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发信人: ayuer@bbs.pku.edu.cn (阿月), 信区: Linux
标 题: Hack, Hackers, and Hacking(转载)
发信站: 北大未名站 (Fri Oct 17 10:48:32 2003)
转信站: SZU!news.ccie.net.cn!news.happynet.org!PKU
【 以下文字转载自 Mechanics 讨论区 】
【 原文由 ayuer 所发表 】
出自 Free as in Freedom
Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software
By Sam Williams
书我看了一些，发现对这种传记的东东并不是很喜欢，不过这段appendix很有趣的:)
Hack, Hackers, and Hacking
To understand the full meaning of the word " hacker," it helps to examine
the word's etymology over the years.
The New Hacker Dictionary, an online compendium of software-programmer ja
rgon, officially lists nine different connotations of the word "hack" and a s
imilar number for "hacker." Then again, the same publication also includes an
accompanying essay that quotes Phil Agre, an MIT hacker who warns readers no
t to be fooled by the word's perceived flexibility. "Hack has only one meanin
g," argues Agre. "An extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulat
ion."
Regardless of the width or narrowness of the definition, most modern hack
ers trace the word back to MIT, where the term bubbled up as popular item of
student jargon in the early 1950s. In 1990 the MIT Museum put together a jour
nal documenting the hacking phenomenon. According to the journal, students wh
o attended the institute during the fifties used the word "hack" the way a mo
dern student might use the word "goof." Hanging a jalopy out a dormitory wind
ow was a "hack," but anything harsh or malicious-e.g., egging a rival dorm's
windows or defacing a campus statue-fell outside the bounds. Implicit within
the definition of "hack" was a spirit of harmless, creative fun.
This spirit would inspire the word's gerund form: "hacking." A 1950s stud
ent who spent the better part of the afternoon talking on the phone or disman
tling a radio might describe the activity as "hacking." Again, a modern speak
er would substitute the verb form of "goof"-"goofing" or "goofing off"-to des
cribe the same activity.
As the 1950s progressed, the word "hack" acquired a sharper, more rebelli
ous edge. The MIT of the 1950s was overly competitive, and hacking emerged as
both a reaction to and extension of that competitive culture. Goofs and pran
ks suddenly became a way to blow off steam, thumb one's nose at campus admini
stration, and indulge creative thinking and behavior stifled by the Institute
's rigorous undergraduate curriculum. With its myriad hallways and undergroun
d steam tunnels, the Institute offered plenty of exploration opportunities fo
r the student undaunted by locked doors and "No Trespassing" signs. Students
began to refer to their off-limits explorations as "tunnel hacking." Above gr
ound, the campus phone system offered similar opportunities. Through casual e
xperimentation and due diligence, students learned how to perform humorous tr
icks. Drawing inspiration from the more traditional pursuit of tunnel hacking
, students quickly dubbed this new activity "phone hacking."
The combined emphasis on creative play and restriction-free exploration w
ould serve as the basis for the future mutations of the hacking term. The fir
st self-described computer hackers of the 1960s MIT campus originated from a
late 1950s student group called the Tech Model Railroad Club. A tight clique
within the club was the Signals and Power (S&P) Committee-the group behind th
e railroad club's electrical circuitry system. The system was a sophisticated
assortment of relays and switches similar to the kind that controlled the lo
cal campus phone system. To control it, a member of the group simply dialed i
n commands via a connected phone and watched the trains do his bidding.
The nascent electrical engineers responsible for building and maintaining
this system saw their activity as similar in spirit to phone hacking. Adopti
ng the hacking term, they began refining it even further. From the S&P hacker
point of view, using one less relay to operate a particular stretch of track
meant having one more relay for future play. Hacking subtly shifted from a s
ynonym for idle play to a synonym for idle play that improved the overall per
formance or efficiency of the club's railroad system at the same time. Soon S
&P committee members proudly referred to the entire activity of improving and
reshaping the track's underlying circuitry as "hacking" and to the people wh
o did it as "hackers."
