hackers, they need to have everything well-structured. I’m not saying the one is better than the other, I’m just saying that each of these decentralized cultures has its very beautiful parts. At the Italian hacker conference you can go to the kitchen and you will see a wonderful place; at the German hacker camp you will see a wonderful internet, but you better not look at the kitchen. Still, the heart of it is we are creating. And I think we find ourselves in some kind of a common consciousness which is totally away from our national identity—from being Germans or from being Italians or from being Americans or whatever—we just see that we want to solve problems, we want to work together. We see this internet censorship, this fight by governments against new technology, as some kind of evolutionary

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.

But the largest of those blind spots, perhaps, can be found in the West’s attitude to Ukraine and silence in the face of the cyberwar afflicting it. For a decade, the United States had treated Russian cyberattacks on its neighbors—Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine, above all—as a “distant” problem. The Obama administration had watched since 2015 as Ukraine became a helpless victim and a nation-sized laboratory for Russia’s cruelest hacking techniques. It allowed those hackers to cross one red line after another, including not one but two unprecedented blackout attacks.