Today, mainstream usage mostly refers to computer criminals, due to the mass media usage of the word since the 1980s. This includes script kiddies A script kiddie, or skiddie, occasionally script bunny, script kitty, script-running juvenile or similar, is a derogatory term used to describe those who use scripts or programs developed by others to attack computer systems and networks, people breaking into computers using programs written by others, with very little knowledge about the way they work. This usage has become so predominant that a large segment of the general public is unaware that different meanings exist. While the use of the word by hobbyist hackers is acknowledged by all three kinds of hackers, and the computer security hackers accept all uses of the word, free software hackers consider the computer intrusion related usage incorrect, and try to disassociate the two by referring to security breakers as "crackers" (analogous to a safecracker).

Hacker definition controversy

The terms hacker and hack are marked by contrasting positive and negative connotations. Computer programmers often use the words hacking and hacker to express admiration for the work of a skilled software developer, but may also use them in a negative sense to describe the production of inelegant kludges A kludge is a workaround, a quick-and-dirty solution, a clumsy or inelegant, yet effective, solution to a problem, typically using parts that are cobbled together. This term is diversely used in fields such as computer science, aerospace engineering, Internet slang, and evolutionary neuroscience. Some frown upon using hacking as a synonym for security cracking In common usage, a hacker is a person who breaks into computers, usually by gaining access to administrative controls. The subculture that has evolved around hackers is often referred to as the computer underground. Proponents claim to be motivated by artistic and political ends, and are often unconcerned about the use of illegal means to achieve -- in distinct contrast to the larger world, in which the word hacker is typically used to describe someone who "hacks into" a system by evading or disabling security measures.

Controversy and ambiguity

While "hack" was originally more used as a verb for "messing about" with (e.g. "I hack around with computers"), the meaning of the term has shifted over the decades since it first came into use in a computer context. As usage has spread more widely, the primary meaning of newer users of the word has shifted to one which conflicts with the original primary emphasis.

Currently, "hacker" is used in two main ways, one pejorative and one complimentary. In popular usage and in the media, it most often refers to computer intruders or criminals, with associated pejorative connotations. (For example, "An Internet 'hacker' broke through state government security systems in March.") In the computing community, the primary meaning is a complimentary description for a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert. (For example, "Linus Torvalds Linus Benedict Torvalds (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈliːnɵs ˈtuːrvalds] ; born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer best known for having initiated the development of the Linux kernel and git revision control system. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's, the creator of Linux The Linux kernel is an operating system kernel used by the Linux family of Unix-like operating systems. It is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software, is considered by some to be a hacker.") A large segment of the technical community insist the latter is the "correct" usage of the word (see the Jargon File The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker slang from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab , and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Carnegie Mellon University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute definition below).

The mainstream media The term mainstream media denotes those media disseminated via the largest distribution channels, which therefore represent what the majority of media consumers are likely to encounter. The term also denotes those media generally reflective of the prevailing currents of thought, influence, or activity's current usage of the term may be traced back to the early 1980s (see History Today, mainstream usage mostly refers to computer criminals, due to the mass media usage of the word since the 1980s. This includes script kiddies, people breaking into computers using programs written by others, with very little knowledge about the way they work. This usage is so much predominant in the general public that a large segment of it). When the term was introduced to wider society by the mainstream media in 1983, even those in the computer community referred to computer intrusion as "hacking", although not as the exclusive use of that word. In reaction to the increasing media use of the term exclusively with the criminal connotation, the computer community began to differentiate their terminology. Several alternative terms such as "black hat A black hat is the villain or bad guy, especially in a western movie in which such a character would wear a black hat in contrast to the hero's white hat. The phrase is often used figuratively, especially in computing slang, where it refers to a hacker that breaks into networks or computers, or creates computer viruses" and "cracker In common usage, a hacker is a person who breaks into computers, usually by gaining access to administrative controls. The subculture that has evolved around hackers is often referred to as the computer underground. Proponents claim to be motivated by artistic and political ends, and are often unconcerned about the use of illegal means to achieve" were coined in an effort to distinguish between those performing criminal activities, and those whose activities were the legal ones referred to more frequently in the historical use of the term "hack Hacking refers to the re-configuring or re-programming of a system to function in ways not facilitated by the owner, administrator, or designer. The term(s) have several related meanings in the technology and computer science fields, wherein a "hack" may refer to a clever or quick fix to a computer program problem, or to what may be". Analogous terms such as "white hats A white hat is the hero or good guy, especially in computing slang, where it refers to an ethical hacker or penetration tester who focuses on securing and protecting IT systems" and "gray hats A grey hat, in the hacking community, refers to a skilled hacker who sometimes acts illegally, sometimes in good will, and sometimes not. They are a hybrid between white and black hat hackers. They usually do not hack for personal gain or have malicious intentions, but may or may not occasionally commit crimes during the course of their" developed as a result. However, since network news use of the term pertained primarily to the criminal activities despite this attempt by the technical community to preserve and distinguish the original meaning, the mainstream media and general public continue to describe computer criminals with all levels of technical sophistication as "hackers" and does not generally make use of the word in any of its non-criminal connotations.

