If I myself had to come up with a definition of what a hacker is I would say a person, or maybe even a computer program, whose goal is to corrupt someone’s computer. This could be anything from viruses to a person who wants to get inside a company’s computer system in order to gain information or just to cause some chaos and destruction. I think this is a good assumption, I’m not exactly a computer expert, far from it, but I would say I am computer savvy.
It is my experiences with computers that lead me to believe this, however if I believed in the media and what they consider hackers I would really be lead to believe hacking was “exciting”, if not completely wrong. There have been countless movies that portray hackers as sophisticated people, who could enter into computers to steal money amongst other things. Often movies portray hacking as a videogame, like it’s that easy. I think it’s obvious that movies have screwed up the image of hackers by far, for example why is the same character that played Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in X-men believable as a hacker in the horrible movie Swordfish? The only “hacking” that I myself have been a part of has been possibly changing a status update or two on a friend’s Facebook when they left their computer up, I guess that didn’t really involve me finding out someone’s password or anything.
According to an article I found from the University of Utah a hacker is as followed: “hacker n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. (The Heroic Hacker: Legends of the Computer Age, Eric Brunvand.)”. This shows that even my assumption is wrong and tells me that I shouldn’t assume things without doing a Google search first.
So now I think that even Mark Zuckerberg might be a hacker, if you go by the above definition. Last year I read The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich on the founding of Facebook. This also was the time his book was adapted into the widely popular movie The Social Network, which as far as movie adaptations go, was done pretty true to the original. In the book Mark Zuckerberg, who is the founder of Facebook, was an obsessive person when it came to programming of his website, and on a couple of other sites he made premature to Facebook. He created this website that took all the pictures of female students from his university, and I believe a few surrounding universities, and put them up versus style so that you could select which female you thought was more attractive. It was quite sinister. He was able to access these pictures by “hacking” into these university’s student databases that held the pictures for record purposes.
It is now my understanding that hackers can mean a wide variety of things, and the word can be used for a wide variety of tasks. Hackers could mean anything from programmers expending their computer skills for fun, but in a non illegal way, and also still include those spam emails I get from “banks in Zimbabwe” that are trying to gain my private information. I do know that hacking is not going into a videogame to destroy an entire corporation, or at least I am quite sure that’s not how it works.
Citations:
Brunvand, Eric. "The Heroic Hacker: Legends of the Computer Age." Utah :: School of Computing. University of Utah, 15 Oct. 1996. Web. 20 Aug. 2011. <http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/afs-paper/afs-paper.html>.
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