Tuesday, January 29

Black and White

Hello people, its early into the new year, and chinese new year is approaching... I think I will be doing assignments even when people around me are celebrating...

I want to share with you about the definition of the term or label "Hacker". For this topic, there are general two schools of thought regarding the understanding of what or who a "Hacker" is. I am a computer science student, i love programming alot, i love learning new types of programming languages, i love to play around with linux/unixes. For one school of thought, I most likely will be labeled a hacker.

The other school of thought will think that hackers are bad people who break into bank accounts, wreak havoc on systems with viruses etc. This is the media's interpretation of what hackers do. But for the first school of thought, these bad people are termed "Crackers".

For the first school of thought, the meaning of a Hacker basically means a person who does an "appropriate application of ingeniuty". Please take a look at the following link, credits to Eric. S Raymond. http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html
I draw alot of inspiration from his literature at his website.

I hope that the next time you hear the word "Hack" or "Hacker", perhaps you will give a little thought into the understanding of how we feel when we are given a bad name by the media. Comments welcome!

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