As a result of this difference, the definition is the subject of heated controversy. The wider dominance of the pejorative connotation is resented by many who object to the term being taken from their cultural jargon Jargon is terminology which is especially defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, or group. The philosophe Condillac observed in 1782 that "Every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas." As a rationalist member of the Enlightenment he continued, "It seems that one ought to and used negatively,^[7] including those who have historically preferred to self-identify as hackers. Many advocate using the more recent and nuanced alternate terms when describing criminals and others who negatively take advantage of security flaws in software and hardware. Others prefer to follow common popular usage, arguing that the positive form is confusing and unlikely to become widespread in the general public. A minority still stubbornly use the term in both original senses despite the controversy, leaving context to clarify (or leave ambiguous) which meaning is intended. It is noteworthy, however, that the positive definition of hacker was widely used as the predominant form for many years before the negative definition was popularized.

"Hacker" can therefore be seen as a shibboleth A shibboleth is any distinguishing practice that is indicative of one's social or regional origin. It usually refers to features of language, and particularly to a word whose pronunciation identifies its speaker as being a member or not a member of a particular group, identifying those who use the technically-oriented sense (as opposed to the exclusively intrusion-oriented sense) as members of the computing community.

A possible middle ground position has been suggested, based on the observation that "hacking" describes a collection of skills which are used by hackers of both descriptions for differing reasons. The analogy is made to locksmithing, specifically picking locks, which — aside from its being a skill with a fairly high tropism A tropism is a biological phenomenon, indicating growth or turning movement of a biological organism, usually a plant, in response to an environmental stimulus. In tropisms, this response is dependent on the direction of the stimulus (as opposed to nastic movements which are non-directional responses). Viruses and other pathogens also affect what to 'classic' hacking — is a skill which can be used for good or evil. The primary weakness of this analogy is the inclusion of script kiddies in the popular usage of "hacker", despite the lack of an underlying skill and knowledge base.

Fred Shapiro thinks that "the common theory that 'hacker' originally was a benign term and the malicious connotations of the word were a later perversion is untrue." He found out that the malicious connotations were present at MIT in 1963 already and then referred to unauthorized users of the telephone network^[8] (which are also called phreakers Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a subculture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems; such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. As telephone networks have become computerized, phreaking has become closely linked with computer hacking. This is sometimes).

