Aren hackers people who break into other peoples computers and spread viruses and stuff?
There are other underground cultures that use the term, and the media seem to have fixated on one particular usage. This culture has nothing to do with the hackers that I’m referring to. Many people prefer to call those people crackers. Hackers, as I use the term, are people who enjoy computer programming (and other related activities), and ‘hacking’ is simply the act of creating and editing program code. The culture originated in university circles (MIT, for instance), and today the term is commonly encounterend in connection with the Free Software community. While hackers generally are anti-authoritarian and non-conformist by nature, this does not mean they accept or are interested in illegal activities.
