OpenEuphoria

Re: the jok3r...

• Posted by RedWordSmith <redwordsmith at NIC.DREAMHOST.COM> Mar 07, 2000
• 648 views

Nick Johnson wrote:
>
> NO! A cracker is someone who deliberately does damage to computers, a Hacker
> is someone who tries to breach the security of a system for the challenge of

I once had a discussion with someone who considered himself a hacker as
to what the definition of "hacker" actually was.  He said he was a
hacker in the "old" sense of the term, that he tried to reverse engineer
file formats*.  To the best of my knowledge, he's the only one who uses
that definition (others would consider him a hacker anyway because of
some of his reasonably impressive projects in VB and Java, including a
complete IRC-like chat system in Java, but I'm getting off topic here.)

IMHO, the term "Hacker" is so misused and vague that it no longer holds
any reasonable definition.  I've heard at least 5 definitions so far,
and they're all slightly different.  The term "Cracker", however, is
much more specific, and leaves very little to the imagination.

*How anyone could consider this "hacking" is beyond me.  It's
impressive, but it's not hacking under any other definition I've heard
of.

--
"I'm looking for something in Red.
        Something that's shocking, to turn someone's head.
[snip lotsa lines for Euphoria List]
I'm looking for something in RED!
I've got to have something in Red."

-Lorrie Morgan, "Something in Red." [abridged for .sig]

This .sig brought to you by Nic "RedWord"Smith
and Linoge, the evil Linux box.