Hackers Vs Crackres
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ssc456
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I'm sure someone out there somewhere has a technical term to differentiate the two but in my mind they are pretty much the same.
I mean personally I would see a "cracker" (as something you pull at xmas
) joke, no I see a cracker as someone who hacks into something like an iphone or an iPad to jailbreak it?
Whereas a hacker I would associate more with hacking websites or accounts?
But I think there pretty much the same thing.
I mean personally I would see a "cracker" (as something you pull at xmas
) joke, no I see a cracker as someone who hacks into something like an iphone or an iPad to jailbreak it? Whereas a hacker I would associate more with hacking websites or accounts?
But I think there pretty much the same thing.
traditionally,
a hacker is someone who does something in a clever fashion.
i.e. I hacked together a script to gather event log details from 1000 servers, it saved me a whole week of logging onto them.
or, I hacked together a little website etc.
Whilst a cracker is someone who breaks into something, like a safe cracker...
however, sometime in the eighties or nineties some journalist somewhere confused the terms.
probably someone did a bit of hacking to make a neat tool for cracking.
anyway, popular media now defines the word hacker not as someone finding neat/elegant solutions to problems, (original MIT definition) but as someone who breaks into computer systems.
thus the meaning has changed, hacker and cracker can now be used interchangeably when talking about exploiting computers.
(though you still hack together clever contraptions, you don't crack them together...)
a hacker is someone who does something in a clever fashion.
i.e. I hacked together a script to gather event log details from 1000 servers, it saved me a whole week of logging onto them.
or, I hacked together a little website etc.
Whilst a cracker is someone who breaks into something, like a safe cracker...
however, sometime in the eighties or nineties some journalist somewhere confused the terms.
probably someone did a bit of hacking to make a neat tool for cracking.
anyway, popular media now defines the word hacker not as someone finding neat/elegant solutions to problems, (original MIT definition) but as someone who breaks into computer systems.
thus the meaning has changed, hacker and cracker can now be used interchangeably when talking about exploiting computers.
(though you still hack together clever contraptions, you don't crack them together...)
There's no technical term to differentiate the two because neither are really technical terms to begin with - they've evolved out of a subculture rather than been defined by posh guys in suits at Oxford.
Root's correct in his definition as far as it goes though - there's lots of people that call themselves hackers that just like tinkering around with things and don't do anything illegal, and they would call the other "hackers" "crackers".
...but then again the general public would generally call the people doing the illegal stuff "hackers", and the guys tinkering around "geeks in a basement."
They're loosely defined terms that are basically what you decide to make them. Nothing hugely formal exists.
Root's correct in his definition as far as it goes though - there's lots of people that call themselves hackers that just like tinkering around with things and don't do anything illegal, and they would call the other "hackers" "crackers".
...but then again the general public would generally call the people doing the illegal stuff "hackers", and the guys tinkering around "geeks in a basement."
They're loosely defined terms that are basically what you decide to make them. Nothing hugely formal exists.
XPikachu
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well a cracker (brute force) might take longer then the age of the universe to crack a password (AES 256 blowfish encryption)
a hacker however, well i just hope my computer not hacked
dont really like hackers unless the "hacker" is tinkering with software witch is what the term "hacker" cames from, not breaking into computers without permission how rude!
a hacker however, well i just hope my computer not hacked
dont really like hackers unless the "hacker" is tinkering with software witch is what the term "hacker" cames from, not breaking into computers without permission how rude!