History

• 1950s: amateur radio enthusiasts defined the term hacking as creatively tinkering to improve performance.
• 1959: hack is defined in MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research. MIT is one of two private land-grant universities[b] and is also a sea-grant and space-'s Tech Model Railroad Club The Tech Model Railroad Club is a student organization at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the most famous model railroad clubs in the world, and a wellspring of hacker culture. Formed in 1946, its HO scale layout specializes in automated operation of model trains. In about 1948, the club obtained space in room 20-E-214, on the Dictionary as "1) an article or project without constructive end; 2) a project undertaken on bad self-advice; 3) an entropy booster; 4) to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack(3)." hacker is defined as "one who hacks, or makes them." Much of the TMRC's jargon is later imported into early computing culture.
• 1963: The first recorded reference to hackers in the computer sense is made in The Tech (MIT Student Magazine).^[9]
• 1972: Stewart Brand Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline publishes "S P A C E W A R: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums" in Rolling Stone Rolling Stone is a United States magazine devoted to music, politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J. Gleason, an early piece describing computer culture. In it, Alan Kay Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." He is the president of the Viewpoints Research Institute, and an Adjunct Professor of is quoted as saying "A true hacker is not a group person. He's a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship... They're kids who tended to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals[...] It's a term of derision and also the ultimate compliment."
• 1980: The August issue of Psychology Today Psychology Today is a bi-monthly magazine published in the United States. It is a psychology-based magazine about relationships, health, and related topics written for a mass audience of non-psychologists. Psychology Today was founded in 1967 and features articles on such topics as love, relationships, sex, happiness, success, depression, and self- prints (with commentary by Philip Zimbardo Philip George Zimbardo is an American psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is known for his Stanford prison study and his authorship of introductory psychology textbooks for college students) "The Hacker Papers", an excerpt from a Stanford Bulletin Board discussion on the addictive nature of computer use.
• 1982: In the film TRON Tron is a 1982 American action science fiction film produced by Walt Disney Pictures. It stars Jeff Bridges as the protagonist hacker Kevin Flynn , Bruce Boxleitner as Tron (and Tron's "user", Alan Bradley), Cindy Morgan as Yori (and her "user", Dr. Lora Baines), and Dan Shor as Ram. David Warner plays all three main, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges Jeffrey Leon "Jeff" Bridges is an American actor and musician. His most notable films include The Last Picture Show, Tron, Against All Odds, Starman, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Fisher King, Fearless, The Big Lebowski, The Contender, and Iron Man) describes his intentions to break into ENCOM's computer system, saying "I've been doing a little hacking here". CLU is the software Computer software, or just software, is the collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions telling a computer what to do. The term was coined to contrast to the old term hardware . In contrast to hardware, software is intangible, meaning it "cannot be touched". Software is also sometimes used in a more he uses for this.
• 1983: The movie WarGames WarGames is a 1983 American thriller film written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes and directed by John Badham. The film starred Matthew Broderick in his second major film role, and featured Ally Sheedy, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, and Barry Corbin. The film follows David Lightman , a young hacker who unwittingly accesses WOPR, a United, featuring a computer intrusion into NORAD North American Aerospace Defense Command is a joint organization of Canada and the United States that provides aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and defense for the two countries. It was founded on May 12, 1958 (an effect of the Cold War) as a joint command between the governments of Canada and the United States, as the North American Air, is released. A gang of 6 teenagers is caught breaking into dozens of computer systems, including that of Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS), located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The laboratory is one of the largest science and technology institutions in the world that conducts multidisciplinary research for fields such as.^[10] Newsweek Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence. Newsweek is published in four English language editions and 12 features the cover story "Beware: Hackers at play."^[11] First Usenet Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980. Users read and post public messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles bulletin board systems (BBS) in most respects, and is the precursor to the various Internet forums that are widely used today; post on the use of the term hacker in the media (CBS News) to mean computer criminal.^[12] Pressured by media coverage of computer intrusions, Congress begins work on new laws for computer security.^[13]
• 1984: Steven Levy Steven Levy is an American journalist who has written several books on computers, technology, cryptography, the Internet, cybersecurity, and privacy publishes Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is a book by Steven Levy about hacker culture. It was published in 1984 in Garden City, New York by Anchor Press/Doubleday. Levy describes the people, the machines, and the events that defined the Hacker Culture and the Hacker Ethic, from the early mainframe hackers at MIT, to the self-made hardware. The book publicizes, and perhaps originates the phrase "Hacker Ethic" and gives a codification of its principles.
• 1986: The Mentor writes The Hacker Manifesto, and publishes it in Phrack Phrack is an ezine written by and for hackers first published November 17, 1985. Described by Fyodor as "the best, and by far the longest running hacker zine," the magazine is open for contributions by anyone who desires to publish remarkable works or express original ideas on the topics of interest. It has a wide circulation which.
• 1988: Stalking the Wily Hacker, an article by Clifford Stoll Clifford Stoll is a U.S. astronomer and author. He received his Ph.D. from University of Arizona in 1980. During the 1960s and '70s, Stoll was assistant chief engineer at WBFO, a public radio station in Buffalo, New York appears in the May 1988 issue of the Communications of the ACM Communications of the ACM is the flagship monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). First published in 1957, CACM is sent to all ACM members, currently numbering about 80,000. The articles are intended for readers with backgrounds in all areas of computer science and information systems management. The focus is on the and uses the term hacker in the sense of a computer criminal. Later that year, the release by Robert Tappan Morris, Jr. of the so-called Morris worm The Morris worm or Internet worm was one of the first computer worms distributed via the Internet. It is considered the first worm and was certainly the first to gain significant mainstream media attention. It also resulted in the first conviction in the US under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It was written by a student at Cornell provoked the popular media to spread this usage.
• 1989: The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll Clifford Stoll is a U.S. astronomer and author. He received his Ph.D. from University of Arizona in 1980. During the 1960s and '70s, Stoll was assistant chief engineer at WBFO, a public radio station in Buffalo, New York is published, and its popularity further entrenches the term in the public's consciousness.
• 2000: Michael Calce (better known as MafiaBoy MafiaBoy was the Internet alias of Michael Calce, a high school student from the middle-class suburban area of the West Island in Montreal, Canada who launched a series of highly publicized denial-of-service attacks in February 2000 against large commercial websites including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE, eBay, and CNN) attacks and disables Yahoo!, Amazon.com, CNN, Dell, Inc., and E*TRADE. President calls for emergency Cyber Security Summit as a result of the attacks. The estimated losses in the attacks was 1.2 billion USD.
• 2008: Global movement of Hackerspaces A hackerspace or hackspace is a real (as opposed to virtual) place where people with common interests, usually in science, technology, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and collaborate emerges. These labs are technological, cultural and social creative places enabling hackers to develop projects together, code, create open source projects or hardware designs.

