Hacker (computing)

In computing, a hacker is a person in one of several distinct (but not completely disjoint) communities and subcultures:^[1]

• People committed to circumvention of computer security. This is the oldest meaning of the word hacker in the computer context and initially referred to unauthorized users of the telephone network (phreakers).^[2] Today, it primarily refers to unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication networks such as the Internet (black hats), but also includes those who debug or fix security problems (white hats). See "Hacker (computer security)".
• 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.^[3] This community is notable for launching the free software movement. The World Wide Web and the Internet itself are also hacker artifacts.^[4] 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." See "Hacker (programmer subculture)".
• The hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s (e.g. the Homebrew Computer Club^[5]) and on software (computer games,^[6] software cracking, the demoscene) in the 1980s/1990s. The community included Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates and created the personal computing industry.^[7] See "Hacker (hobbyist)".

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. While the use of the word by hobbyist hackers is acknowledged by all three subcultures, and the computer security hackers accept all uses of the word, free software hackers consider the computer intrusion related usage incorrect, and refer to security breakers as “crackers”.