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A "Hacker" is someone who breaks into other people's computers through their network security. You may find him reading your mail, or stealing your credit card off of an e-commerce site, or trying to crash Yahoo!. A "Cracker", on the other hand, is someone who breaks through software security on his home machine. You may find plenty of proud and noble "crackers" copying DVDs to grainy, low-quality Video CDs, putting their own names in the title screen of popular video games, or staying up all night with a disassembler to remove the registration code scheme from a $20 shareware program.
Unlike most amateur entymologists, I'm not making this shit up. People who break into other people's machines over the network DO call themselves HACKERS, no matter what open-source lunatics may say. And stolen video games almost ALWAYS say CRACKED BY on the title screen. So Hacker and Cracker actually MEAN things, and it's time to stop making up stupid stories about what these words DON'T mean.
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