What is a Hacker?

Jargon File contains a number of definitions of the term 'hacker', most related to technical skills and enjoy solving problems and overcoming limits. If you want to know how a hacker, but only two are really relevant.

There is a community, culture, expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades for the first time-sharing minicomputers and the early ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term 'hacker'. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web works. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to these and other people in the know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.

Hacker mentality is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things like electronics or music - actually, you can find it at the highest level of science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them 'hackers' too - and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of specific media hacker to work, but in this paper we will focus on the skills and attitudes software hackers, and the cultural traditions derived from the term 'hacker'.

There is another group of people who call themselves hackers loudly, but did not. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get kicks out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people crackers' and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers lazy, irresponsible and not very bright, and object security is not able to resolve the hacker made more than your car can Hotwire makes you a car engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers cheated and used the word hacker 'to describe crackers, this does not affect real hackers end.

The fundamental difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break.

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