Given their affinity for sophisticated electronics-not to mention the tra
ditional MIT-student disregard for closed doors and "No Trespassing" signs-it
didn't take long before the hackers caught wind of a new machine on campus.
Dubbed the TX-0, the machine was one of the first commercially marketed compu
ters. By the end of the 1950s, the entire S&P clique had migrated en masse ov
er to the TX-0 control room, bringing the spirit of creative play with them.
The wide-open realm of computer programming would encourage yet another mutat
ion in etymology. "To hack" no longer meant soldering unusual looking circuit
s, but cobbling together software programs with little regard to "official" m
ethods or software-writing procedures. It also meant improving the efficiency
and speed of already-existing programs that tended to hog up machine resourc
es. True to the word's roots, it also meant writing programs that served no o
ther purpose than to amuse or entertain.
A classic example of this expanded hacking definition is the game Spacewa
r, the first interactive video game. Developed by MIT hackers in the early 19
60s, Spacewar had all the traditional hacking definitions: it was goofy and r
andom, serving little useful purpose other than providing a nightly distracti
on for the dozen or so hackers who delighted in playing it. From a software p
erspective, however, it was a monumental testament to innovation of programmi
ng skill. It was also completely free. Because hackers had built it for fun,
they saw no reason to guard their creation, sharing it extensively with other
programmers. By the end of the 1960s, Spacewar had become a favorite diversi
on for mainframe programmers around the world.
This notion of collective innovation and communal software ownership dist
anced the act of computer hacking in the 1960s from the tunnel hacking and ph
one hacking of the 1950s. The latter pursuits tended to be solo or small-grou
p activities. Tunnel and phone hackers relied heavily on campus lore, but the
off-limits nature of their activity discouraged the open circulation of new
discoveries. Computer hackers, on the other hand, did their work amid a scien
tific field biased toward collaboration and the rewarding of innovation. Hack
ers and "official" computer scientists weren't always the best of allies, but
in the rapid evolution of the field, the two species of computer programmer
evolved a cooperative-some might say symbiotic-relationship.
It is a testament to the original computer hackers' prodigious skill that
later programmers, including Richard M. Stallman, aspired to wear the same h
acker mantle. By the mid to late 1970s, the term "hacker" had acquired elite
connotations. In a general sense, a computer hacker was any person who wrote
software code for the sake of writing software code. In the particular sense,
however, it was a testament to programming skill. Like the term "artist," th
e meaning carried tribal overtones. To describe a fellow programmer as hacker
was a sign of respect. To describe oneself as a hacker was a sign of immense
personal confidence. Either way, the original looseness of the computer-hack
er appellation diminished as computers became more common.
As the definition tightened, "computer" hacking acquired additional seman
tic overtones. To be a hacker, a person had to do more than write interesting
software; a person had to belong to the hacker "culture" and honor its tradi
tions the same way a medieval wine maker might pledge membership to a vintner
s' guild. The social structure wasn't as rigidly outlined as that of a guild,
but hackers at elite institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon
began to speak openly of a "hacker ethic": the yet-unwritten rules that gove
rned a hacker's day-to-day behavior. In the 1984 book Hackers, author Steven
Levy, after much research and consultation, codified the hacker ethic as five
core hacker tenets.
