for sale etiquette?

The media are (not "is") _wrong_. Then 98% of the population is _wrong_. Several million articles are _wrong_. You can call a dog a cat till you're blue in the face, but it will still bark rather than meow. I don't know why "people" do - and it's not really "being a hacker is good"; there are, unfortunately, evil hackers. (Pleasantly few, but still, a very poisonous few; the mindsets that seem essential to hacking appear to be strongly correlated, for reasons I find mysterious but pleasing, with a reasonably functional ethical/moral sense.) I can perhaps explain a bit of why _I_ take such umbrage. Because it leaves us with nothing to call ourselves. Because we were there first and, like anyone who is having something important taken away, are hanging onto it. Because it is an insult to hackers to equate them with crackers - for the vast majority of the hackers, it is an insult on an ethical level, and for the vast majority of the crackers, it is an insult (to the hackers) on a technical level. The best analogy I have found so far for getting across the hacker attitude towards the journalistic mislabeling is to suggest imagining what would happen if an organized-crime boss who insists on calling himself a "businessman" resulted in the media everywhere starting to use the term "businessman" to mean an organized-crime type. Businessmen everywhere of the non-criminal sort would resent it, and rightly so. That is the position we find ourselves in when faced with this mislabeling of lamers with nothing better to do than break into other people's computers as "hackers". Yes, a few of them are hackers - though a cracker's being a hacker correlates strongly negatively with the cracker's making the news, making the journalistic labeling even more a *mis*labeling. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B