Top Five Best Hackers of All Time | Hacker News Reader

Top Five Best Hackers of All Time

marvquin.com

11 pointsdrusenko16 comments

Doh, when I saw "hacker" in the title, I assumed "skilled programmer"...

You would be looking for http://www.marvquin.com/blog/top-five-5-best-non-criminal-ha... . Well, maybe. Also not a great list.

That list is pretty close to who I'd pick, actually. Except that Shimomura would not make mine - I'd place several others, notably Jamie Zawinski and Guy Steele, above him.

This is even worse, mixing up two or three different meanings of the word.

This is more like the "Top Five Best-Known Hackers of All Time". Surely, the real top 5 (with all due respect to RTM), whoever they are, never saw the inside of a courtroom.

"... Mitnick then embarked on a two and a half year coast to coast hacking spree ..."

Mitnick is a good choice for #1 cracker (why do people persist with the 'h' & not the 'cr' ~ http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is ). Mitnick is probably the best known ( http://www.takedown.com/bio/mitnick.html ) but his special area of exploitation is "primarily human" and focus of his book "Art of Deception". This makes him an exceptionally effective cracker, exploiting both man and machine.

While some are good with machines, Mitnick is good with machines & humans cracks ~ http://www.kevinmitnick.com

Top N lists will hopefully not be part of web 3.0 :-P

What are the top N things from web2.0 that you don't want to see in web3.0? ;-)

I wish I could upmod more than once sometimes :-P

These are just computer vandals, none have created anything interesting.

The article title is like a 'list of the best arsonists'. Not classy.

Robert Morris helped create this site, and I consider it interesting.

Acknowledged. But the article doesn't mention Morris as the creator of a social news site for startups, merely a person who caused vast amounts of damage for his own selfish interests. As does Robert's wikipedia entry.

Robert, if you're reading this, do you still (post-sentencing) regret creating the worm?

Selfish interests? He didn't even release it intentionally.

Morris has previously stated the worm was intentionally released to gauge the size of the Internet.

In case some haven't noticed yet, Robert Morris of Y Combinator is #4 on that list. Pretty cool.

It is awesome. Who hasn't dreamed of being featured on the MarvQuin.com Blog? ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com