| crack root
= C =
cracking
cracker n.
One who breaks security on a system. Coined
ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of
hacker (q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish
`worm' in this sense around 1981-82 on Usenet was largely a
failure.
Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion against
the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. The
neologism "cracker" in this sense may have been influenced not so
much by the term "safe-cracker" as by the non-jargon term
"cracker", which in Middle English meant an obnoxious person (e.g.,
"What cracker is this same that deafs our ears / With this
abundance of superfluous breath?" - Shakespeare's King John, Act
II, Scene I) and in modern colloquial American English survives as
a barely gentler synonym for "white trash".
While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some
playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques, anyone
past larval stage is expected to have outgrown the desire to
do so except for immediate, benign, practical reasons (for example,
if it's necessary to get around some security in order to get some
work done).
Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom
than the mundane reader misled by sensationalistic journalism
might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very
secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open
poly-culture this lexicon describes; though crackers often like to
describe themselves as hackers, most true hackers consider
them a separate and lower form of life.
Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who can't
imagine a more interesting way to play with their computers than
breaking into someone else's has to be pretty losing. Some
other reasons crackers are looked down on are discussed in the
entries on cracking and phreaking. See also
samurai, dark-side hacker, and hacker ethic. For a
portrait of the typical teenage cracker, see warez d00dz.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.
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