🚀 go-pugleaf

It was a sorrowful sight to see CommunicationsWeek pejoratively malign 
the image of hackers in your April 21st article on "Toll Carrier 
American Network Fears Being 'Hacked' To Pieces" by Brian Watson.

You portrayed hackers as bands of juvenile delinquents and unscrupulous 
trespassers who are bent on ripping off the telephone system.

This is not what hacking is about in the least.  Hackers are individuals 
who take delight in learning about computing, seek to stretch a system's 
capabilities, write code for the sheer fun of it and appreciate the 
intrinsic beauty of software.

Persons engaged in the theft of long distance toll service should not  
be erroneously labeled as hackers.  There is not a jot of evidence of 
improper conduct in hacking and I wish CommunicationsWeek would not use 
the term as if there were.  You're giving a lot of us hackers a bad 
name.


Geoffrey S. Goodfellow
Director, Technology Development,
Cellular Radio Corp., Vienna, VA,
Hacker & Coauthor,
"The Hacker's Dictionary --
A Guide To The World of
Computer Wizards." (Harper & Row)