I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute.

I have not seen anyone assume that all the citizens of New York are guilty of murder, violence, robbery, perjury, or writing proprietary software.

Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users dont have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.

It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

All governments should be pressured to correct their abuses of human rights.

You know, if you were *really* going to starve, you'd be justified in writing proprietary software.

A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness—not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean “security breaker.”