The word hack is an ancient one. So long as you’re referring to chopping something to pieces, it’s been essentially unchanged in English for eight hundred years, and is thought to be traceable back many thousands of years before that to an ancient pan-European term for a tooth or hook.
In computing terms, it’s a far younger idea—but one with a surprisingly similar origin. Because digital “hacking” started out meaning broadly what it always had: chopping something down to size and then rearranging it at will, quite possibly with mischievous intentions.
From the early 1960s, talk of hacks, (used as a noun) meaning clever tricks or pranks, was reported at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Early computers had extremely limited resources for running programs, as well as vulnerabilities that could be exploited by those in the know. Performing clever hacks was thus the sign of a true expert and innovator: someone able not only to understand a system completely, capable of thinking laterally around the system’s limitations.
By the late 1970s, pioneers of home computing like Apple founder Steve Jobs were starting their careers in parents’ garages, dismantling and rebuilding electronics—“hacking” in the most literal of senses and expanding the associations of the word in the process toward the dawning realm of home computing.
By the time of the world wide web’s arrival in the 1990s, hacking’s darker connotations were coming increasingly to the fore in its usage—thanks partly to scare stories in the media, partly to fiction about those seeking to undermine world order from within, and partly to real malice among those determined to exploit the world’s rapidly increasing number of inexperienced computer users.
To those in the know, determining hacking’s precise connotations is a much-debated controversy, while “hacker culture” itself represents a series of traditions encompassing many of the ideas in this book (most iconically embodied in a document known as the “Jargon File”: see the bibliography for further details). Yet it’s also a pursuit that has always come in different “flavors”—and these have over time been formed into a semi-official classification, based on the old-fashioned western movie trope of baddies and goodies wearing different colored hats.
As you might expect, “black hat” hackers are the worst of all digital baddies: someone breaking into computer systems for no reason beyond malice or personal gain. Their counterpart is a “white hat” hacker, whose ethical approach to hacking involves testing and aiming to improve computer security systems, usually in an official capacity.
Between these two lies the realm of the “gray hats,” who may unofficially take on the kind of work performed by white hats—even if they haven’t been invited to do so. There can also be “blue hat” hackers—employed by security consulting firms to test systems—and, leaving hats behind for a moment, “elite” hackers at the very top of the global pecking order, with callow “noobs” at its base (see entry number 43 for more detailed commentary on this delightful term).
Perhaps most pleasing of all, at least linguistically, is a term for those using hacking to send out a political message which has come into its own over the last five years: “hacktivism.” In a world where shutting down the website of a credit-card company can be a potent form of protest, this portmanteau of hacking and activism is perhaps the perfect word for our times.