Hacker Schools

Reuters has a story today about an LA-based “Hacker College,” where people pay 4K to learn how to be “ethical hackers.”

This is somewhat of an oxymoron, since the word “hacker” started out with only the most ethical of implications. I’m talking about the so-called “Hacker Ethic,” as described in Steven Levy’s wonderful book about the early days at the computer labs at MIT and Stanford. Despite all the sensational press about “unethical” hackers, I find that, despite the bad eggs, many of these people I run across are far from the cavalier punks the media often portrays.

This isn’t the only hacker school around. The government has had its cybercorps computer security scholarships in action for a few years. And this year the Electronic Entertainment Exposition, the big gaming convention in LA, I attended a Hacker University session run by Macrovision, the creators of copyprotection wares.