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Hacker is a term used to describe different types of computer experts. It is also sometimes extended to mean any kind of expert, especially with the connotation of having particularly detailed knowledge or of cleverly circumventing limits. The meaning of the term, when used in a computer context, has changed somewhat over the decades since it first came into use, as it has been given additional and clashing meanings by new users of the word.Currently, "hacker" is used in two main ways, one positive and one pejorative. It can be used in the computing community to describe a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert (for example: " Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is a genius hacker.").
This is said by some to be the "correct" usage of the word (see the Jargon File definition below).
In popular usage and in the media, however, it generally describes computer intruders or criminals. "Hacker" can be seen as a shibboleth, identifying those who use it in its positive sense as members of the computing community.
As a result of this conflict, the term is the subject of some controversy. The pejorative usage is disliked by many who identify themselves as hackers, and who do not like their label used negatively. Many users of the positive form say the "intruder" meaning should be deprecated, and advocate terms such as " cracker" or "black-hat" to replace it. Others prefer to follow common popular usage, arguing that the positive form is confusing and never likely to become widespread.
A possible middle ground position observes that "hacking" describes a specific (collection of) skill-set(s), and that these skills are utilized by hackers of both descriptions, though for differing reasons. The companion situation which illustrates this is the skills involved in 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.
1 History
Here is a timeline of the noun "hack" and etymologically related terms as they evolved in historical English:
- In French, haquenée means an ambling horse.
- In Old English, tohaccian meant hack to pieces.
- At some point in the 14th century, the word haquenée became hackney, meaning a horse of medium size or fair quality.
- Shortly after, hackney was shortened to hack, and in riding culture the act of "hacking" (as opposed to fox-hunting) meant riding about informally, to no particular purpose.
- 1393 (at the latest): the word had also acquired the meaning of a horse for hire and also "prostitute."
- 1596: hackney was being used as an adjective meaning tired or worn out. Shakespeare also used the word to mean "to make common and overly familiar" in Henry IV, Part I.
- 1700: a hack is a "person hired to do routine work".
- 1704: hack now also means a "carriage for hire".
- 1749Events While in debtor's prison, John Cleland writes Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure . Released from prison, the book was published in London, England. Immediately, the Church of England asked the British Secretary of State to stop the progress: hack means "one who writes anything for hire" (still in use today among writers); see hack writerA hack writer is someone who writes in any language, be it computer code or spoken word, with the purpose of exposing and, in some cases, exploiting a systemic flaw. Many of these exposures have been the cause of better understanding of the attacked syste
- 1802Events March 16 West Point is established. March 25/ 27 Treaty of Amiens between France and United Kingdom ends the War of the Second Coalition. March 28 H. Olbers discovers the asteroid Pallas. May 19 Napoleon Bonaparte establishes the French legion d'ho: hack is used to mean a "short, dry cough" (still in use)
- 1826Events February 11 University College London is founded, under the name University of London''. April 1 Samuel Morey patents the internal combustion engine. June 14- 15 The Auspicious Incident: Mahmud II, sultan of Ottoman Empire, crushes the last mutiny: the expression hack writerA hack writer is someone who writes in any language, be it computer code or spoken word, with the purpose of exposing and, in some cases, exploiting a systemic flaw. Many of these exposures have been the cause of better understanding of the attacked syste is first recorded though hackney writer appeared at least 50 years earlier
- 1898Events January 1 New York City annexes land from surrounding counties, creating the City of Greater New York. The city is geographically divided into five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, and Staten Island. January 13 Emile Zola's J'accus: hack is given the figurative sense of "a try, an attempt".
- 1950sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s Years: 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 Events and trends Technology United States tests the first fusion bomb.: ham radio fans borrowed the term hacking from riding and defined it as creatively tinkering to improve performance.
- 19551955 is a common year starting on Saturday. see link for calendar) Events January events January 2 Panama president Jose Antonio Remon is assassinated. January 19 The Scrabble board game debuts. February events February 8 Nikolai Bulganin ousts Georgi Mal: American English gives it the slang sense of "cope with" (as in "can't hack it"). On the U.S. East Coast, cars were substituted for horses, and hacking was a precursor to cruising.
- 1988: Stalking the Wily Hacker, an article by Clifford Stoll appears in the May 1988 issue of the Communications of the ACM 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 provoked the popular media to spread this usage.
- 1989: The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll is published, and its popularity further entrenches the term in the public's consciousness.
The modern, computer-related form of the term is likely rooted in the goings on at MIT in the 1960s, long before computers became common; the word " hack" was local slang 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 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 is now sometimes called a reality hacker 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 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
- "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".