Contemporary use

The modern, computer-related use of the term is considered likely rooted in the goings on at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research. MIT is one of two private land-grant universities[b] and is also a sea-grant and space- (MIT) in the 1960s, long before computers became common; the word "hack Hacking refers to the re-configuring or re-programming of a system to function in ways not facilitated by the owner, administrator, or designer. The term(s) have several related meanings in the technology and computer science fields, wherein a "hack" may refer to a clever or quick fix to a computer program problem, or to what may be" was local slang Slang is the use of informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's dialect or language. Slang is often to be found in areas of the lexicon that refer to things considered taboo . It is also used to identify with one's peers which had a large number of related meanings. One was a simple, but often inelegant, solution to a problem. It also meant any clever prank perpetrated by MIT students; logically, the perpetrator was a hacker. To this day the terms hack and hacker are used in several ways at MIT, without necessarily referring to computers. When MIT students surreptitiously put a fake police car atop the dome on MIT's Building 10, that was a hack, and the students involved were therefore hackers. Another type of hacker — one who explores undocumented or unauthorized areas in buildings — is now called a reality hacker or urban spelunker.

The term was fused with computers when members of the Tech Model Railroad Club The Tech Model Railroad Club is a student organization at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the most famous model railroad clubs in the world, and a wellspring of hacker culture. Formed in 1946, its HO scale layout specializes in automated operation of model trains. In about 1948, the club obtained space in room 20-E-214, on the started working with a Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American computer company, a leading vendor in the minicomputer market though the 1960s and 1970s, and for a long time one of the most admired within the hacker community.[citation needed] PDP-1 The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1960. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at MIT, BBN and elsewhere. The PDP-1 was also the original hardware for playing history's first computerized video game, Steve Russell's Spacewar! computer and applied local model railroad slang to computers.

The earliest known use of the term in this manner is from the 20 November 1963 issue of The Tech, the student paper of MIT:

Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Prof. Carlton Tucker, administrator of the Institute phone system. […] The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found. […] Because of the 'hacking', the majority of the MIT phones are 'trapped'.

Originally, the term "hack" was applied almost exclusively to programming Computer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging / troubleshooting, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in a programming language. The code may be a modification of an existing source or something completely new. The purpose of programming is to create a program that or electrical engineering Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical power supply. It now covers a range of subtopics, but it has come to be used in some circles for almost any type of clever circumvention, in phrases such as "hack the media", "hack your brain" and "hack your reputation".

Negative usage in engineering

Another meaning of the term "hack", similar to kludge A kludge is a workaround, a quick-and-dirty solution, a clumsy or inelegant, yet effective, solution to a problem, typically using parts that are cobbled together. This term is diversely used in fields such as computer science, aerospace engineering, Internet slang, and evolutionary neuroscience and distinct from both the positive and security-related meanings discussed above, derives from the everyday English sense "to cut or shape by or as if by crude or ruthless strokes" [Merriam-Webster]. In other words to "hack" at an original creation, as if with an axe, is to force-fit it into being usable for a task not intended by the original creator, and a "hacker" would be someone who does this habitually. (The original creator and the hacker may be the same person.)

This usage is common in both programming^[14] and engineering. In programming, hacking in this sense appears to be tolerated and seen as a necessary compromise in many situations. In non-software engineering, the culture is less tolerant of unmaintainable solutions, even when intended to be temporary, and describing someone as a "hacker" might imply that they lack professionalism. In this sense, the term has no real positive connotations, except for the idea that the hacker is capable of doing modifications that allow a system to work in the short term, and so has some sort of marketable skills. There is always, however, the understanding that a more skillful, or technical, logician could have produced successful modifications that would not be considered a "hack-job".

