How Hackers Changed the World | History of Hacking

Hey Hackers! in this post of Learn Hacking, I am not bringing any new tutorial or trick for you but I am bringing out the truth of Hackers. How the Hackers changed the world and What is their actual contribution to the society.
When the term Hacker comes into Picture, many people get scared as the evil picture comes into their mind. They think that a hacker is going to hack their email or bank account or they are going to face severe loss of information and data, but this is not so. A few black hat hackers who misused their knowledge have made people think so however this is not the reality of Hackers, this is not what a Hacker really is.
People often come and say – “I am a hacker, I can hack any email account” and stuff like that, sounds really kiddish to me. They don’t know who a hacker really is and they call themselves a hacker. For a moment lets just forget about Blackhat and Whitehat or any other categorization of hackers.
Lets start from the beginning, How Hacking started?
What led to the birth of Hackers?
Any idea?
Well you are about to know.
It all started with video games, the early beginning of computers when people used computers just to perform calculations or play very small games, this new machine and its working generated curiosity in the minds of people and they wanted to learn more about it, when learnt they wanted to make it better. Then people like Bill Gates and many others mastered the concept and started improving them and the result is infront of  us, yes your computer. Its the curiosity to Learn New things that led to the birth of Hackers (No harm in this I guess). Proved to be a boon for all of us.
The main aim of Hackers at that time was to gain respect of other Hackers, to prove that they have superior knowledge than others. A hacker is actually someone who has mastered in his/ her field and can develop its hack ie.. make it better. Even if you find an exploit in a software or break into it, its also going to benefit the software as that Exploit is going to get removed from it in the next update.
Now the Next generation came when after the hardware improvement it was the time for softwares and websites. Hackers had machines in their hands but wanted to make the best use of it, as a result they made many softwares and made many new innovations. Most of us have hear about one coding language or the other but have you ever wondered who thought about having a standardized Coding language or platform to perform a particular task? Well now you got the answer.
We all also use Linux and even Backtrack, Ever wondered how Linux was developed? It was developed as an opensource on Hacking forums. That’s why is still free and is so secure that many companies and even the biggest web servers use it.
Ah.. This is just the beginning. Lets come to the websites thing, people designed websites and developed them on various platforms but who would have taken care of website’s security. People gained immense knowledge about web servers. Internet was the next big thing. It was the age of static websites, trust me, static websites are much more hard to hack than dynamic websites. And only people with immense knowledge of web servers could hack them. So if someone was able to break into any website at that time, he was actually a web server expert.
Things don’t end here, as the process of learning never ends, the hackers have become smarter with time.
So what separates a Good Hacker from a Bad Hacker or What differentiated between a blackhat hacker and a Whitehat Hacker, well its their deeds.
Obviously when you have immense knowledge of anything you can both use and misuse it. If you use it wisely, you become a hacker else you become a cracker.
Then came several more categorizations depending upon the level you can hack, but they don’t matter much.
The main reason of me writing this post was to tell you Who a Hacker actually is.
In the present era when people consider Hacking Facebook account or email account as hacking, never forget the roots, How Hacking Started. Hacking will always lead to progress and development if used wisely, but in the end its you who is to decide how you want to use your knowledge.

What Is a Hacker?

The Jargon File contains a bunch of definitions of the term hacker, most having to do with technical adeptness and a delight in solving problems and overcoming limits. If you want to know how to become a hacker, though, only two are really relevant.

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments. The members of this culture originated the term ‘hacker’. Hackers built the Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system what it is today. Hackers run Usenet. Hackers make the World Wide Web work. If you are part of this culture, if you have contributed to it and other people in it know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a hacker.

The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music  actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them hackers too and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term hacker

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call these people hacker and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word hacker to describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.

If you want to be a hacker, keep reading. If you want to be a cracker, go read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the slammer after finding out you aren't as smart as you think you are. And that's all I'm going to say about crackers.

What is hacking?

Hacking is unauthorized use of computer and network resources. (The term "hacker" originally meant a very gifted programmer. In recent years though, with easier access to multiple systems, it now has negative implications.)

Hacking is a felony in the United States and most other countries. When it is done by request and under a contract between an ethical hacker and an organization, it's OK. The key difference is that the ethical hacker has authorization to probe the target.

We work with IBM Consulting and its customers to design and execute thorough evaluations of their computer and network security. Depending on the evaluation they request (ranging from Web server probes to all-out attacks), we gather as much information as we can about the target from publicly available sources. As we learn more about the target, its subsidiaries and network connectivity, we begin to probe for weaknesses.

Examples of weaknesses include poor configuration of Web servers, old or unpatched software, disabled security controls, and poorly chosen or default passwords. As we find and exploit vulnerabilities, we document if and how we gained access, as well as if anyone at the organization noticed. (In nearly all the cases, the Information Syhstems department is not informed of these planned attacks.) Then we work with the customer to address the issues we've discovered.

The number of really gifted hackers in the world is very small, but there are lots of wannabes.... When we do an ethical hack, we could be holding the keys to that company once we gain access. It's too great a risk for our customers to be put in a compromising position. With access to so many systems and so much information, the temptation for a former hacker could be too great -- like a kid in an unattended candy store.

From the interview with Dr. Charles C. Palmer, IBM.