[EAS]Girl Hackers

pjk pjk at design.eng.yale.edu
Tue Mar 5 18:49:21 EST 2002


Subject:   Girl Hackers

(from NewsScan Daily, 5 March 2002)
<http://www.newsscan.com/>

GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE HACKER FUN
An unidentified hacker who claims to be a 17-year-old girl says she
was  motivated to write the "Sharpei" worm to dispel the notion that
there  aren't any female virus writers and to annoy Microsoft, rather
than to have  it spread to actual computer users. Going by the name
"Gigabyte," she says  on her Web site that she's a high-school senior
who takes kick-boxing  classes and likes techno and trance music. A
consultant for Sophos, the  U.K. based security company that reported
the worm says, "I just don't know  what she's accomplishing by this.
She's neither hurting nor helping  people." The worm was written to
spread via Outlook Express e-mail, with a  subject line reading,
"Important: Windows Update." (Reuters/New York Times  4 Mar 2002)
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-feminist.html

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To me the consistently remarkable thing about such stories does not
involve gender, but the blithely accepted proposition of building a
huge infra-structure with technology so easily hacked. There are a lot
of teenagers with computers in the world.  --PJK





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