[NetBehaviour] How To Become A Hacker.

marc marc.garrett at furtherfield.org
Fri Dec 22 16:09:28 CET 2006


How To Become A Hacker.

By Eric Steven Raymond.

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and 
networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the 
first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. 
The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built 
the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. 
Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are 
part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in 
it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.

The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. 
There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like 
electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels 
of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits 
elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the 
hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker 
works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills 
and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared 
culture that originated the term ‘hacker’.

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but 
aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of 
breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers 
call these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real 
hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very 
bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a 
hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive 
engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled 
into using the word ‘hacker’ to describe crackers; this irritates real 
hackers no end.

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.

If you want to be a hacker, keep reading. If you want to be a cracker, 
go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the 
slammer after finding out you aren't as smart as you think you are. And 
that's all I'm going to say about crackers.

more...
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html



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