The definition is similar to other, non-computer based, uses of the term "hack-job". For instance, a professional modification of a production sports car into a racing machine would not be considered a hack-job, but a cobbled together backyard mechanic's result could be. Even though the outcome of a race of the two machines could not be assumed, a quick inspection would instantly reveal the difference in the level of professionalism of the designers.

Computer security hackers

In computer security, a hacker is someone who focuses on security mechanisms of computer and network systems. While including those who endeavor to strengthen such mechanisms, it is more often used by the mass media and popular culture to refer to those who seek access despite these security measures. That is, the media portrays the 'hacker' as a villain. Nevertheless, parts of the subculture see their aim in correcting security problems and use the word in a positive sense. They operate under a code, which acknowledges that breaking into other people's computers is bad, but that discovering and exploiting security mechanisms and breaking into computers is still an interesting activity that can be done ethically and legally. Accordingly, the term bears strong connotations that are favorable or pejorative, depending on the context.

The subculture around such hackers is termed network hacker subculture, hacker scene or computer underground. It initially developed in the context of phreaking during the 1960s and the microcomputer BBS scene of the 1980s. It is implicated with 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and the alt.2600 newsgroup.

By 1983, hacking in the sense of breaking computer security had already been in use as computer jargon,^[15] but there was no public awareness about such activities.^[16] However, the release of the movie WarGames that year raised the public belief that computer security hackers (especially teenagers) could be a threat to national security. This concern became real when a gang of teenage hackers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin known as The 414s broke into computer systems throughout the United States and Canada, including those of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Security Pacific Bank. The case quickly grew media attention,^[10][17] and 17-year-old Neal Patrick emerged as the spokesman for the gang, including a cover story in Newsweek entitled "Beware: Hackers at play", with Patrick's photograph on the cover.^[11] The Newsweek article appears to be the first use of the word hacker by the mainstream media in the pejorative sense.

As a result of news coverage, congressman Dan Glickman called for an investigation and new laws about computer hacking.^[18] Neal Patrick testified before the U.S. House of Representatives on September 26, 1983 about the dangers of computer hacking, and six bills concerning computer crime were introduced in the House that year.^[19] As a result of these laws against computer criminality, white hat, grey hat and black hat hackers try to distinguish themselves from each other, depending on the legality of their activities.

The programmer subculture of hackers

The computer security use is contrasted by the different understanding of hacker as a person who follows a spirit of playful cleverness and loves programming. It is found in an originally academic movement unrelated to computer security and most visibly associated with free software and open source. It also has a hacker ethic, based on the idea that writing software and sharing the result on a voluntary basis is a good idea, and that information should be free, but that it's not up to the hacker to make it free by breaking into private computer systems. Academic hackers disassociate from the mass media's pejorative use of the word 'hacker' referring to computer security, and usually prefer the term 'cracker' for that meaning.

In this hacker culture, a computer hacker is a person who enjoys designing software and building programs with a sense for aesthetics and playful cleverness. The term hack in this sense can be traced back to "describe the elaborate college pranks that...students would regularly devise" (Levy, 1984 p. 10). To be considered a 'hack' was an honour among like-minded peers as "to qualify as a hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style and technical virtuosity" (Levy, 1984 p. 10)

According to Eric S. Raymond,^[20] the Open source and Free Software hacker subculture developed in the 1960s among ‘academic hackers’^[21] working on early minicomputers in computer science environments in the United States. After 1969 it fused with the technical culture of the pioneers of the Arpanet. The PDP-10 machine AI at MIT, which was running the ITS operating system and was connected to the Arpanet, provided an early hacker meeting point. After 1980 the subculture coalesced with the culture of Unix, and after 1987 with elements of the early microcomputer hobbyists that themselves had connections to radio amateurs in the 1920s. Since the mid-1990s, it has been largely coincident with what is now called the free software and open source movement.

Many programmers have been labeled "great hackers,"^[22] but the specifics of who that label applies to is a matter of opinion. Certainly major contributors to computer science such as Edsger Dijkstra and Donald Knuth, as well as the inventors of popular software such as Linus Torvalds (Linux), and Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson (the C programming language) are likely to be included in any such list; see also List of programmers. People primarily known for their contributions to the consciousness of the academic hacker culture include Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement and the GNU project, president of the Free Software Foundation and author of the famous Emacs text editor as well as the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), and Eric S. Raymond, one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative and writer of the famous text The Cathedral and the Bazaar and many other essays, maintainer of the Jargon File (which was previously maintained by Guy L. Steele, Jr.).

