Difference Between 'Hacking' and 'Cracking'

May be this will be huge and immense But trust me it will life changing and just go through it and try it read I assure that you will not find it boring at all rather exciting and inspiring  

The idea of hacking may conjure stylized images of electronic vandalism,

espionage, dyed hair, and body piercings. Most people associate hacking with

breaking the law and assume that everyone who engages in hacking activities is

a criminal. Granted, there are people out there who use hacking techniques to

break the law, but hacking isn't really about that. In fact, hacking is more about

following the law than breaking it. The essence of hacking is finding unintended

or overlooked uses for the laws and properties of a given situation and then

applying them in new and inventive ways to solve a problem—whatever it may

be.

The rules for this problem are well defined and simple, yet the answer eludes

many. Like the solution to this problem (shown on the last page of this book),

hacked solutions follow the rules of the system, but they use those rules in

counterintuitive ways. This gives hackers their edge, allowing them to solve

problems in ways unimaginable for those confined to conventional thinking and

methodologies.

Since the infancy of computers, hackers have been creatively solving problems.

In the late 1950s, the MIT model railroad club was given a donation of parts,

mostly old telephone equipment. The club's members used this equipment to rig

up a complex system that allowed multiple operators to control different parts of

the track by dialing in to the appropriate sections. They called this new and

inventive use of telephone equipment hacking ; many people consider this group

to be the original hackers. The group moved on to programming on punch cards

and ticker tape for early computers like the IBM 704 and the TX-0. While others

were content with writing programs that just solved problems, the early hackers

were obsessed with writing programs that solved problems well. A new program

that could achieve the same result as an existing one but used fewer punch cards

was considered better, even though it did the same thing. The key difference was

how the program achieved its results—elegance.

Being able to reduce the number of punch cards needed for a program showed an

artistic mastery over the computer. A nicely crafted table can hold a vase just as

well as a milk crate can, but one sure looks a lot better than the other. Early

hackers proved that technical problems can have artistic solutions, and they

thereby transformed programming from a mere engineering task into an art form.

Like many other forms of art, hacking was often misunderstood. The few who

got it formed an informal subculture that remained intensely focused on learning

and mastering their art. They believed that information should be free and

anything that stood in the way of that freedom should be circumvented. Such

obstructions included authority figures, the bureaucracy of college classes, and

discrimination. In a sea of graduation-driven students, this unofficial group of

hackers defied conventional goals and instead pursued knowledge itself. This

drive to continually learn and explore transcended even the conventional

boundaries drawn by discrimination, evident in the MIT model railroad club's

acceptance of 12-year-old Peter Deutsch when he demonstrated his knowledge

of the TX-0 and his desire to learn. Age, race, gender, appearance, academic

degrees, and social status were not primary criteria for judging another's worth—

not because of a desire for equality, but because of a desire to advance the

emerging art of hacking.

The original hackers found splendor and elegance in the conventionally dry

sciences of math and electronics. They saw programming as a form of artistic

expression and the computer as an instrument of that art. Their desire to dissect

and understand wasn't intended to demystify artistic endeavors; it was simply a

way to achieve a greater appreciation of them. These knowledge-driven values

would eventually be called the Hacker Ethic: the appreciation of logic as an art

form and the promotion of the free flow of information, surmounting

conventional boundaries and restrictions for the simple goal of better

understanding the world. This is not a new cultural trend; the Pythagoreans in

ancient Greece had a similar ethic and subculture, despite not owning computers.

They saw beauty in mathematics and discovered many core concepts in

geometry. That thirst for knowledge and its beneficial byproducts would

continue on through history, from the Pythagoreans to Ada Lovelace to Alan

Turing to the hackers of the MIT model railroad club. Modern hackers like

Richard Stallman and Steve Wozniak have continued the hacking legacy,

bringing us modern operating systems, programming languages, personal

computers, and many other technologies that we use every day.

How does one distinguish between the good hackers who bring us the wonders

of technological advancement and the evil hackers who steal our credit card

numbers? The term cracker was coined to distinguish evil hackers from the good

ones. Journalists were told that crackers were supposed to be the bad guys, while

hackers were the good guys. Hackers stayed true to the Hacker Ethic, while

crackers were only interested in breaking the law and making a quick buck.

Crackers were considered to be much less talented than the elite hackers, as they

simply made use of hacker-written tools and scripts without understanding how

they worked. Cracker was meant to be the catch-all label for anyone doing

anything unscrupulous with a computer— pirating software, defacing websites,

and worst of all, not understanding what they were doing. But very few people

use this term today.

The term's lack of popularity might be due to its confusing etymology— cracker

originally described those who crack software copyrights and reverse engineer

copy-protection schemes. Its current unpopularity might simply result from its

two ambiguous new definitions: a group of people who engage in illegal activity

with computers or people who are relatively unskilled hackers. Few technology

journalists feel compelled to use terms that most of their readers are unfamiliar

with. In contrast, most people are aware of the mystery and skill associated with

the term hacker, so for a journalist, the decision to use the term hacker is easy.

Similarly, the term script kiddie is sometimes used to refer to crackers, but it just

doesn't have the same zing as the shadowy hacker. There are some who will still

argue that there is a distinct line between hackers and crackers, but I believe that

anyone who has the hacker spirit is a hacker, despite any laws he or she may

break.