Hacker definition controversy

[Rayan Lami]

Hacker definition controversy

Hacker is a term that has been used to mean a variety of different things in computing. Depending on the context although, the term could refer to a person in any one of several distinct (but not completely disjointed) communities and subcultures:

People committed to computer security, primarily concerns those who work debugging or fixing security problems (White hats), differentiate from the morally ambiguous Grey hats and the illegal hackers, crackers, for the shake of language, who perform unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication networks such as the Internet (Black hats).

A community of enthusiast computer programmers and systems designers, originated in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This community is notable for launching the free software movement. The World Wide Web and the Internet itself are also hacker artifacts. The Request for Comments RFC 1392 amplifies this meaning as "[a] person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.

The hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s and on software (video games, software cracking (this are in real illegal hackers, turning his designation into crackers, for the shake of language), the demoscene) in the 1980s/1990s. The community included Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen and created the personal computing industry.

Each of these hacker community/culture examples conform to the definition of an umbrella phenomenon: creative consumers.

Today, mainstream (mediums) usage of "hacker" might mostly refer to computer criminals, erroneously noted continuously by the experts during the history, due to the mass media usage of the word since the 1980s and the continuous negligence/incompetence to these days. This includes what hacker slang calls "script kiddies," 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 the general public is unaware that different meanings exist.[citation needed] While the self-designation of hobbyists as hackers is acknowledged by all three kinds of hackers, and the computer security hackers accept all uses of the word, people from the programmer subculture consider the computer intrusion related usage incorrect, and emphasize the difference between the two by calling security breakers "crackers".

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