By Chad Perrin in IT Security, in Security on April 17, 2009, 6:20 AM PST The word 'hacker' gets used in a pejorative sense by journalists an awful lot. Download software tv tuner epro system.

A term in Southeastern United States English to describe poor white trash, derived from the Scottish meaning of the verb 'to crack,' which, in this sense denotes. 'I should explain to your what is meant by crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia, who often change their places of abode.' In more general and contemporary U.S. Usage, the term has become an ethnic slur for all Americans of Northern European decent. Crackers were poor white folk who lived in the south during the era. Given their name because of their staple diet of crack-corn, crackers were often hired by plantation owners in order to replace a slave in dangerous jobs.

The high prices of slaves during the 1830s and 40s made It efficient to use a cracker rather than a slave. If lost or injured a slave he would be pressed to buy another slave, but if got injured or died, finacially, the would have been unaffected. Crackers had a very low standard of living. Many of them lived in forests and dug holes in the ground to live in.

Despite their living conditions and their social status, crackers believed they were better than the african slaves. Today, cracker is often used as a derogatory term for a white person for obvious reasons. It implies a person who lives in the utmost worst conditions and a person who no one really cares about.

In mainstream press, the word 'hacker' is often used to refer to a malicious security cracker. There is a classic definition of the term 'hacker', arising from its first documented uses related to information technologies at MIT, that is at odds with the way the term is usually used by journalists. The inheritors of the technical tradition of the word 'hacker' as it was used at MIT sometimes take offense at the sloppy use of the term by journalists and others who are influenced by journalistic inaccuracy. Some claim that the term has been unrecoverably corrupted, and acquired a new meaning that we should simply accept. This descriptivist approach is predicated upon the assumption that there's no reasonable way to communicate effectively with the less technically minded without acquiescing to the nontechnical misuse of the term 'hacker'. I believe it's still useful to differentiate between hackers and security crackers, though, and that terms like 'malicious security cracker' are sufficiently evocative and clear that their use actually helps make communication more effective than the common journalistic misuse of 'hacker'. I think it's useful to differentiate especially because there are many situations where 'hack', and its conjugations, is the only effective term to describe something that has nothing to do with malicious violation of security measures or privacy.

When you simply accept that 'hacker' means 'malicious security cracker', you give up the ability to use the term to refer to anything else without potential confusion. Both are distinct from people whose interest in technical matters is purely professional, with no desire to learn anything about the subject at hand other than to advance a career and make a living. Many hackers and security crackers turn their talents toward professional ends, of course, and some security crackers got where they are only through professional advancement, but one definitely need not have a professional interest to pursue the path of either a hacker or a security cracker. A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.

The term is often misused in a pejorative context, where 'cracker' would be the correct term. See also: cracker.

The Jargon Wiki's first definition for says: A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. A security cracker, meanwhile, is someone whose purpose is to circumvent or break security measures. Some security crackers end up using their powers for good, providing penetration testing services or otherwise making efforts on the side of the angels. Many others use their powers for evil, however, as we are all too painfully aware. Both RFC 1392 and the Jargon Wiki provide definitions of 'cracker' that support this use of the term. Maintaining distinct terms for distinct phenomena is an important aspect of communication, as demonstrated in the incident I described in, where a company executive and I used the same term to refer to two different things and failed to communicate effectively as a result.