There are probably as many definitions of the word hacker as there are people who are called hackers, either by themselves or by someone else. There are also a number of variants, such as cracker, script kiddie, and more. We’ll go over each of the better-known words in this area.
Hacker
The word hacker is the most contested of the bunch. Most of the other terms came later, and are attempts to be more explicit about what type of person is being discussed.
Where does the word hackercome from? One of the earlier books on the subject is Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy. You can find his summary of the book here:
www.stevenlevy.com/hackers.html
In this book, Mr. Levy traces the origin of the word hackerto the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1950s; specifically, its use in the MIT Model Railroad Club. A sample of the book can be read here: www.usastores.com/gdl/text/hckrs10.txt
This sample includes the portions relevant to this discussion. MIT is gener- ally acknowledged as the origin of the modern use of the word hacker. There are a few folks who claim that the word hacker was also used earlier among folks who experimented with old tube radio sets and amplifiers. The original definition of the word hacker had to do with someone who hacked at wood, especially in reference to making furniture.
For a wide range of definitions, check here: www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=hacker
Naturally, we’re concerned with the term hacker as it relates to computers. This version of the word has come into such wide popular use that it has almost entirely eliminated the use of the word hacker for all other purposes.
One of the most popular definitions that hackers themselves prefer to use is from The Jargon File, a hacker-maintained dictionary of hacker terms. The entry for hacker can be found here:
www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/hacker.html
Here’s a section of it, though you’ll want to check it out at least once online, as The Jargon File is extensively hyperlinked, and you could spend a fair amount of time cross-referencing words:
hacker n.
[originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A
person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys pro- gramming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular pro- gram, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in ‘a Unix hacker.’ (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or cir- cumventing limitations. 8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence ‘password hacker,’ ‘network hacker.’ The correct term for this sense is cracker.
The Jargon File makes a distinction for a malicious hacker, and uses the term cracker.
Cracker
The Jargon File makes reference to a seemingly derogatory term, cracker. If you were viewing the above definition in your Web browser, and you clicked on the “cracker” link, you’d see the following:
cracker n.
One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker(q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish ‘worm’ in this sense around 1981–82 on Usenet was largely a failure.
Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion against the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques, anyone past larval stage
is expected to have outgrown the desire to do so except for imme- diate, benign, practical reasons (for example, if it’s necessary to get around some security in order to get some work done).
Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crack- erdom than the mundanereader misled by sensationalistic jour- nalism might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open poly-culture this lexicon describes; though crackers often like to describe themselves as hackers, most true hackers consider them a separate and lower form of life.
It’s clear that the term cracker is absolutely meant to be derogatory. One shouldn’t take the tone too seriously though, as The Jargon File is done with a sense of humor, and the above is said with a smile. As we can see from the above, illegal or perhaps immoral activity is viewed with disdain by the “true hackers,” whomever they may be. It also makes reference to cracker being a possible intermediate step to hacker, perhaps something to be overcome.
Without debating for the moment whether this is a fair definition or not, I would like to add an additional, slightly different, definition of cracker. Many years ago when I got my first computer, an Apple ][ clone, most software pub- lishers employed some form of copy protection on their software as an attempt to keep people from pirating their programs. This was from about 1980 to about 1985, and saw some use even much later than that. As with all copy protection, someone would eventually find a way to circumvent the protection mechanism, and the copies would spread. The people who were able to crack the copy pro- tection mechanisms were called crackers. There’s one major difference between this kind of cracker and those mentioned before: copy protection crackers were widely admired for their skills (well, not by the software publishers of course, but by others). Often times, the crack would require some machine language debugging and patching, limiting the title to those who possessed those skills. In many cases, the cracker would use some of the free space on the diskette to place a graphic or message indicating who had cracked the program, a practice perhaps distantly related to today’s Web page defacements.
The thing that copy protection crackers had in common with today’s crackers is that their activities were perhaps on the wrong side of the law. Breaking copy protection by itself may not have been illegal at the time, but giving out copies was.
Arguments could be made that the act of breaking the protection was an intellectual pursuit. In fact, at the time, several companies existed that sold software that would defeat copy protection, but they did not distribute other
people’s software. They would produce programs that contained a menu of software, and the user simply had to insert their disk to be copied, and choose the proper program from the menu. Updates were distributed via a subscrip- tion model, so the latest cracks would always be available. In this manner, the crackers could practice their craft without breaking any laws, because they didn’t actually distribute any pirated software. These programs were among those most coveted by the pirates.
Even though the crackers, of either persuasion, may be looked down upon, there are those who they can feel superior to as well.