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 U.S.-based 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 He is the president of the Viewpoints Research Institute, and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard. Until mid 2005, he was a Senior Fellow at HP Labs, a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University, and an Adjunct Professor at the Massachusetts Institute 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, 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 messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects, and is the precursor to the various Internet forums that are widely used today; and can 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 of November 2, 1988 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 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".

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