Hacker
It’s so easy on social networking sites to find names like Dark Hacker, Wild Hacker, Baby Hacker etc. Every one without being concerned about the knowledge of word hacker is using it; maybe they want to show that they are admirable. I made a search on facebook with the word “hacker” and the list of people I got was never ending. In this era of technology, youth is overusing this word to show their expertise on the other hand media is using this word to refer to computer criminals. Thanks to mainstream press, the word “hacker” has got a new meaning which is quite offensive for real hackers to accept. Before beginning with the actual meaning of hacker let me clear that a hacker is not a computer terrorist, pirate or some kind of a thief.
Understanding Hackers
A hacker is a person who does things in a professionally perfect manner, the manner in which it is not supposed to be done or a manner which is not conventional. An example by Elf Qrin (provided in his essay “Hacker Being”) will justify my point.
"A hacker is a person that loves to study all things in depth, especially the more apparently meaningless details, to discover hidden peculiarities, new features and weakness in them. For example, it is possible to hack a book, by using it to equalize the legs of a table, or to use the sharp edge of one of its pages to cut something. The main point being that it is used for more than its conventional function of being read."
Hackers tend to analyze systems to gain knowledge. They try to discover peculiarities, weakness, not to exploit them but to eliminate the loopholes. In this way they are helping computer world by providing them foolproof systems. They are programming experts and like to solve difficult problems related to computing. Hackers love to read theoretical knowledge of computer stuff but never depend on spoon feed bookish knowledge, rather they tend to learn everything from the scratch on their own by doing practical’s and this deed of them, give them intense comprehension to tinker with any computer system be it hardware or software.
Hackers are not crackers
As I mentioned earlier, we always miscomprehend hackers with crackers and media is the culprit for this. Crackers are the malicious computer experts who have similar skills as a hacker have but the difference comes to their intention. Crackers always tend to harm people for their own benefits.
CRACKER=CRIMINAL + HACKER
Often termed as black hat hacker or unethical hacker, are the bad guys. All the cruel deeds that you are scared of are done by crackers.
That’s all about a hacker’s psychology, now you know what a hacker is. So if you are one of them who call themselves hacker, do think for an instance whether you deserve to be called a hacker.