Within the academic hacker culture, the term hacker is also used for a programmer who reaches a goal by employing a series of modifications to extend existing code or resources. In this sense, it can have a negative connotation of using kludges to accomplish programming tasks that are ugly, inelegant, and inefficient. This derogatory form of the noun "hack" is even used among users of the positive sense of "hacker" (some argue that it should not be, due to this negative meaning; others argue that some kludges can, for all their ugliness and imperfection, still have "hack value"). In a very universal sense, hacker also means someone who makes things work beyond perceived limits in a clever way in general.^[3] That is, people who apply the creative attitude of software hackers in fields other than computing. This includes even activities that predate computer hacking, for example reality hackers.^[23] More recent examples of this usage are wetware hackers and media hackers. According to the Jargon File the word hacker was used in a similar meaning among radio amateurs already in the 1950s.^[24]

The culture sometimes uses jargon which is "incomprehensible to outsiders".^[25] Examples are 'losing' "when a piece of equipment is not working"^[25] and 'munged' "when a piece of equipment is ruined".^[25]

Home computer hackers

In a third meaning, hacker refers to computer hobbyists who push the limits of their software or hardware. The home computer hacking subculture relates to the hobbyist home computing of the late 1970s, beginning with the availability of MITS Altair. An influential organization was the Homebrew Computer Club.

The areas that did not fit together with the academic hacker subculture focus mainly on commercial computer and video games, software cracking and exceptional computer programming (demo scene). Also of interest to some members of this group is the modification of computer hardware and other electronic devices, see modding.

Overlaps and differences

The main basic difference between academic and computer security hackers is their mostly separate historical origin and development. However, the Jargon File reports that considerable overlap existed for the early phreaking at the beginning of the 1970s. An article from MIT's student paper The Tech used the term hacker in this context already in 1963 in its pejorative meaning for someone messing with the phone system.^[8] The overlap quickly started to break when people joined in the activity who did it in a less responsible way.^[26] This was the case after the publication of an article exposing the activities of Draper and Engressias.

According to Raymond, academic hackers usually work openly and use their real name, while computer security hackers prefer secretive groups and identity-concealing aliases.^[27] Also, their activities in practice are largely distinct. The former focus on creating new and improving existing infrastructure (especially the software environment they work with), while the latter primarily and strongly emphasize the general act of circumvention of security measures, with the effective use of the knowledge (which can be to report and help fixing the security bugs, or exploitation for criminal purpose) being only rather secondary. The most visible difference in these views was in the design of the MIT hackers' Incompatible Timesharing System, which deliberately didn't have any security measures.

There are some subtle overlaps, however, since basic knowledge about computer security is also common within the academic hacker community. For example, Ken Thompson noted during his 1983 Turing Award lecture that it is possible to add code to the UNIX "login" command that would accept either the intended encrypted password or a particular known password, allowing a back door into the system with the latter password. He named his invention the "Trojan horse." Furthermore, Thompson argued, the C compiler itself could be modified to automatically generate the rogue code, to make detecting the modification even harder. Because the compiler is itself a program generated from a compiler, the Trojan horse could also be automatically installed in a new compiler program, without any detectable modification to the source of the new compiler. However, Thompson disassociated himself strictly from the computer security hackers: "I would like to criticize the press in its handling of the 'hackers,' the 414 gang, the Dalton gang, etc. The acts performed by these kids are vandalism at best and probably trespass and theft at worst. ... I have watched kids testifying before Congress. It is clear that they are completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts."^[28]

The academic hacker community sees secondary circumvention of security mechanisms as legitimate if it is done to get practical barriers out of the way for doing actual work. In special forms, that can even be an expression of playful cleverness.^[29] However, the systematic and primary engagement in such activities is not one of the actual interests of the academic hacker subculture and it doesn't have significance in its actual activities, either.^[27] A further difference is that, historically, academic hackers were working at academic institutions and used the computing environment there. In contrast, the prototypical computer security hacker had access exclusively to a home computer and a modem. However since the mid-1990s, with home computers that could run Unix-like operating systems and with inexpensive internet home access being available for the first time, many people from outside of the academic world started to take part in the academic hacking subculture.

Since the mid-1980s, there are some overlaps in ideas and members with the computer security hacking community. The most prominent case is Robert T. Morris, who was a user of MIT-AI, yet wrote the Morris worm. The Jargon File hence calls him "a true hacker who blundered".^[30] Nevertheless, members of the academic subculture have a tendency to look down on and disassociate from these overlaps. They commonly refer disparagingly to people in the computer security subculture as crackers, and refuse to accept any definition of hacker that encompasses such activities. The computer security hacking subculture on the other hand tends not to distinguish between the two subcultures as harshly, instead acknowledging that they have much in common including many members, political and social goals, and a love of learning about technology. They restrict the use of the term cracker to their categories of script kiddies and black hat hackers instead.

