hackers consist of 3 types white hats, blackhats and grey hats
white hats are the security guys, black hats are the ones who drive for curiosity even though they should not do and grey hats are ones who know what the black hats know but agree with the white hats and help to stop black hats.
but beside the part above anyone who is a programmer is also know as a hacker.

crackers they are people who love to reverse engineer software and other things by use of patches and cracks

phreakers- they deal with phones

you just classified yourself as a total dumbass, and crackers are people who "crack" passwords and jack your shit, not only cracking software which everyone does

yeah they crack algorithms, which come from coded applications that the cracker did not make. Therefore they reverse engineer the software in order to make a patch or a crack.

Just because you find a patch or a keygen to make some pirated software available to use, does not mean that you are a cracker. all and when u say "jack your shit", you mean torrent em, cause idk.

So, learn who to call dumb-ass, if you need to know more i can point you in a good place to learn

shut the fuck up, you dumbass.

Well, um... What he said.

Good and well, but I don't support the anarchist's cookbook at all. It's a book filled with halfassed recipes made to get adolescent males arrested or killed. And thats just the textual content; let alone the intent behind it and the following it has developed.

But as I mentioned, and as you seemed to be hinting at, the hacking I enjoy and the hacking as mentioned in the Anarchist Cookbook are two entirely different entities. One is true hacking at its best, the other is mindless exploitation of other's property and identity; which I do not support (unless I am sufficiently angry).

The difference between knowing the terms for something and knowing its nature are orders of magnitude different. I think many users make the mistake of saying they "know" something, when in fact they only vaguely understand the concept of it. I think that is a very large factor in telling a skiddy from a true hacker.

Err.. No actually. Hackers come in many many more flavours than that which you describe. Any person with enough skill and intense passion for a particular hobby is a type of hacker.

You have the classic computer hacker, someone who eats breathes and shits computer related studies and has complete and total dominance over any aspect of the system he is working with.

You can have a mathematical hacker, someone who knows the ins and outs, tricks and secrets of solving abstract problems and find odd connections between their lives and mathematical properties (like that guy from Numb3rs).

You can have a sculptor who is a hacker. He sees the world in a different way than the rest of the general public, keen sense of measurement and perspective, the ability to craft anything from his imagination or reality into any medium he chooses.

Thats just a random selection of 'hackers', there are many more; but I have not the space on this server's harddrive to describe them all.

as cuddles already stated, shut the fuck up you god damned idiot.

haha you are saying i need to learn? 2 of the best people on here just defended me... and when i mean "jack your shit" i MEAN "jack your shit" not torrent dumb fucking, i mean jacking bank account #'s, passwords that shit, so if you need to work on not only hacking but also reading comprehension

the only one you got right is the phreaker one...

I'm in a cyber security class and all your 'hats' are totally off. I'd type what my book says they are but i don't feel like it...