Hacker

From WikiHack

In computing, hacker has several meanings:

• People engaged in circumvention of computer security. This primarily refers to unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication network such as the Internet black hats, but also includes those who debug or fix security problems white hats. Its earliest known meaning in the computer context referred to an unauthorized user of the telephone company network (now called a phreaker).
• A community of enthusiast computer programmers and systems designers, originated in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This community is notable for launching the free software movement. The World Wide Web and the Internet itself are also hacker artifacts. The Request for Comments (RFC) 1392 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.
• The hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s (e.g. the Homebrew Computer Club) and on software (computer games, software cracking, the demoscene) in the 1980s/1990s.

Today, mainstream usage mostly refers to computer criminals, due to the mass media usage of the word since the 1980s. This includes script kiddies, people breaking into computers using programs written by others, with very little knowledge about the way they work. This usage is so much predominant in the general public that a large segment of it is unaware that different meanings also exist.