The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy—often in collective effort—the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware (mostly digital electronics), 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 how it is done and whether it is exciting and meaningful. 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. 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 damage. 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.
Richard Stallman explains about hackers who program:
Hackers from this subculture tend to emphatically differentiate themselves from whom they pejoratively call "crackers": those who are generally referred to by media and members of the general public using the term "hacker", and whose primary focusbe it to malign or for malevolent purposeslies in exploiting weaknesses in computer security.
Definition 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."
As documented in the Jargon File, these hackers are disappointed by the mass media and general public's usage of the word hacker 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 (such as viruses or trojans) 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.
History
The word "hacker" derives from the Late Middle English words hackere, hakker, or hakkere - one who cuts wood, woodchopper, or woodcutter.
Although the idea of "hacking", in the modern sense, existed long before the modern 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. It was not until the mid 1940s, particularly in connection to the ENIAC computer, that some programmers began to see their expertise as a passion rather than a profession.
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 is that each is someone who enjoys "…the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming and circumventing limitations of programming systems and who tries to extend their capabilities". With this definition in mind, it can be clear where the negative implications of the word "hacker" and the subculture of "hackers" came from.
Some common nicknames among this culture include "crackers", who are considered to be unskilled thieves who mainly rely on luck, and "phreaks", which refers to skilled crackers and "warez d00dz" (crackers who acquire reproductions of copyrighted software). Hackers who are hired to test security are called "pentesters" or "tiger teams".
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
These sorts of subcultures were commonly found at academic settings such as college campuses. The MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University 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.
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.
Ethics and principles
Many of the values and tenets of the free and open source software movement stem from the hacker ethics that originated at MIT and at the Homebrew Computer Club. The hacker ethics were chronicled by Steven Levy in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and in other texts in which Levy formulates and summarizes general hacker attitudes: Access to computers-and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works-should be unlimited and total. All information should be free. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. You can create art and beauty on a computer. Computers can change your life for the better.
Hacker ethics are concerned primarily with sharing, openness, collaboration, and engaging in the hands-on imperative.
Linus Torvalds, one of the leaders of the open source movement (known primarily for developing the Linux kernel), has noted in the book The Hacker Ethic. that these principles have evolved from the known Protestant ethics and incorporate the spirits of capitalism, as introduced in the early 20th century by Max Weber.
Hack value is the notion used by hackers to express that something is worth doing or is interesting.Definition of 'hack value' in the Jargon File This is something that hackers often feel intuitively about a problem or solution.
An aspect of hack value is performing feats for the sake of showing that they can be done, even if others think it is difficult. Using things in a unique way outside their intended purpose is often perceived as having hack value. Examples are using a dot matrix impact printer to produce musical notes, using a flatbed scanner to take ultra-high-resolution photographs or using an optical mouse as barcode reader.
A solution or feat has "hack value" if it is done in a way that has finesse, cleverness or brilliance, which makes creativity an essential part of the meaning. For example, picking a difficult lock has hack value; smashing it does not. As another example, proving Fermat's Last Theorem by linking together most of modern mathematics has hack value; solving a combinatorial problem by exhaustively trying all possibilities does not. Hacking is not using process of elimination to find a solution; it's the process of finding a clever solution to a problem.
Overlaps and differences
The main basic difference between programmer subculture and computer security hacker is their mostly separate historical origin and development. However, the Jargon File reports that considerable overlap existed for the early phreaking at the beginning of the 1970s. 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.Fred Shapiro: Antedating of "Hacker" . American Dialect Society Mailing List (13. June 2003) The overlap quickly started to break when people joined in the activity who did it in a less responsible way.
According to Raymond, hackers from the programmer subculture usually work openly and use their real name, while computer security hackers prefer secretive groups and identity-concealing aliases.
There are some subtle overlaps, however, since basic knowledge about computer security is also common within the programmer subculture of hackers. For example, Ken Thompson noted during his 1983 Turing Award lecture that it is possible to add code to the UNIX "login" command that would accept either the intended encrypted password or a particular known password, allowing a backdoor into the system with the latter password. He named his invention the "Trojan horse". Furthermore, Thompson argued, the C compiler itself could be modified to automatically generate the rogue code, to make detecting the modification even harder. Because the compiler is itself a program generated from a compiler, the Trojan horse could also be automatically installed in a new compiler program, without any detectable modification to the source of the new compiler. However, Thompson disassociated himself strictly from the computer security hackers: "I would like to criticize the press in its handling of the 'hackers,' the 414 gang, the Dalton gang, etc. The acts performed by these kids are vandalism at best and probably trespass and theft at worst. ... I have watched kids testifying before Congress. It is clear that they are completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts."