We feel that large-scale computer organizations, while maintaining a high level of quality and achievement, lose to bureaucracy and red-tape sight of what many of us enjoy about hacking: late night programming sessions filled with soda and Screaming Yellow Zonkers, pounding on sudden inspiration until we've completed a thousand line program just to satisfy our curiosity, learning new and exciting algorithms and useless facts, etc., etc.
To this end, we hereby found The Chico Hackers Guild; a free, no obligation organization dedicated to the spread of computer knowledge to the hacking public.
With that said, I'd like to talk about what the CHG is not. It's not a bunch of crackers. Here's the difference between us and them: we don't consider it a hack to run crack on /etc/passwd to get some passwords. That is, to be blunt, a lame non-hack. Finding ways around security can be hacking, but you have to be doing it correctly. If you are a hacker, you will understand what that means.
We're not out to do anything malicious or destructive. We're here to hack. Now, I must concede that if you only read the newspaper, you probably think hackers are an evil bunch of low down miscreants. You are mistaken. The press has done its damnedest to make "hacker" a dirty word, and they've pretty much succeeded. And we hate them for it. After all, if I describe one of my friends as a hacker to my parents, they'll have a tainted view of this person when I meant it as a compliment.
Nevertheless, I will continue to use the term as God intended, and will attempt to set the record straight whenever possible.
