Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: 20 Jun 91 10:59:48 EDT From: "76012,300 Brad Hicks" <76012.300@compuserve.com> Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Please Explain the Terms 'Hacker' and 'Phreaker' Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 472, Message 10 of 11 Lines: 79 In TELECOM Digest vol 11, #471, jdl@pro-nbs.cts.com (Jennifer Lafferty) asked: > I'm kind of lost here. Exactly what is "phreaking" and "hacking" > as you are using the terms. This should make a LONG thread. Everybody has their own definitions. Pat Townson, the TELECOM moderator, chimed in with his own. If I may paraphrase in the interest of brevity, Pat sez that a phreaker is someone who likes to rip of the Phone Cops; a hacker, a bright computer programmer; and a cracker, someone who rips off computer users. If true, this leaves a gaping hole in the language: what do we call a bright phone system expert who isn't a bright computer programmer? That aside, let me chip in my own definitions, which hopefully will shed as much light as they will heat (grin): HACKER: (n) Derived from "to hack," a verb used at MIT for dozens of years now to mean "to throw something together quickly" with an alternate, but related meaning, "to prank." (In MIT usage, a great prank is still called a hack, whether or not it has anything to do with computers.) Computer hackers are people who live for their hobby/profession. What seperates a truly brilliant hacker from a truly brilliant programmer is that the hacker is only interested in results; s/he will achieve the impossible in record time but with code that cannot be maintained and no documentation. As one of Nancy Lebovitz's buttons says, "Real programmers don't document. If it was hard to write, it SHOULD be hard to understand." Or as we used to say at Taylor U., a hacker is someone who will sit at a computer terminal for two solid days, drinking gallons of caffeinated beverages and eating nothing but junk food out of vending machines, for no other reward than to hear another hacker say, "How did you get it to do THAT?" PHREAK: (n) Derived from the word "phone" and the Sixties usage, "freak," meaning someone who is very attached to, interested in, and/or experienced with something (e.g., "acid freak"). A "phone freak," or "phreak," is to the world-wide telephone system what a hacker is to computers: bright, not terribly disciplined, fanatically interested in all of the technical details, and (in many cases) prone to harmless but technically illegal pranks. CRACKER: (n) A hacker who specializes in entering systems against the owner and/or administrator's wishes. Used to be fairly common practice among hackers, but then, computing used to be WAY outside the price range of almost anybody and computers used to have lots of empty CPU cycles in the evenings. (There also used to be a lot fewer hackers; what is harmless when four or five people do it may become a social problem when four or five thousand do it.) Now hackers who don't illegally enter systems insist on a distinction between "hackers" and "crackers;" most so-called crackers do not, and just call themselves hackers. CRASHER: (n) Insult used by computer bulletin board system operators (sysops) to describe a cracker who enters for the malicious purpose of destroying the system or its contents. Used to be unheard of, but when I was last sysoping, was incredibly common. Crashers (who insist on calling themselves hackers) insist that this is because sysops are more obnoxious about asking for money and insisting on collecting legal names and addresses. CYBERPUNK: (n) A cyberpunk is to hackers/phreaks/crackers/crashers what a terrorist is to a serial killer; someone who insists that their crimes are in the public interest and for the common good, a computerized "freedom fighter" if you will. PROPOSITION FOR DEBATE: "It is immoral for anyone to do that which, if everybody did it, would destroy civilization." [I'll chip in with my position on that last part later, if others are interested enough to perpetuate the thread. Please send personal replies to jbhicks@mcimail.com, it's cheaper.]