Hackers Hack

What is hacking? To hack is to break something, and make it better. A hacker has the drive to figure out what makes something tick, what makes it bend, and ultimately what makes it break. If you aren't breaking shit, you aren't hacking.

If someone mentions the word "hacking" in the context of a discussion about security, it's unlikely that they're talking about model trains[1], or golf[2]. They're probably referring to hacking as it's described in the Hacker Manifesto[3]. The confusion likely comes from such documents as the "Hacker Howto"[4] from ESR, written 10 years after the manifesto, where hacking is more about writing useless code in dead programming languages, and writings from RMS that describe hacking as using too many chopsticks[5], but in reality, if someone is talking about "hacking", they're almost certainly talking about it in the context of information security.

[1] http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html
[2] http://golf.about.com/cs/golfterms/g/bldef_hacker.htm
[3] http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
[4] http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#skills2
[5] https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html