The Conscience of a Hacker
I can tell already this won't be a popular sentiment around here.  Also, I want to preface this by saying I wasn't around in bbs era, and maybe my reaction would be different if I had been.<p>But this kind of irks me: "...ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?  Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?"<p>Did the author ever take a look behind the eyes of the people whose systems he was breaking into and wonder why they didn't react well to having their privacy violated?<p>Perhaps I'm being unfair, but what I get out of it is "I'm smarter than you, so I'm entitled to do whatever I want."  And I get that the author was treated poorly in school, and he has my sympathy for that (I was too).  But that attitude of entitled superiority is dangerous.  It can and has been used to justify really awful things.  I don't think this manifesto should be lionized.