hackers, phreaks, and pirates -- over a decade of confusion and disagreement

i just wanted to bring out this classic paper on the semantics of the word hacker.

i know i've been harping on this lately, but i really wanna differentiate between hackers going about doing hackerly things and hackers using their skills for criminal activities.

hackers are the ones who figure things out--they can do good things or bad things with what they learn, but the point is they _learn_.

phreaks are phone hackers. they explore the phone system.

skript kiddies are people who take others tools, code, and methods and apply them for their own uses. script kiddies may be doing anything from criminal activities to mischevious pranks to benevolent acts, but the term implies that while they use these tools and may even modify them to their own ends, they don't understand the methods and didn't find them for themselves.

criminals are people who commit crimes.

the point i've been driving into the ground for the past few days is this--an individual can and often does fall into more than one of the above categories, and certain activities will certainly fit this description, but just because one applies doesn't necessarily mean the others do.

sorry to keep ranting, but there's been a lot of debate about this recently. gimme your thoughts...

--cid