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Hacker culture

Not to be confused with Security hacker.

The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming limitations of software systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes. The act of engaging in activities (such as programming or other media) in a spirit of playfulness and exploration is termed "hacking." However, the defining characteristic of a hacker is not the activities performed themselves (e.g. programming), but the manner in which it is done and whether it is something exciting and meaningful.

This culture began back in the 1960s at MIT, where students banded together to release information on the internet they thought should be public information. Often referred to as, "computer-science freaks."

Richard Stallman explains about hackers who program:

What they had in common was mainly love of excellence and programming. They wanted to make their programs that they used be as good as they could. They also wanted to make them do neat things. They wanted to be able to do something in a more exciting way than anyone believed possible and show "Look how wonderful this is. I bet you didn't believe this could be done."

People in hacker culture have a unique desire to practice their skills while simultaneously trying to have fun like children.

Definition

The term hacker was first coined in the fourteenth century, as a term for someone who did not have a lot of knowledge in something. The Jargon File, an influential but not universally accepted compendium of hacker slang, defines hacker as "A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary." The Request for Comments (RFC) 1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, 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 word "hacker" derives from the seventeenth-century word of a "lusty laborer" who harvested fields by dogged and rough swings of his hoe. Although the idea of "hacking" has existed long before the term "hacker"‍—‌with the most notable example of Lightning Ellsworth, it was not a word that the first programmers used to describe themselves. In fact, many of the first programmers were from engineering or physics backgrounds.

"But from about 1945 onward (and especially during the creation of the first ENIAC computer) some programmers realized that their expertise in computer software and technology had evolved not just into a profession, but into a passion" (46).

There was a growing awareness of a style of programming different from the cut and dried methods employed at first, but it was not until the 1960s that the term hackers began to be used to describe proficient computer programmers. Therefore, the fundamental characteristic that links all who identify themselves as hackers are ones who enjoy "…the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming and circumventing limitations of programming systems and who tries to extend their capabilities" (47). With this definition in mind, it can be clear where the negative implications of the word "hacker" and the subculture of "hackers" came from. The media started using the word "hacker" heavily when Google Maps was released to the public in 2005. People would mess with Google's code to add whatever they wanted to the map, which caught wind with the media and hackers began to have a negative connotation.

Hacker vs. Cracker

A hacker that hacks ethically. Image taken by devdsp

Some common nicknames among this culture include "crackers" who are unskilled thieves who mainly rely on luck. Others include "phreak"‍—‌which refers to a type of skilled crackers and "warez d00dz"‍—‌which is a kind of cracker that acquires reproductions of copyrighted software. Furthermore, there are other hackers who are hired to test security, they are called "pentesters" or "tiger teams".

As documented in the Jargon File, these hackers are disappointed by the mass media and general public's usage of the word hacker, whose primary focus was for malevolent purposes, to refer to security breakers, calling them "crackers" instead. This includes both "good" crackers ("white hat hackers") who use their computer security related skills and knowledge to learn more about how systems and networks work and to help to discover and fix security holes, as well as those more "evil" crackers ("black hat hackers") who use the same skills to author harmful software (like viruses, trojans, etc.) and illegally infiltrate secure systems with the intention of doing harm to the system. The programmer subculture of hackers, in contrast to the cracker community, generally sees computer security related activities as contrary to the ideals of the original and true meaning of the hacker term that instead related to playful cleverness.

The dictionary still defines a hacker as someone who illegally obtains access to some form of digital information. But this culture would argue that there is a clear difference between hackers and crackers.

History

Activities of playful cleverness can be said to have "hack value" and therefore the term "hacks" came about, with early examples including pranks at MIT done by students to demonstrate their technical aptitude and cleverness. Therefore, the hacker culture originally emerged in academia in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Hacking originally involved entering restricted areas in a clever way without causing any major damages. Some famous hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were placing of a campus police cruiser on the roof of the Great Dome and converting the Great Dome into R2-D2.

These sorts of subcultures were commonly found at other college campuses, including the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, in addition to MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, were particularly well-known hotbeds of early hacker culture. They evolved in parallel, and largely unconsciously, until the Internet, where a legendary PDP-10 machine at MIT, called AI, that was running ITS, provided an early meeting point of the hacker community. This and other developments such as the rise of the free software movement and community drew together a critically large population and encouraged the spread of a conscious, common, and systematic ethos. Symptomatic of this evolution were an increasing adoption of common slang and a shared view of history, similar to the way in which other occupational groups have professionalized themselves but without the formal credentialing process characteristic of most professional groups.^{[citation needed]}

Over time, the academic hacker subculture has tended to become more conscious, more cohesive, and better organized. The most important consciousness-raising moments have included the composition of the first Jargon File in 1973, the promulgation of the GNU Manifesto in 1985, and the publication of Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1997. Correlated with this has been the gradual recognition of a set of shared culture heroes, including: Bill Joy, Donald Knuth, Dennis Ritchie, Alan Kay, Ken Thompson, Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall, and Guido van Rossum.

The concentration of academic hacker subculture has paralleled and partly been driven by the commoditization of computer and networking technology, and has, in turn, accelerated that process. In 1975, hackerdom was scattered across several different families of operating systems and disparate networks; today it is largely a Unix and TCP/IP phenomenon, and is concentrated around various operating systems based on free software and open-source software development.

Before communications between computers and computer users were as networked as they are now, there were multiple independent and parallel hacker subcultures, often unaware or only partially aware of each other's existence. All of these had certain important traits in common:

• Creating software and sharing it with each other
• Placing a high value on freedom of inquiry
• Hostility to secrecy
• Information-sharing as both an ideal and a practical strategy
• Upholding the right to fork
• Emphasis on rationality
• Distaste for authority
• Playful cleverness, taking the serious humorously and humor seriously

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