If you pay attention to the news, it seems like every time you turn around, here comes another news report about how some company has been “hacked” by “hackers.” “Hackers” steal credit card accounts from Target, Neiman Marcus gets “hacked,” the Yahoo website serves up “hacked” ads that infect visitors’ computers with viruses, etc. What’s all this “hacking” stuff mean?
As near as anyone can tell, the term “hacker” was first used by members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960’s. This merry band of gadget freaks specialized in building sophisticated railroad and train models. They called themselves “hackers” as a way of describing their love for using and experimenting with technology in new and unusual ways. The ability to use mechanical and electronic devices in ways for which they were not originally designed was highly regarded, and success at doing so was termed “a good hack.”
Early computer pioneers at MIT and around the country soon started to be called “hackers,” too. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were proud to be called hackers, as that included them with the leading tinkerers, experimenters and inventors of the day. Steven Levy’s book, “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution,” documents this exciting time in history, and is a wonderfully entertaining book.
With the advent of the Internet, and the rise of Internet-related crime, the news media latched onto the term “hacker” and started using it as a name tag for people who committed computer crimes. What had been worn for years by technology innovators as a badge of honor was turned by the news media into an ugly term associated with Internet criminals. Many computer buffs are still resentful at this perversion of the word “hacker,” but its long-term misuse by the media has embedded its modern definition in the popular vernacular. Most people today, when asked to define “hacker,” would describe some sort of computer criminal.
A few years after Michael Jackson changed the definition of the word “bad” to mean “good,” I gave up the cause of lobbying for the original, “pure” definition of the word “hacker;” it’s a lost cause, as I see it. Instead, I’ve tried to move on and use terms like “white-hat hacker” and “Internet bad guys” as ways of describing things in our current culture.
To learn more about “hackers,” and how to avoid them, call the Norman Public Library at (405)701-2697 and sign up for my free, one-night-only class called “Fight the Internet Bad Guys and Win.” Then, on Wednesday, February 12, at 6:30 pm, come to the downtown library location and you will learn all about hackers, viruses, email safety, passwords, updates, security questions, browsers, online shopping, wireless networking, Internet scammers, and much more.
Meanwhile, next week we will look at, “What do hackers do, anyway?”