Hacking: How a misunderstood word becomes its own field.

Of all the words computers have popularized, none has been as misinterpreted as the word Hacking.  What started out as a slang used by programmers at colleges, "hacking" was nothing more than programmer jargon for having fun.  Today, thanks in large to Hollywood and the news media, hacking's connotation has become that of cracking, which is using a computer to gain access to something illegally.  What started as a harmless word, hacking now represents a malicious area of computer science. 

I find hacking to be a fascinating subject in the field.  Some of the biggest hacks in history have been great lessons for up and coming programmers.  After all a hack is nothing more than one person exposing a weakness in another program causing it to misbehave.  Because of researching hacking on my own time, I have learned how to make my programs secure so to not be vulnerable to common attacks.  Attacks such as Smashing The Stack, which is common in C programs when the original coder is careless with how they read in input.  The best solution to someone messing with your programs stack is to use safe functions or data structures that prevent the stack from being misused.  Not all hacking is considered bad, White hacking, is done in a manner of sport to find the weakness but rather than exploit them, warn the programmers of these flaws. 

Hacking today though is most commonly thought as of a completely negative aspect.  

 Organizations such as Anonymous which use hacking as their main tool have gained large media attention.  Anonymous have hacked into many websites using the hacking methods to not only take information but also to disable operations of websites. 

Not all hackers are evil, not all hackers are crackers.