Hackers are experts who help to solve problems
I would like to bring to your notice the incorrect usage of the word ‘hacking’ in the March 2015 edition of OSFY. Hackers are programmers who push technology to the forefront, and are keen on solving challenging problems. Kindly refer to the following sources of information: Free as in Freedom at http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ Sadly, marketing people have come up with the term ‘ethical hacking’ for selfish reasons and have corrupted the meaning of hacking. In engineering circles, ‘hacking’ is a good thing, and is a way to improve code and solve problems.
In the article ‘ModSecurity Solves the Manager’s Dilemma’ on Page 61, left column, the author used it in the right context, “…as opposed to ‘hackers’, who don’t perform such malicious stuff,” but subsequently, in the right column, used it incorrectly: “Around 73 per cent of organisations have been hacked through insecure Web applications ...”
There are a few trainers and authors who claim to be ‘Certified Ethical Hackers’, which is a misnomer and a false trap that people fall into. Those offering courses on ‘ethical hacking’ neither teach the basics nor how the security tools are implemented. I would appreciate it if you could make people aware of the terminology, as it is fundamental to the free and open source software work culture. It is the crackers that companies need to be wary of.
—Shakthi Kannan, shakthimaan@gmail.com ED: Thanks for pointing this out. We will certainly ensure our authors use this term correctly.
We are looking forward to arranging one session in the coming month for Linux beginners, for which it would be great help if we could get some support from OSFY. The main purpose of this event is to involve more students who are not familiar with the Linux OSs (like Ubuntu) and provide them with some open source alternatives to Windows based software.
It will be a great help if OSFY could support us by providing some resources or goodies that we can share with our student participants. The event can help us to make students aware about open source technologies, and these resources will motivate students to learn about and explore Linux.
—Hitesh, hitesh.parmar915@gmail.com ED: Thanks for the words of appreciation. We aim to continue publishing well-informed articles so that our readers get to know everything about open source. It really feels great to know about your efforts in popularising FOSS. We are happy that OSFY inspired you to set up this community. We do support such events by way of a media partnership. You can get in touch with us at osfyedit@ efy.in with more details about the event.