What is a hacker?

After viewing the documentary my idea of a hacker has opened my mind about who they really are. I used to think hackers were just horrible people that wanted to break people's computers for fun, steal identities, or to steal confidential information etc. But after watching the video, even Net Artists are hackers because of their altering, subverting, repurposing, re-creating, redefining of whatever someone says you're supposed to do with something. Hackers are very experimental, innovative thinkers that have definitely pushed a new medium to develop new things. I have been so used to seeing them in only negative ways but after watching the video, I realized that without hackers then the creation of home computers would not have existed. Hacking led to these new computers, and additional features like making games, programs, and graphics. I never knew that it all started out with an era of "phone phreaking." Whistling and making sounds into phones to make free calls is very ingenious. Not only is hacking thought of as just an outlaw profession which can violate the right of privacy for many, but hacking is a profession that has greatly sparked the computer revolution. However, hackers are still a great threat to society because they can find information from people- which can be a powerful thing in my opinion. Although copying information from people isn't necessarily "stealing," I feel like it is wrong sometimes because the original doesn't belong to them. I hate it when people try to steal graphics or codes of my site layouts or something, and try to put it on their sites without my consent. But then again, I might be hypocritical when I take parts of other people's codes for my site too.. but I just alter it to fit my site. I usually give credit too.

As for "hacking," I am not sure how to define what I made as "hacking." I used to own my own forums/bbs, however you wanna call it. I would install codes provided by XMB Boards and I would customize everything myself. I was the Super Administrator and I had the power to alternate and change the board to my own liking. There were features you could add to the boards, besides the basic message boards, members lists, etc. Features such as "shops," theme/layout changes, additional live chat rooms, games, additional forum pages, portal systems, and random little changes for the boards. These features were called "hacks." Depending on the version of the XMB Board you had, they had different hack releases available for you to use for your own boards that people created, or you could create yourself. A friend and I created live chat rooms and additional pages for an old board, but we closed it down after a while of inactivity. It was really fun having people our age come to our boards and have contests, random topics and games, chatting, sharing pixel art & other art, and so much more.

The forum is still actually sorttaa up, but its been really dead and dying the past like 2 years. A lot of code is just messed up and gone because I haven't updated it in aggesss. I made our Forum a fun theme, "Bandaid BBS." Adminstrators/Moderators were like "Doctors/Nurses" while members were like "patients." It's such a shame it's down now though. You can see it here at a subdomain of my main site: http://bbbs.simplyaesthetic.net. (I warn you it looks really horrible now, and there are missing images and backgrounds and codes... ew. And it was reallly pink- at least the default theme was pink.)