[dasil003]

Yes, I'm saddened by all the responses here making the basic logical fallacy of affirming the consequent.

It seemed perfectly clear to me that you meant that a hacker is going to have some means of finding his stolen laptop rather than that using Prey makes you some kind of hacker.

And to the criticism that you are running a product, that's ridiculous as well. Do we all solder our own motherboards? Devout Not-Invented-Hereism isn't a prerequisite for being a hacker, and in fact it probably makes you much less effective of one.

[Legion]

It's sad that many of the people who say the word "hacker" means all these positive and inclusive things are often the same people who lambast someone for actually using the word that way to refer to themselves.

Make up your minds. Is it the inclusive, "explorers of technology" meaning where it's more about curiosity and open-mindedness than skill level, or is it your little l337 boys club badge of honor?

[jff]

It's highly desirable to be called a genius, but in general people calling themselves geniuses are looked down upon.

I think among people who do use the word "hacker" to mean someone skilled with computers, it's considered poor form to call yourself a hacker but high praise to be named a hacker. Eric Raymond wrote long screeds about this way back in the 90s when people still gave a damn about him.

Personally, I call somebody who is skilled at breaking systems a hacker. The guy who discovers how to Man-in-the-middle attack an SSL connection is a hacker. The morons in black trenchcoats and leather fedoras who then download a .EXE to automatically do just that and harvest passwords at Starbucks... are fucking scum of the earth script kiddies.

[Legion]

But is "hacker" really analogous to "genius"? I mean, we have a bunch of annual hacker conferences. If "hacker" isn't something you can call yourself, who is going to all of these things?

[jff]

Joke answer: Have you ever been to Def Con? People who wear utilikilts and dyed mohawks unironically probably have no qualms about calling themselves hackers, deservedly or un-.

Real answer: I did actually attend Def Con this year, with the intent of learning about hacking, possibly from hackers. I wouldn't call myself a hacker, I just went because I wanted to learn about the subject. Really the whole topic is not something I worry much about... in my line of work we don't compliment people by saying "he's a good hacker", we just say "he's brilliant" or "she does really great work", which to my mind is a better and less ambiguous compliment.

[icebraining]

>And to the criticism that you are running a product, that's ridiculous as well.

Personally, it's not so much using a product, but 1) giving access to a third-party (the Prey server admins) to his laptop and 2) being limited instead of having complete control.

Prey just seems a poor solution if you know what you're doing. For non-computer geeks is excellent, though.

[dasil003]

That's a value judgement. As a hacker you can't do everything.

Prey is a polished product that you can trust to work. If you are into this sort of thing, certainly you can achieve more functionality and better security by rolling your own, but I don't consider it a prerequisite to hackerdom anymore than soldering your own motherboards. How often do you expect your laptop to be stolen anyway?

[icebraining]

The thing is: rolling my own takes less time than installing Prey. Of course, it won't have bells and whistles, but it'll be much less limited.

[dasil003]

I'm sorry but that claim has no credibility with me. Setting up the proper cron jobs, server-side components, and verifying that everything is working under a variety of circumstances will take much more than the 5 mins it takes to install Prey.

Just because you've already done it and you have a pre-rolled solution doesn't mean you didn't invest that time, and don't fool yourself.

[suivix]

You only need to set up a cron job to create a reverse SSH tunnel into your home server. That way from your home server you could SSH into the machine, no matter where it is.

It's one or two lines of configuration.

[wisty]

If it doesn't work when you really need it though, you can't fix it.