Hacker
The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hacker – someone with knowledge of bugs or exploits to break into computer systems and access data which would otherwise be inaccessible to them.
[5] This includes what hacker jargon calls script kiddies, less skilled criminals who rely on tools written by others with very little knowledge about the way they work.
The controversy is usually based on the assertion that the term originally meant someone messing about with something in a positive sense, that is, using playful cleverness to achieve a goal.
In computer enthusiast and hacker culture, the primary meaning is a complimentary description for a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert.
"[9] 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."
Civic hackers use their security and/or programming acumens to create solutions, often public and open-sourced, addressing challenges relevant to neighborhoods, cities, states or countries and the infrastructure within them.
[13] Civic hackers, though often operating autonomously and independently, may work alongside or in coordination with certain aspects of government or local infrastructure such as trains and buses.
An article from MIT's student paper The Tech used the term hacker in this context already in 1963 in its pejorative meaning for someone messing with the phone system.
"[24] The programmer subculture of hackers sees secondary circumvention of security mechanisms as legitimate if it is done to get practical barriers out of the way for doing actual work.
They commonly refer disparagingly to people in the computer security subculture as crackers and refuse to accept any definition of hacker that encompasses such activities.
The case was solved when Clifford Stoll, a scientist working as a system administrator, found ways to log the attacks and to trace them back (with the help of many others).
Stoll's portrait of himself, his lady Martha, and his friends at Berkeley and on the Internet paints a marvelously vivid picture of how hackers and the people around them like to live and how they think.
Alternative terms such as cracker were coined in an effort to maintain the distinction between hackers within the legitimate programmer community and those performing computer break-ins.
Network news' use of the term consistently pertains primarily to criminal activities, despite attempts by the technical community to preserve and distinguish the original meaning.
Members of the media sometimes seem unaware of the distinction, grouping legitimate "hackers" such as Linus Torvalds and Steve Wozniak along with criminal "crackers".
The wider dominance of the pejorative connotation is resented by many who object to the term being taken from their cultural jargon and used negatively,[31] 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.
A possible middle ground position has been suggested, based on the observation that "hacking" describes a collection of skills and tools which are used by hackers of both descriptions for differing reasons.
The primary weakness of this analogy is the inclusion of script kiddies in the popular usage of "hacker", despite their lack of an underlying skill and knowledge base.
