Hacking Code Vs. Code Hacking

I consider the terms "hacking code" and "programming" to be synonymous, or virtually synonymous. In some instances I may say that I had to "hack together some perl code" in order to merge elements from two different databases together. People who know me, and are programmers, would agree that what I ended up with was in fact a hack.

That is not to say that it defeated security in any way, but rather it was probably something less glorious than the same sort of program that might have been designed and then built by a team of professional programmers who were hell bent on selling the world the next great database merge tool with bells and whistles hidden beyond the ken of any human user. What I ended up with may or may not have been elegant - but it did work. It was a successful perl hack.

The term hack and hacker can have both positive and negative connotations, depending upon the context in which they are used. For example, consider this comment made by one IT professional when talking about a particular network engineer's "fix" to protect a large hospital's exposure to the conficker malware: "If he would have spent half the time coming up with that fire-wall hack as he did surfing the web this morning, we might have actually avoided having the entire hospital infected." Clearly, in this instance, the hack was not a success.

Had that network engineer been a member of our cyber-jutsu blog, he might have been better educated. He might have still been accused of implementing a hack, but it would have then been a good thing. Luckily for him, that hospital's CIO doesn't know the difference, and he still has a job.

I recommend a google search for "The New Hacker's Dictionary" to help get you up to speed on all the jargon you'll need to survive here at Hacking Code.

In case you want to check out a good online reference for the same: see Jargon File

There are many copies of the Jargon file being hosted by different sites. Google it and see for yourself.

So, the difference between hacking code and code hacking - to me - would be this:

If I am hacking code, I am programming.

If I am code hacking, I am trying to find a way around or through some sort of code or cypher.

If I'm hacking a web server, I'm probably trying to bypass the security of the web server. If I'm hacking together a web server, I'm writing a bare-bones computer program to do the work of a web server rather than using someone else's fully developed web server program (such as Apache 2).

Some might say that I'm not really a freelance writer or professional blogger, that I'm just a hack. Therein we see the negative connotation of hack as applied to a writer.

To this I say: :>p

That's it in a nutshell. I hope this was edifying.