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Among computer programmers in good standing with the technical community, the words ''hacker'' and ''hacking'' is used more often in the admiring or awed sense of a wizard software developer. People favoring this usage typically look with dismay on the usage of the term as a synonym for Security Cracking . In the non-technical community, the concept of wizard programmer is poorly known, and the meaning of ''hacker'' as 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 (i.e. "I hack around with computers"), the meaning of the term when used in a computer context has shifted over the decades since it first came into use. Furthermore, as usage has spread more widely, the primary meaning of new users of the word has shifted to one which in some ways conflicts with the original primary meaning. Currently, "''hacker''" is used in two main ways, one pejorative and one complimentary. In popular usage and in the media, it generally describes computer intruders or criminals. In the computing community, it describes a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert (For example, " Linus Torvalds , the creator of Linux , is considered by some to be a genius 'hacker'."). The latter is said by some to be the "correct" usage of the word (see the Jargon File definition below). The Mainstream Media 's current usage of the term may be traced back to the early 1980's (see History ). When the term was used by the mainstream media in 1983 , even those in the computer community referred to such activity as "hacking", although this was not the Exclusive Use of the word. In reaction to the increasing media use of the term exclusively in the criminal connotation, the computer community began to differentiate their terminology. Several alternative terms such as " Black Hat " and " Cracker " 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 ". Despite this attempt to preserve the original meaning, since network news use of the term pertained primarily to the criminal activities, the mainstream media and general public continues 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 term is the subject of some controversy. The pejorative connotation is disliked by many who identify themselves as hackers who do not like their historically preferred self-identification used negatively. 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. 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 , identifying those who use the technically-oriented sense (as opposed to the intrusion-oriented sense) as members of the computing community. A possible middle ground position observes that "hacking" describes a collection of skills which are utilized by hackers of both descriptions for differing reasons. A useful analogy is locksmithing, specifically picking locks, which — aside from its being a skill with a fairly high Tropism to 'classic' hacking — is a skill which can be used for good or evil. The primary weakness of this analogy is the popular usage of "hacker" to also describe Script Kiddies , despite their lack of an underlying skill and knowledge base. History ''A timeline of the noun "hack" and etymologically related terms as they evolved in historical English'':
The modern, computer-related form of the term is likely rooted in the goings on at the or Urban Spelunker . The term was fused with computers when members of the Tech Model Railroad Club started working with a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 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'." In the nascent computer culture of the 1960s, the unavoidable analogy to "hacking" programs was the already-established counter-culture practice of ''chopping'' Harley-Davidsons in Southern California: taking them apart and "chopping" their frames, improvising to make them lower, sleeker, faster, hotter than their uncustomized "stock" originals. Originally, the term applied almost exclusively to Programming or Electrical Engineering , 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". Jargon File definition The following is the definition given by the most recent edition of the Jargon File (a dictionary of hacker jargon), which emphasizes the positive sense of "hacker". The definitions in this dictionary were not made through research into common usage, but reflect to a large extent the opinions of its editors. Hence, the following is accepted by some but not all of the hacker community.
The earliest Stanford revisions of the Jargon file ( 1975 ) did not describe the term so positively, including only definitions 4, 5 and 8. The current definition was written in more or less its current form around 1980 at MIT . Definition 8 was "deprecated" in the 1990s by Jargon File editor Eric S. Raymond , a known advocate of the positive usage of "hacker". This deprecation is considered somewhat controversial by some, although use of the term "hacker" (in the computer-related sense) predates the first computer system with security ( CTSS ), and thus necessarily pre-dates any security-related meaning. EXTERNAL LINKS |
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