Michael Conlen says:

The White Hat -vs- Black Hat distinction misses the whole point all together. Someone who is a hacker might break in to computers but not everyone who breaks in to computers is a hacker. Likewise everyone who is a hacker does not break in to computers. Many of them don’t even hack computer systems!

A hacker is someone who is curious, creative and studies a system (any system) to the point of understanding it in a way that allows them to make use of unintended consequences. They do clever and creative things with systems. Sometimes these things are illegal or immoral but not always or even usually.

Someone who studies a piece of software or an operating system to the point of being able to write software that gives them the ability to do things with the system they aren’t normally allowed to do is a hacker. Someone who downloads a few pieces of software from the Internet and uses it to break in to a computer system is a cracker. The difference is in what they had to do to accomplish the task.

Consider the book “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”. This was *the* book on hackers. Published in the early to mid 80s most of the book dealt with constructive hacking such as writing interesting software getting computer systems to do things their creators never imagined. Only in some small detail was the abuse of systems, mostly phone systems, dealt with and then only because they were pranks pulled by some mebers of the MIT model railroad club.

You can continue to abuse the term hacker but it only shows your ignorance.

Ed Campbell says:

John — is this an appropriate time to suggest an equivalent parallel with the well-meaning folks who are premising a whole new campaign to be “Brights” instead of atheists or even “secular humanists”? As much as I sympathize [ atheist since 13, philosophical materialist since 18], I think the campaign stands as much chance as the proverbial snowball in the hot half of Fundamentalist superstition.

J. Otto Tennant says:

The term “hacker” has considerably changed since I first heard it used, perhaps 35 years ago. Then, as I remember, it described a person doing random things to try to fix a problem (seldom with any success.)

(Of course, security issues had not, in any significant way, raised their ugly heads. The most “secure” system in the house would run anything with a valid account number (password? What’s that?) The rest were all sitting on the test floor, waiting for anyone to walk up and re-boot the machine. There was “security” in a sense: nothing was connected to a network, and you had to show a pass to get into the building.)

RonD says:

Looks like the son of the “pointey haired boss” in Dilbert. 🙂

Actually, I don’t remember his name, but I believe he modified a worm virus and re-released it. But he left enough clues behind that
he was easily tracked down.

"-" says:

Isn’t a “hack” a non-structured almost impulsive attack on a problem. Hackers only talk about hacks that work, so after awhile a “hack” is a pragmatic, working solution to a programming problem. Sort of the opposite of “academic.”

At some point, those working in “structured programming” of one sort or another saw “hackers” as something like bums or sneaks. They weren’t doing things the “right” way. Meanwhile a good example of a “hacker” might be Steve Wozniak, who solved problems for HP and for the brand new Apple without consideration of “what should be” concentrating on “what worked.”

Woz is a good example of a hacker since it’s known that he made at least one blue box, the little gizmos that let you walk through the telephone system once you learned the appropriate “sesames.”

At this point, about when the Feds made “unauthorized use of the system” (telephone, cable, computer) a crime in it’s own right (like conspiracy) “hackers” were real bad people.

Now, it’s just a ritual. Some programmers will say “I’m just a hacker and proud of it” because they don’t look up algorithms or develop any kind of formal approach to a programming problem before starting to code. Like a backyard mechanic, some are good, some are bad.

People who use the term “hacker” purely in the negative sense are usually just not really part of the society of programmers and haven’t had to the pleasure of sitting around and talking about “what’s a hacker” and getting mad and yelling, etc., so they just start all over again.

The term is really useful when describing someone’s programming style. She’s a hacker: She jumps right in. She can hack, but she knows what she’s doing: she can fake the supporting paperwork. She can’t hack: She needs time and a formal environment (up to and including explicit step-by-step instructions) in order to finish a project. And usually somebody who can’t hack will turn in the requisite number of coded lines each week, but not be able to wrap a project up.

Or something like that.

URL email: “-“

“–”

ps- John, thanks for the odd prompts for discussions. You just go on about just about anything. That’s good.

Bryan says:

Jim,

True, the linked article was “not real”, but the picture and caption were real.

When there are farcical articles about Bush in The Onion, it’s still a “real” picture of Bush, identitied as Bush.

When I clicked on the link to see who the funny looking kid was and saw the article was a joke, I put the name given into google, and found reputable sites with the same picture.

Bryan