All three subcultures have relations to hardware modifications. In the early days of network hacking, phreaks were building blue boxes and various variants. The academic hacker culture has stories about several hardware hacks in its folklore, such as a mysterious 'magic' switch attached to a PDP-10 computer in MIT's AI lab, that, when turned off, crashed the computer.^[31] The early hobbyist hackers built their home computers themselves, from construction kits. However, all these activities have died out during the 1980s, when the phone network switched to digitally controlled switchboards, causing network hacking to shift to dialing remote computers with modems, when pre-assembled inexpensive home computers were available, and when academic institutions started to give individual mass-produced workstation computers to scientists instead of using a central timesharing system. The only kind of widespread hardware modification nowadays is case modding.

An encounter of the academic and the computer security hacker subculture occurred at the end of the 1980s, when a group of computer security hackers, sympathizing with the Chaos Computer Club (who disclaimed any knowledge in these activities), broke into computers of American military organizations and academic institutions. They sold data from these machines to the Soviet secret service, one of them in order to fund his drug addiction. The case could be solved when Clifford Stoll, a scientist working as a system administrator, found ways to log the attacks and to trace them back (with the help of many others). 23, a German film adaption with fictional elements, shows the events from the attackers' perspective. Stoll described the case in his book The Cuckoo's Egg and in the TV documentary The KGB, the Computer, and Me from the other perspective. According to Eric S. Raymond, it "nicely illustrates the difference between 'hacker' and 'cracker'. Stoll's portrait of himself, his lady Martha, and his friends at Berkeley and on the Internet paints a marvelously vivid picture of how hackers and the people around them like to live and how they think."^[32]

See also

• Hack (technology)
• Category:Computer hacking
• History of free software
• Timeline of computer security hacker history
• Hacker Ethic
• Patriot hacking
• List of fictional hackers

References

1. ^ Löwgren, Jonas (February 23, 2000). "Hacker culture(s): Origins". http://webzone.k3.mah.se/k3jolo/HackerCultures/origins.htm. Retrieved 2008-10-18.
2. ^ Raymond, Eric (25 August 2000). "The Early Hackers". A Brief History of Hackerdom. Thyrsus Enterprises. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/hacker-history/ar01s02.html. Retrieved 6 December 2008.
3. ^ ^{a b} Eric Steven Raymond (2001). "What Is a Hacker?". How To Become A Hacker. Thyrsus Enterprises. http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is. Retrieved 2008-10-18.
4. ^ Levy, part 2
5. ^ Levy, part 3
6. ^ Sterling, Bruce. "cyberview_91.report". http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/cyberview_91.report. ""hackers" had built the entire personal computer industry. Jobs was a hacker, Wozniak too, even Bill Gates, the youngest billionaire in the history of America -- all "hackers.""
7. ^ "TMRC site". Archived from the original on 2006-05-03. http://web.archive.org/web/20060503072049/http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html.
8. ^ ^{a b} Fred Shapiro: Antedating of "Hacker". American Dialect Society Mailing List (13. June 2003)
9. ^ The Origin of "Hacker", http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
10. ^ ^{a b} Elmer-DeWitt, Philip (August 29, 1983), "The 414 Gang Strikes Again", Time magazine: 75, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,949797,00.html
11. ^ ^{a b} "Beware: Hackers at play", Newsweek: 42–46,48, September 5, 1983
12. ^ j...@uvacs. UUCP (19-September-83 13:50:25 EDT). "for hack ( er ) s who want to complain to CBS". net.followup net.misc, net.followup. (Web link).
13. ^ David Bailey, "Attacks on Computers: Congressional Hearings and Pending Legislation," sp, p. 180, 1984 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 1984.
14. ^ As demonstrated by a Google code search for "HACK"
15. ^ See the 1981 version of the Jargon File, entry "hacker", last meaning.
16. ^ Computer hacking: Where did it begin and how did it grow?. WindowSecurity.com. October 16, 2002. http://www.windowsecurity.com/whitepapers/Computer_hacking_Where_did_it_begin_and_how_did_it_grow_.html.
17. ^ Detroit Free Press, September 27, 1983
18. ^ "Timeline: The U.S. Government and Cybersecurity". Washington Post. 2002. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50606-2002Jun26.html. Retrieved 2006-04-14.
19. ^ David Bailey, "Attacks on Computers: Congressional Hearings and Pending Legislation," sp, p. 180, 1984 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 1984.
20. ^ Eric S.Raymond: A Brief History of Hackerdom (2000)
21. ^ Raymond, Eric Steven (19 September 2003). "Reasons to Believe". The Art of Unix Programming. Addison-Wesley. http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch20s06.html. Retrieved 2008-11-16.
22. ^ Graham, Paul (2004). "Great Hackers". http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html.
23. ^ See for example the MIT Gallery of Hacks
24. ^ hacker. http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html. Retrieved 2008-10-18.
25. ^ ^{a b c} Levy, Steven (2001) [1984]. Hackers: Heroes of the Compuer Revolution. Penguin Books. p. 9. ISBN 0141000511.
26. ^ phreaking. http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/P/phreaking.html. Retrieved 2008-10-18.
27. ^ ^{a b} cracker. http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/cracker.html. Retrieved 2008-10-18.
28. ^ Thompson, Ken (August 1984). "Reflections on Trusting Trust" (PDF). Communications of the ACM 27 (8): 761. doi:10.1145/358198.358210. http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf.
29. ^ Richard Stallman (2002). "The Hacker Community and Ethics: An Interview with Richard M. Stallman". GNU Project. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-hack.html. Retrieved 2008-10-18.
30. ^ Part III. Appendices. http://catb.org/jargon/html/pt03.html#bibliography. Retrieved 2008-10-18.
31. ^ A Story About ‘Magic'. http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html. Retrieved 2008-10-18.
32. ^ Part III. Appendices. http://catb.org/jargon/html/pt03.html. Retrieved 2008-10-18.

