Hacker definition controversy
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The terms hacker and hack have controversial definitions.
Among some computer programmers in good standing with the technical community, the words hacker and hacking are used more often in the admiring or awed sense of a skilled software developer. People favoring this usage typically look with dismay on the usage of the term as a synonym for security cracking.
In the non-technical community, the word hacker most often describes someone who "hacks into" a system by evading or disabling security measures.
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[edit] Controversy and ambiguity
While "hack" was originally more used as a verb for "messing about" with (i.e. "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, the creator of Linux, is considered by some to be a genius 'hacker'.") A large segment of the technical community insist the latter is the "correct" usage of the word (see the Jargon File definition below).
The mainstream media's current usage of the term may be traced back to the early 1980's (see History). 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" and "cracker" 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". Analogous terms such as "white hats" and "gray hats" 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 and used negatively[1], 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, 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 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.
[edit] History
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".
- circa 1600: hackneyed was being used as an adjective meaning tired or worn out. William Shakespeare also used the word (as hackney'd) to mean "to make common and overly familiar" in Henry IV, Part I[2].
- 1700: a hack is a "person hired to do routine work".
- 1704: hack now also means a "carriage for hire".
- 1749: hack means "one who writes anything for hire" (still in use today among writers); see hack writer
- 1802: hack is used to mean a "short, dry cough" (still in use)
- 1826: the expression hack writer is first recorded though hackney writer appeared at least 50 years earlier
- 1898: hack is given the figurative sense of "a try, an attempt".
- Early 20th Century: hack is one of many slang terms in use by railroaders for a train's caboose. [3]
- 1950s: amateur radio enthusiasts borrowed the term hacking from riding and defined it as creatively tinkering to improve performance.
- 1955: 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.
- 1959: hack is defined in MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club 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.
- 1972: Stewart Brand publishes "S P A C E W A R: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums" in Rolling Stone, an early piece describing computer culture. In it, Alan Kay 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 prints (with commentary by Philip Zimbardo) "The Hacker Papers", an excerpt from a Stanford Bulletin Board discussion on the addictive nature of computer use.
- 1982: In the film TRON, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) describes his intentions to break into ENCOM's computer system, saying "I've been doing a little hacking here". CLU is the software he uses for this.
- 1983: First Usenet post on the use in the media (in Newsweek and on CBS News) of hacker to mean computer criminal.[4] Also, release of movie War games which used hacker in the criminal sense.
- 1984: Steven Levy publishes Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. The book publicizes, and perhaps originates the phrase "Hacker Ethic" and gives a codification of its principles.
- 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.
Hacker also commonly refers to a bad golfer.
[edit] Contemporary Use
The word hack has several definitions, according to the dictionary. One is "to cut irregularly, without skill or definite purpose." Another definition (derived from "hackney", a cab for hire) refers to a person superficially familiar with an activity (usually writing) whose work is unimaginative or low quality, or is created seeking purely commercial success. Cutting (one synonym for "hack") and pasting blocks of text or software source code in order to factor and reorganize an essay or program are activities familiar to writers and computer programmers alike. Alternately, when typing on an old fashioned mechanical typewriter or teleprinter, a phalanx of typebars chops against the ribbon, paper, and platten, making a characteristic "hacking" noise.
Another speculation is that the word "hacker" is a humorously ironic conflation of elegant and well spoken eloquent prosody, to "a raspy, chopping, cough." When a person doesn't know how to pronounce a word, they will sometimes fill in with a, hcahw, coughing sound. Reporters are known to attempt writing about a subject they do not completely comprehend, don't get the facts or story straight, and thus sometimes "hack the story to pieces". So, perhaps to some, a neophyte programmer is thereby termed a "hacker", and that would explain why one sense of the word "hack" is given as "A quick and inelegant, though functional solution to a programming problem."
The modern, computer-related use of the term is considered likely rooted in the goings on at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (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 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 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 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'.
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 "hack" was 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".
[edit] Jargon File definition
The following is the definition given by the 4.4.7 edition of the Jargon File (a dictionary of hacker jargon), which emphasizes the positive sense of "hacker". The definitions in this dictionary were not made through research into common usage, but reflect to a large extent the opinions of its editors. Hence, the following is accepted by some but not all of the hacker community.
hacker n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]
The term "hacker" also tends to connote membership in the global community defined by the net (see the network. For discussion of some of the basics of this culture, see the How To Become A Hacker FAQ. It also implies that the person described is seen to subscribe to some version of the hacker ethic (see hacker ethic). It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as a hacker . See also geek, wannabe. This term seems to have been first adopted as a badge in the 1960s by the hacker culture surrounding TMRC and the MIT AI Lab. We have a report that it was used in a sense close to this entry's by teenage radio hams and electronics tinkerers in the mid-1950s.
- 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. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.
- One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
- A person capable of appreciating hack value.
- A person who is good at programming quickly.
- An expert at a particular program, 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.)
- An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
- One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
- [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 earliest Stanford revisions of the Jargon file (1975) did not describe the term so positively, including only definitions 4, 5 and 8. The current definition was written in more or less its current form around 1980 at MIT. Eric S. Raymond, a known advocate of the positive usage of "hacker", made an editorial decision in his capacity as the Jargon File maintainer to add "deprecated" to definition 8 in the 1990s. This is considered somewhat controversial by some, although use of the term "hacker" (in the computer-related sense) predates the first computer system with security (CTSS), and thus necessarily pre-dates any security-related meaning as we know it today. However early computer "sensitive information" related more to knowledge of the computer hardware and operating software than to data content. Access to technical information was through tightly-controlled company-confidential publications in hard-copy only. (There was no PDF or WWW.) Computer hackers of the 1970s fitting definition 8 were those who, lacking the confidential formal documentation, learned proprietary or confidential information through exhaustive trial-and-error and other sometimes ingenious analysis techniques. They were considered malicious primarily by the companies who were attempting to hide and protect their company secrets.
[edit] Quotations
"A Hacker is any person who derives joy from discovering ways to circumvent limitations." — Bob Bickford (computer and video guru) in MicroTimes, December 1986
[edit] References
- ^ TMRC site, Archive.org cache
- ^ Henry IV, Part I Act III, Scene 2; published in 1597
- ^ A Glossary of Railroad Terms, American Speech, volume 18 number 3 (October 1943), pp. 161-170; cited page 163.
- ^ Google Groups archive of an early post about the semantic distinction
