"Hacker" defined

A particular meme in the mainstream media has always bothered me; that of hacker = evil. While this is pretty widespread outside the computer industry, to those inside the industry it usually has a much different meaning - that of expert programmer. Wikipedia has their usual comprehensive analysis of the term hacker. From their timeline, what I consider the "true" definition seems to have been seeded in the 1950s among ham radio fans, who defined it as "creatively tinkering to improve performance". Also noteworthy (and a fun read) is the meaning of "Hack" from the venerable Jargon File, aka the Hackers Dictionary. (Who better to define it?) All this to give context when I say I really enjoyed this rant on the differences between script kiddies and real hackers.

Script kiddies have all the destructive capability, without any of the brains. Hey, what's this? I don't know, let's break it. That makes you cool, right? Ugh. The power to destroy something is not knowledge, and that doesn't make you cool.

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If they only screwed themselves over, I wouldn't be so worried about it. Everyone has the right to run their own lives as they see fit, and that includes the right to screw up your own life if you want. But when they're taking the rest of us with them, it bothers me. I was in a restaurant waiting for a friend of mine I hadn't seen in a long time. She greeted me fondly with "How's my favorite hacker?", and the management asked us to leave. Lame? Absolutely. But why did it happen? Because of people like that.

Truly, I consider "hacker" a high compliment, when delivered by someone who understands the definition. Some parts of my job call for "hacking" in many senses of the word. I have been called upon to recover lost passwords; to find a way into a client's network when the client could not be reached; to bypass firewall security temporarily or permanently; to verbally negotiate past unknowledgeable technical support people (thereby hacking a person); to find a way around an inappropriately applied policy (hacking the rules); and even to investigate and demonstrate security holes. Even in the midst of typing this paragraph, a coworker asked me to help find a workaround for some misbehaving DLLs. Far and away, most of my hacking involves finding elegant solutions for complex problems. With our clients, we use the words "architecture", "system design" and "technical review", but deep down it's hacking, and I love it.