[Cialug] SysAdmin FYI

[Matt Stanton]

I was in my teens when the "script kiddies" flooded IRC.  I was in my late teens or early twenties when first-person shooters started (really) becoming popular (not really counting Wolfenstien 3D or Doom 1 or 2... more like Quake, which I believe was the first to allow the player to actually jump over things).  I was even in a gaming clan until I was 30, and only quit because of my inability to play the games after my wreck.  So it's not that I don't "understand" the culture, or that I wasn't ever a part of it.  It's that that culture doesn't exist outside of fantasy.

All of the gamer slang involves making fun of someone for losing a match or being killed.  Stuff like "pwnage" or "epic fail" doesn't denote any respect for the people you are attacking.  Going after a law-abiding sysadmin, then doing a virtual teabagging over him is not respectful.  Yelling "pwned!" when you hack some edge server for some terrorist network doesn't convey the fact that these people actually go out and murder hundreds of our soldiers a year in "The Real World"... especially when most of that hacking probably doesn't even turn up any useful intel.

This guy, in particular, has no respect for the job he is doing as far as I can tell, and these people really need to be more than just network gamers if our security and freedom are at stake.  In the gaming community, no one likes these people anyway.  They are just loud-mouthed people who make the game less enjoyable to play, just as the l33t-spe4kers made IRC nearly unbearable.  Why let them have all our email to read?

-- Matt (N0BOX)

Sent from my ASUS Transformer

-----Original Message-----
From: Zachary Kotlarek <zach at kotlarek.com>
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group <cialug at cialug.org>
Sent: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 2:45 AM
Subject: Re: [Cialug] SysAdmin FYI


On Mar 24, 2014, at 11:57 PM, Matt Stanton <matt at itwannabe.com> wrote:

> It's not so much about age as how this guy acts... or at least how he writes.

Except the difference you’re citing are directly correlated with age — as you note, the language in question came into existence as part of a certain computer-related culture that you are slightly too old to be a part of. These people, simply be being alive at the right time and interested in computer security, would have been widely exposed to script-kiddie (which is itself a dismissive, agist description of behavior not particularly related to age), and they may even have been script-kiddies when they were younger. Why does that mean they are unqualified today?

Have you never heard your grandmother (or a similarly aged person) lament that people today don’t write by hand, or that they use language in ways she finds unbecoming? Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing here — applying cultural judgements across cultures?

	Zach