
Pastebin: How a popular code-sharing site became a hacker hangout - bjonathan
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/06/05/pastebin-how-a-popular-code-sharing-site-became-the-ultimate-hacker-hangout/
======
p4bl0

        Earlier this year Pastebin was under heavy attack by a hacker.
        This person was creating about 500 new pastes per second, all
        which were very much alike. Each item contained an email
        address and a message saying that I had to contact that email
        address if I wanted this attack to stop.
    
        The requests came from thousands of different IP’s, but I
        managed to stop it for a few minutes until the hacker came up
        with another type of attack. Eventually I contacted the person
        in question. He replied that he was very impressed with my
        infrastructure, and that he wanted to know on what kind of
        hardware and software I was running.
    
        He was a big fan of Pastebin, and simply wanted to test the
        infrastructure. Of course I was fuming with anger at the time
        of the attack. Funnily enough, over time we got to know each
        other, and since then he has helped me guard off various other
        attacks.
    

This quote from the story is the more important to me. It's a great example to
explain to people what is a hacker when all they know about the word is what
the television says.

~~~
leon_
So a hacker is someone who fucks up your website till you do what he demands?

I don't think this is a good example of what a hacker is.

~~~
p4bl0
Not exactly what a hacker _is_ , but why he does what he does. Here it was
simple curiosity and the fact that he actually liked the service (spare the
rod and spoil the child), not at all an evil plan. I think it's a good example
to give while trying to explain what a hacker can be (rather than "is", given
that there are multiple valid definitions), but I agree that this text on its
own it's clearly not sufficient.

------
code_duck
'The code was originally written to operate from a single open-source PHP file
with the code posted publicly so that users could hit “view source” to see how
it operated.'

Is this true, they put their PHP source into the HTML document? Or is this
just an instance of a confused reporter?

~~~
nerfhammer
There would have been a link somewhere on the page to the .phps copy of itself

~~~
code_duck
Yeah, but you don't view that with 'view source' in the browser. I think the
author was confused about the difference between code that runs on the server
and the client.

------
Luyt
I'd say a ' _cracker_ hangout', but that's just me, not willing to let the
popular media bastardize the true meaning of _hacker_.

~~~
eli
Oh, c'mon. You lost that fight at least 15 years ago.

~~~
dorian-graph
And have been completely obliterated lately due to all the "Someone hacked my
Facebook" people -- what actually happened is they left it logged in and some
intelligent fellow posted some horribly amusing and unique status message.

~~~
Jach
As long as programmers know the difference, I think that's all that matters.
The media will do what it wants.

------
duck
This was brought up last week: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595066>

