Hacking: Thank Goodness for Rebels

In life, there are always good and bad people. In a classroom, there are always those that follow all the rules and those that rebel and break the rules. Like the shoulder angels and devils, you know, where the angel tells you to do the right thing and the devil tells you to do the wrong thing, you can't have one without the other. In other words, you can't have good without bad; you can't have good hackers without the bad hackers. It is because of the good hackers that there are bad hackers and the other way around.

A hacker is defined as "a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system." We usually think of hackers as bad, but there are situations when hackers do bad for the greater good. You can compare it to Batman, where he does wrong things because good behavior and following the law isn't enough to accomplish what needs to be done.

People think of hacking as breaking into computers and stealing data and files. While there are hackers that do such things, known as the "Black Hats," there are other hackers that, for example, hack into sites in order to help improve them, known as the "White Hats." Hackers are talented coders, since they are able to do either good or bad to different sites and systems.

Without hackers, we wouldn't have some of the things we use almost everyday today. The desire to explore systems and see how they work made many hackers knowledgeable. Open-sourced programs wouldn't have much improvement without hackers. Steven Jobs built Apple. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook. Linus Torvalds created Linux.

Though it is important to not forget about the black hat hackers, if one can stand out and do something that benefits others as a white hat, then they are also hackers. Hacking, like Batman, whether it is good or bad, is up to you to decide.