little dipshits

You talk so much about programming, but you cant talk about hacking because you cant actually do anything. I run a hacked network of computers that I programmed to click on googles ads in my secret website. I even write my own viruses to make people get hacked into my network. I work at home and have a bunch of screens showing me what people on my network are doing on their screens. I can even set it so that i can see the code of their computers. can you guys do any of that? I dont think so. I bet you dont know where all the websites real hackers hang out are either? if you name them, I just might tell them that marshviperX sent you.

>>2
It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".

Hackers typically had little respect for the silly rules that administrators like to impose, so they looked for ways around. For instance, when computers at MIT started to have "security" (that is, restrictions on what users could do), some hackers found clever ways to bypass the security, partly so they could use the computers freely, and partly just for the sake of cleverness (hacking does not need to be useful). However, only some hackers did this—many were occupied with other kinds of cleverness, such as placing some amusing object on top of MIT's great dome (**), finding a way to do a certain computation with only 5 instructions when the shortest known program required 6, writing a program to print numbers in roman numerals, or writing a program to understand questions in English.

Yet when I say I am a hacker, people often think I am making a naughty admission, presenting myself specifically as a security breaker. How did this confusion develop?

Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think.

You can help correct the misunderstanding simply by making a distinction between security breaking and hacking—by using the term "cracking" for security breaking. The people who do it are "crackers". Some of them may also be hackers, just as some of them may be chess players or golfers; most of them are not.