Said honestly it bothers me that most people think the term hacker in relation to computers means (loosely), "An individual with the intent to harm electronically", such as breaking into someone else’s email account, stealing files, etc.
The term has become so broad that it’s used as an excuse for people’s stupidity.
Example:
"My email account was hacked!"
"Wow, that’s sounds bad. How did it happen?"
"Someone guessed my password!"
That’s not hacking. Not in the slightest. If you were stupid enough to use a weak password, that’s your fault, and the person who "hacked" your account is simply a good guesser.
True hackers to me are programmers, be they beginners or advanced.
If you do something as simple as custom create your own WordPress theme with special PHP functions throughout, you’re technically hacking the code. You saw what WordPress had to offer, didn’t like it and wanted something better. So you sat down, wrote the code by hand, modified some functions, created a few of your own and so on. You hacked the code. There was absolutely nothing illegal about it.
All programmers by default are hackers by nature. They take code, shape it, mold it and do whatever it takes to make it do what they want it to. Maybe one will find some open source code for a program and say, "Y’know, I can make this better." And so it happens. A better program is built from the original source code, more features are added in, ones not needed are taken away, etc.
Just remember that hacker does not necessarily mean "The Bad Guy". And in fact it rarely does. Were it not for code hackers out there we wouldn’t have cool things like, oh, I dunno.. the internet?
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Thank you! Exactly. Unfortunately thanks to the media and Hollywood anyone that’s ever hacked (not cracked) is looked at funny.
Kind of represents the difference between Cracker and Hacker.
Excellent post Rich, exactly what I have been trying to explain to a friend but honestly wasn’t getting anywhere.
Knowledge is power in the PC world.
Get smart, the stupid shall be punished!
I agree with this perfectly but that doesn’t mean the media and movies will change. The term hacker is ingrained in the average person’s mind as a person with ill intent and this will not change in the forseeable future. The thing that annoy’s me the most is if try to use the correct term of cracker everyone looks at me funny…
None of these posts could be any more right on-the-money! To tell you the truth I thought I was the only one who linked the term hacker to programmer. Good to know I am in good company. And I use the term quite proudly to be honest. I even have a t-shirt that says “I’m a hacker, what do you do?” You should see the looks…
Thanks, I may be curious but I’m NOT a hacker!
Yesterday when I went to access my yahoo email, I unexpectedly found myself in my (X) boyfriend’s email instead…..hmmmmm so what would YOU do? Look? Logout quickly?
He was the last person to use my computer to log into yahoo a few days prior…Yahoo is my home page, and I simply I clicked on “mail” as I always do…I didn’t TRY to access anyones email but my own.
I saw a bunch of emails between him and another woman-and other stuff too that just leaves a giant rock in the pit of my stomach.
Now he keeps loudly and repeatedly insisting I HACKED into his email to invade his privacy.
I saw, I read, I left. I didn’t send out any angry emails, didn’t change his password or mess with his account or snoop other websites in search of more evidence to break my heart further.
*sigh* thanks for listening