In many ways, the core tenets listed by Levy continue to define the cultu
re of computer hacking. Still, the guild-like image of the hacker community w
as undermined by the overwhelmingly populist bias of the software industry. B
y the early 1980s, computers were popping up everywhere, and programmers who
once would have had to travel to top-rank institutions or businesses just to
gain access to a machine suddenly had the ability to rub elbows with major-le
ague hackers via the ARPAnet. The more these programmers rubbed elbows, the m
ore they began to appropriate the anarchic philosophies of the hacker culture
in places like MIT. Lost within the cultural transfer, however, was the nati
ve MIT cultural taboo against malicious behavior. As younger programmers bega
n employing their computer skills to harmful ends-creating and disseminating
computer viruses, breaking into military computer systems, deliberately causi
ng machines such as MIT Oz, a popular ARPAnet gateway, to crash-the term "hac
ker" acquired a punk, nihilistic edge. When police and businesses began traci
ng computer-related crimes back to a few renegade programmers who cited conve
nient portions of the hacking ethic in defense of their activities, the word
"hacker" began appearing in newspapers and magazine stories in a negative lig
ht. Although books like Hackers did much to document the original spirit of e
xploration that gave rise to the hacking culture, for most news reporters, "c
omputer hacker" became a synonym for "electronic burglar."
Although hackers have railed against this perceived misusage for nearly t
wo decades, the term's rebellious connotations dating back to the 1950s make
it hard to discern the 15-year-old writing software programs that circumvent
modern encryption programs from the 1960s college student, picking locks and
battering down doors to gain access to the lone, office computer terminal. On
e person's creative subversion of authority is another person's security head
ache, after all. Even so, the central taboo against malicious or deliberately
harmful behavior remains strong enough that most hackers prefer to use the t
erm " cracker"-i.e., a person who deliberately cracks a computer security sys
tem to steal or vandalize data-to describe the subset of hackers who apply th
eir computing skills maliciously.
This central taboo against maliciousness remains the primary cultural lin
k between the notion of hacking in the early 21st century and hacking in the
1950s. It is important to note that, as the idea of computer hacking has evol
ved over the last four decades, the original notion of hacking-i.e., performi
ng pranks or exploring underground tunnels-remains intact. In the fall of 200
0, the MIT Museum paid tradition to the Institute's age-old hacking tradition
with a dedicated exhibit, the Hall of Hacks. The exhibit includes a number o
f photographs dating back to the 1920s, including one involving a mock police
cruiser. In 1993, students paid homage to the original MIT notion of hacking
by placing the same police cruiser, lights flashing, atop the Institute's ma
in dome. The cruiser's vanity license plate read IHTFP, a popular MIT acronym
with many meanings. The most noteworthy version, itself dating back to the p
ressure-filled world of MIT student life in the 1950s, is "I hate this fuckin
g place." In 1990, however, the Museum used the acronym as a basis for a jour
nal on the history of hacks. Titled, The Institute for Hacks Tomfoolery and P
ranks, the journal offers an adept summary of the hacking.
"In the culture of hacking, an elegant, simple creation is as highly valu
ed as it is in pure science," writes Boston Globe reporter Randolph Ryan in a
1993 article attached to the police car exhibit. "A Hack differs from the or
dinary college prank in that the event usually requires careful planning, eng
ineering and finesse, and has an underlying wit and inventiveness," Ryan writ
es. "The unwritten rule holds that a hack should be good-natured, non-destruc
tive and safe. In fact, hackers sometimes assist in dismantling their own han
diwork."
The urge to confine the culture of computer hacking within the same ethic
al boundaries is well-meaning but impossible. Although most software hacks as
pire to the same spirit of elegance and simplicity, the software medium offer
s less chance for reversibility. Dismantling a police cruiser is easy compare
d with dismantling an idea, especially an idea whose time has come. Hence the
growing distinction between "black hat" and "white hat"-i.e., hackers who tu
rn new ideas toward destructive, malicious ends versus hackers who turn new i
deas toward positive or, at the very least, informative ends.
Once a vague item of obscure student jargon, the word "hacker" has become
a linguistic billiard ball, subject to political spin and ethical nuances. P
erhaps this is why so many hackers and journalists enjoy using it. Where that
ball bounces next, however, is anybody's guess.
--
We toast the lisp programmer who pens his thoughts
within nests of parentheses.
-----Alan J. Perlis
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