Further reading

• Michael Hasse: Die Hacker: Strukturanalyse einer jugendlichen Subkultur (1994)

Computer security

• Logik Bomb: Hacker's Encyclopedia (1997)
• Katie Hafner & John Markoff: Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (Simon & Schuster, 1991), ISBN 0-671-68322-5.
• Sterling, Bruce (1992). The Hacker Crackdown. Bantam. ISBN 0-553-08058-X. http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html.
• Slatalla, Michelle; Joshua Quittner (1995). Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-017030-1.
• Dreyfus, Suelette (1997). Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier. Mandarin. ISBN 1-86330-595-5.
• Verton, Dan (2002). The Hacker Diaries : Confessions of Teenage Hackers. McGraw-Hill Osborne Media. ISBN 0-07-222364-2.
• Thomas, Douglas (2002). Hacker Culture. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0816633452.
• Taylor, Paul A. (1999). Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime. Routledge. ISBN 9780415180726. http://insecure.org/stf/them_and_us.txt.
• Levy, Steven (2002). Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age. Penguin. ISBN 0140244328.
• Ventre, Daniel (2009). Information Warfare. Wiley - ISTE. ISBN 9781848210943. http://infowar.romandie.com.

Free Software/Open Source

• Raymond, Eric S.; Steele, Guy L., eds (1996). The New Hacker's Dictionary. The MIT Press. ISBN 0262680920.
• Raymond, Eric S. (2003). The Art of Unix Programming. Prentice Hall International. ISBN 0131429019.
• Levy, Steven (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-19195-2.
• Turkle, Sherry (1984). The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. MIT Press. ISBN 0262701111.
• Graham, Paul (2004). Hackers and Painters. Beijing: O'Reilly. ISBN 0-59-600662-4.
• Lakhani, Karim R.; Wolf, Robert G. (2005). "Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects". in Feller, J.; Fitzgerald, B.; Hissam, S. et al.. Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. MIT Press. http://freesoftware.mit.edu/papers/lakhaniwolf.pdf.
• Himanen, Pekka (2001). The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. Random House. ISBN 0375505660.
• Ingo, Henrik (2006). Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source. Lulu.com. ISBN 1847286119. http://www.openlife.cc/onlinebook.

External links

• Interview with Steven Levy: About the different hacker subcultures and their relations.
• The Word "Hacker"
• What is a Hacker?, Brian Harvey
• "What is a Hacker?" by Bruce Schneier
• Steve Wozniak Discusses the original meaning of hacker

Computer security

• Hacking in 17 easy steps, by Doug Mclean 1995.

Free Software/Open Source

• How To Become A Hacker by Eric S. Raymond, open source perspective
• The Hacker Community and Ethics: An interview with Richard M. Stallman, 2002

Categories: Computer hacking | Computing culture | Naming controversies | Computing terminology

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• Computing Culture
• Hacker: Dictionary
• Computer: Encyclopedia
• Computing: Encyclopedia
• Computers: Hacking: Directory

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