History for cracker

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Most folks would use the term ``hacker'' to refer to someone who breaks into computer systems.  This is thanks to our oh-so-enlightened members of the media, who heard the phrase, perhaps used by one of those folks caught comitting the crime, and grabbed onto it.  And so, just like the term MIPS, which did not at first mean "Millions of Instructions Per Second", we have another term which means something other than what it first meant.  What would our modern media have done if Jessie James and his gang had called themselves "Pinkertons" or Al Copone had referred to himself as a "G-Man"??? And so, we are stuck with a further distinction of "White Hats" and "Black Hats", which is why we also have things like "Fedora", "Red Hat" and such. <P>
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To clarify things...the term "hacker" goes back to the days of when programming was done with wires on what was called a <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-board">plug-board</A>.  To make a change, one might often "hack" out a wire from the tangled mess on the plug-board, and in the process, hopefully produce a program which worked perhaps a bit better than it did.  Today, the "Security cracker", or "cracker" for short, <I>might</I> be someone who could do this sort of programming in machine language and such, but for various reasons, has decided to use that knowledge in an unacceptable way.  At various times in various locations (such as college computer labs in the 1980's), the goal might just be to show what they could do in the hopes of gaining a job (the usual punishment seemed to be a slap on the hand, and a few quarters later, the student was a system operator in that lab).  There are other crackers who do not have the skills to do the work needed to find and exploit the security holes, but who are prefectly willing to stand on the shoulders of others to commit their crimes.  These folks are often referred to by the derogatory "script kiddie", since they take the scripts written by others, and just like a kid, have their run playing around on other peoples systems illegally.
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Myself, I am a hacker in the older, more acceptable form.  I have actually programmed computers using plug-boards, and so can truely claim the term.   And I work routinely down at the machine instruction level, which is the modern equivilent of plug-board programming.   I have also had as my job duties the responsibility for computer security (making me a "white hat"), while working at places such as CompuServe (where I was also responsible for the Usenet newsgroup servers, including during the Christmas 1995 deal over blocking access to the groups) and Lucent's Greater Bell Labs.

<H3>External References:</H3>
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-board">Wikipedia: Plug-board</A> <P>
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker">Wikipedia: Hacker</A> <P>
<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_definition_controversy">Wikipedia: Hacker definition controversy</A> <P>
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