问答题 Hackers never were part of the mainstream establishment, but their current reputation as villains of cyberspace is a far cry from the early days when, first and foremost, they were seen as ardent if quirky programmers, capable of near-miraculous, unorthodox feats of machine manipulation. True, their dedication bordered on fanaticism, and their living habits bordered on the unsavory. But the shift in popular perception to hackers as deviants and criminals is important not only because it affects the hackers themselves and the extraordinary culture that
has grown around them (fascinating as a subject in its own right), but because it reflects shifts in the development, governance, and meaning of the new information technology. These shifts should be questioned and resisted. They unfairly cast hackers in a disreputable light and, more important, they deny the rest of us a political opportunity.
In the early decades- 1960s and 1970s- although hacker antics and political ideology frequently led to skirmishes with the authorities, hackers were generally tolerated with grudging admiration. Even the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the funding agency widely credited for sponsoring invention of the Internet, not only turned a blind eye to unofficial hacker activities but indirectly sponsored some of them. Eric Raymond, prolific philosopher of the Open Source movement, suggests that for DARPA "the extra overhead was a small price to pay for attracting an entire generation of bright young people into the computing field."