h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is one that always gets up geeks noses. Apparantley the generally
held meaning of the word hacker (as in some kind of nerdy misanthrope
who evilly ruins other peoples computer systems or steals neclear weapons
secrets for some guy in a fur hat called Boris) is not what real geeks
(who should know these things) mean when they call somebody a hacker.
I think someone is called a hacker if they have an unhealthily high level of
knowledge of the workings of computers, but I could be wrong. An argument
springs up about the semantcs regularly on Slashdot, but I havn't managed
to read one yet.

According to Slashdot hackers call what the general public call hackers crackers, although goodness only knows what crackers call themselves... http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/06/05/1815225.shtml

K3wl Do0dZ, mostly. The rest of us just call them scum. Or script kiddies - a term of derision applied to someone who uses publicly available attack tools (melodramatic term, I know...) to knacker someone else's system, whilst not having the faintest idea about the technical abilities required to write the tools.