Culture can make or break a company, and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (News - Alert) credits his company’s success to following what he calls “The Hacker Way.”
Zuckerberg included his manifesto in a document submitted to the SEC (News - Alert) last week. For him, a hacker has nothing to do with groups like Anonymous, who cause mayhem by attacking people they don’t like, but build things instead.
“The word ‘hacker’ has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers,” Zuckerberg said in the document. “In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.”
In Zuckerberg’s view, instead of waiting for management to approve a new project, a hacker just goes ahead and implements it to see if it will work instead. A hacker believes that something can always be improved.
To him, a hacker isn’t someone in a Guy Fawkes mask, but is embodied by figures such as the late Steve Jobs (News 
- Alert), who set out to make computers easier to use.
The term “hacker” had a much more positive connotation back in the 1960s and 1970s, Steven Levy, author of “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (News - Alert)” told the Associated Press.
Hacking culture began with some bright young people at MIT, Levy said, calling it “the Mesopotamia of hacking.”
In the book, Levy details how the MIT (News - Alert) hackers invented things that became standard many years later, with or without the approval of administrators, much the same way that Zuckerberg encourages Facebook developers to take risks.
Not everyone agrees with Zuckerberg’s characterization of hackers, though. Robert D’Ovidio, an associate professor of criminal justice at Drexel University, said, “Symbolically, it doesn’t bode well to Facebook and to potential investors.”
Ideologically, the hacking world divides into two camps: the “white hat” hackers like Zuckerberg who try to build things and keep systems secure, and “black hat” hackers who try to break into computer systems.
Kevin Mitnick is a notorious former “black hat” who now makes his living firmly on the “white hat” side as a security consultant. “I break into computers to find holes before the bad guys do,” Mitnick said.
The term “hacker” only became pejorative in the 1980s, especially after Robert Morris released the notorious Internet worm in 1988.
David Delony is a Bay Area expatriate living in Ashland, Oregon. He combines his lifelong love of both words and technology in his career as a freelance writer. David holds a B.A. in communication from California State University, East Bay.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
TMCnet LOGIN
Webinars
