What is a Hacker?

The question of what is a hacker is one that is puzzling. Given the time in which I was born, the term hacker kinda had a stigma attached to it. Those that were hackers were thought to be cool(well at least to me), they were normally pictured as a person with a computer with multiple monitors set up and some with some type of continuous information being displayed with a terminal type background. The more I think about it, it reminds me of the screen that Link from The Matrix would use. I however had never taken the time to actually think what a hacker, is but more importantly, why they do it.

The most I've ever seen of hackers and what they do has mainly been on TV where they're usually portrayed as these technological geniuses who are able to get computers to do whatever they want to do. They use them to control doors, security cameras, and other integral systems to a structure or vehicle. They usually are assisting a team of either thieves or a small team, providing them with crucial information pertaining to enemy movements, building maps, access to different corridors, etc. the general overwatch responsibilities. The reasons why they were able to do this or how they learned to do so is never really covered, it's just assumed that that's what they've been doing since birth. Also there is no clear reason why they do it, it often seems that they do it just because they can, it seemed that there was rarely any kind of personal gain for them. Although I could be wrong about this and am probably most definitely wrong about this, but it just goes to show that this is something that I never really thought about at all in the slightest.

As a matter of fact when I was a young kid, no more than 8 or 9, one of my family friends at the time was attending Notre Dame studying Computer Science. I would go as far to say that he was a hacker. Besides being an avid gamer and beating my brother all the time in Mario Kart and Smash Bros, he was always tinkering with things. Whenever he was home, he would download movies and video games off of the internet, illegally. I never knew that that is what he was doing at the time, but now that I look back on it, he did it quite often just because he could. Well that and he was also able to get all the latest movies and some *alternative* video games for free.

When asked about the hacker archetype, I believe that the most important archetype that the readings get to is that a hacker can be best described as a tinkerer. They also are software engineers and they are individuals who do not conform to mainstream society and set their own rules. I say that a hacker is a tinkerer because they are continuously "testing" certain software to find out how they can break it. They then seek to exploit these breaks in the software.

I guess I would consider myself a hacker, but not in the traditional sense. I am not a hacker of software, at least not yet, but I have always been a tinkerer. Whether it be a simple pen, or a telephone, if given the proper tools, I would disassemble things figure out how they work and put them back together. I am always interested in how things work and am always analyzing how things are structured, organized and implemented. I believe that by doing these things, it will make me a better engineer.

I am honestly surprised by this characterization of a hacker. I never really did consider myself to be one at all. I am one that is driven by curiosity, a hunger for knowledge. I want to understand how something works and why it works the way that it does. Sometimes the only way for me to do that is to play with something and experiment around with it until I break it, to disassemble it and then reassemble it, to look at all the individual parts and understand their purpose. These are things that I believe a hacker cares about, it's not the material things that they gain from hacking, but the experience and the knowledge they gain from each program they write, each website that they hack. It is their own curiosity that drives them to test software, to play with it until they figure out how it works and then subsequently break it. This I believe has major ethical and moral issues as it pertains to hacking and personal security. It begs the questions of what information should we store? If by hacking, we can expose peoples short comings and misjudgments, is it worth it? At what cost is it worth it?