Conference noted::hackers_v1

42.0. "Hackers & Crackers" by VAXUUM::DYER () Fri Aug 10 1984 02:33

	Here's a distinction between "crackers" and "hackers" that was made
in HUMAN-NETS recently...
		<_Jym_>

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From:	RHEA::DECWRL::"TREITEL@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA" "Richard Treitel"
Date:	Sun 5 Aug 84 14:50:46-PDT
Subj:	Re: Crackers and Hackers

A nice simple easily memorisable definition is the following:

 "A cracker is a CRiminally inclined hACKER"

Some people may take exception to the implication that even a minority
of hackers have criminal inclinations, and others may argue that most
crackers are not talented enough to deserve to be called hackers.  I
get more and more sympathetic to Mark Crispin's fondness for the plain
old word "vandal".

                                                - Richard
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From:	RHEA::DECWRL::"REM@MIT-MC.ARPA" "Robert Elton Maas"
Date:	7 August 1984 07:41-EDT
Subj:	hacker vs. cracker

A "hacker" is somebody who has a penchant for understanding how
computer systems really work instead of the misleading or incomplete
descriptions that occur in documentation, and using such knowledge for
making things work more efficiently than by advertised means or for
making things work that seem impossible based on published
information.

A "cracker" is somebody who has a penchant for violating the security
of computer systems.

It used to be the two were related, if you were an expert at the
security aspects of a system you could possibly figure out how to
violate them. But now with thousands of random people banging away at
a security system until one person accidently discovers a flaw in it,
and that one person advertising a recipe for violating the security on
hundreds of bulletin boards arond the country, then thousands of
random users of those bulletin boards using that recipe to violate
that one system, you don't have to know anything about a system to
break into it using a recipe you happen to see on a bulletin board, so
crackers aren't necessarily (or even usually) hackers any more.

<Exposition by REM>

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