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The Heroic Hacker: Legends of the Computer Age

Erik Brunvand
Department of Computer Science
University of Utah, SLC, Utah 84112
elb@cs.utah.edu, www.cs.utah.edu/~elb

Abstract:

The computer hacker has been depicted in the popular press as a socially maladjusted teenager whose goal is to wreak malicious havoc on unsuspecting computer users. In the culture of the computer programmer however, the hacker takes on a far different aspect. The true hacker is raised to heroic status with tales of amazing feats circulated through computer networks in the form of stories and legends. In this paper I discuss the persona of the true hacker, illustrated using hacker legends collected from the Internet.





Erik Brunvand
Tue Oct 15 13:40:41 MDT 1996