Do u know Who is a CRACKER

The Cracker is 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. 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 polyculture
this lexicon describes; though crackers often like to describe
themselves as hackers, most true hackers consider them a separate
and lower form of life.
It’s clear that the term cracker is absolutely meant to be derogatory. One
shouldn’t take the tone too seriously though, as The Jargon File is done with a
sense of humor, and our statement is said with a smile.As we can see from the
above, illegal or perhaps immoral activity is viewed with disdain by the “true hackers,” whomever they may be. It also makes reference to cracker being a possible
intermediate step to hacker, perhaps something to be overcome.
Without debating for the moment whether this is a fair definition or not, we
would like to add an additional, slightly different, definition of cracker. Many
years ago when I got my first personal computer, most software publishers
employed some form of copy protection on their software as an attempt to keep
people from pirating their programs. As with all copy protection, someone would
eventually find a way to circumvent the protection mechanism, and the copies
would spread.The people who were able to crack the copy protection mechanisms
were called crackers.There’s one major difference between this kind of
cracker and those mentioned before: copy protection crackers were widely
admired for their skills (well, not by the software publishers of course, but by
others). Often times, the crack would require some machine language debugging
and patching, limiting the title to those who possessed those skills. In many cases,
the cracker would use some of the free space on the diskette to place a graphic
or message indicating who had cracked the program, a practice perhaps distantly
related to today’s Web page defacements.
The thing that copy protection crackers had in common with today’s crackers
is that their activities were perhaps on the wrong side of the law. Breaking copy
protection by itself may not have been illegal at the time, but giving out copies was.
Arguments could be made that the act of breaking the protection was an
intellectual pursuit. In fact, at the time, several companies existed that sold software
that would defeat copy protection, but they did not distribute other people’s
software.They would produce programs that contained a menu of software, and
the user simply had to insert their disk to be copied, and choose the proper program
from the menu. Updates were distributed via a subscription model, so the
latest cracks would always be available. In this manner, the crackers could practice
their craft without breaking any laws, because they didn’t actually distribute any
pirated software.These programs were among those most coveted by the pirates.
Even though the crackers, of either persuasion, may be looked down upon,
there are those who they can feel superior to as well.

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