Hackers

This paper is about the hacker subculture. The paper breaks the misused term 'hacker' in to its sub categories provides descriptions of the categories and a psychological profile of the most common type.

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Hackers cannot be defined by skin color, religion, or race, nor can they properly be generalized as one group. Hackers are not a homogeneous group, they have a variety of values, beliefs and experience that can dramatically set one hacker apart from another; the only common ground is their desire to understand the inner most workings of the computer. As a result of its broad misuse, the term hacker has become rather generic. As it is commonly used today, the term hacker can basically be broken up into two major categories: "Hackers", who are intensely interested in the "system" per se, and enjoy relating to machines; and "phreaks" who are more social, manipulating the [phone] system in a rough-and-ready fashion in order to get through to other human beings, fast, cheap, and under the table (Sterling).

Computer Security

Computer Security

English: Ankit Fadia Computer Hacker

Phreaking is the art and science of cracking the phone network so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls. Phreaking is by extension, security-cracking in any other context especially, but not exclusively, on communications networks. At one time phreaking was a semi-respectable activity among hackers; there was a gentleman's agreement that phreaking as an intellectual game and a form of exploration was OK, but serious theft of services was taboo. There was significant crossover between the hacker community and the hard-core phone phreaks who ran semi-underground networks of their own through such media as the legendary "TAP Newsletter". This ethos began to break down in the mid-1980s as wider dissemination of the techniques put them in the hands of less responsible phreaks. Around the same time, changes in the...