New Scientist has an interesting
interview with Cult of the Dead Cow "foreign minister" Oxblood Ruffin, talking about the group's history and the "hacker"/"cracker" thing.
[the CDC] started in 1984 as a group using early networked computers long
before the Web. You published whatever you wanted, pushing the free speech
envelope. The name actually came from the two guys who started this,
Grandmaster Ratte' and Franken Gibe. They were 14-year-old kids hanging out in
Texas at this abandoned abattoir, one of these big ruined buildings where kids
smoke cigarettes, talk about girls and create mayhem and bust Coke bottles.
Grandmaster is now a hip-hop music producer living in Harlem. And Franken
ended up going to Harvard.
"before you actually had to hack. You had to be considered a bit of a genius
to do anything. Now it's just like any moron can run a script, and the next
thing you know they're taking down the Pentagon."