The nature of today 's hacker has coded by the way computing was developed

The otaku is the scourge of contemporary Japanese youth culture. The term, popularised in the west by science fiction author William Gibson, describes a "passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects".

Preferring to interact with computers than one another, otaku spend their time in their bedroom, fueled by a steady supply of junk food and information to do things in online networks that are incomprehensible to anyone outside the community.

In most cases these techno-dropouts does not really hurt. But the otaku do become a problem when one of their number hacks into a high-profile database. Suddenly the quiet kid next door is thrust into the spotlight, along with geeks around the globe.

Otaku and their western counterparts have existed as long as computers have been networked. The internet has always held temptations for people with the time, the skills and the inclination to seek out its unsecured treasures. It's fun – and occasionally profitable – to try to break into systems.

But collective of hackers are now increasingly paid attention. Use groups like Anonymous or LulzSec celebrated qualities of the technology: it connects people with similar interests, allowing them to share information freely, and it is the world 's largest collection of archived material, including detailed instructions for performing Denial of Service ( DDoS) attacks. While there are a small subset of women participating in their activities, most people in these communities men.

Well established, there is a gender bias in Internet and Web technology. Each new iteration of the computer codes constructed based on an earlier and, historically, a binary logic programming knowledge patterns associated with male spoken. Had there been more women who could be the first computer languages, there are more female hacker now.

Hacking incidents also lead cultural indicators. After Aleks Gostev, the chief security expert for the global research and analysis team at the anti-virus software developer Kaspersky Labs, attacks, the conscript a network of computers to get out of Russia tend, while malware tends from India . come Gendered attacks could also have different qualities.

Although some recent high-profile attacks have a political agenda, say those who test hacker culture that most of the people who perpetrate these attacks, in it are "for the lols". The researcher Danah Boyd, who has spent the past decade to studying online subcultures, believes that the motivation of people involved in today's otakuto kidnap and hacker communities the attention economy. "I grew up on a hacker culture, but to prove my cohort was about breaking into the so-called secure government and enterprise systems that we could" she says. "Well, there 's another kind of subculture. There is still the safety circuit breaker, but most of it is about capturing a moment that every attention to challenges."

In fact, there is a "look at me" element to the attacks, which allegedly Ryan Cleary allegedly committed. The apparently growing phenomenon of young people disappear into their bedrooms, war is against the establishment, you can just to the computer generation 's way to his attention. The damage that ultimately leads to the systems, their deficiencies exposed by the quiet otaku next door.