1. The internet started in academia. Everybody trusted each other and there was no security and no systems compromise. The word 'hacker' came into use to mean a very skilled engineer. 2. The internet became commonplace and children started using it everywhere. These children came to know it better than almost anybody else. A widespread culture grew of people who would control computers to accomplish tasks nobody else could do. This culture had a subculture of people who would break into the systems of others, mostly to show off their skills than accomplish anything else in particular. 3. The internet became the way to do things. Businesses and governments started using it for everything; mostly inexperienced people who didn't understand how it worked. A group of skilled professionals were responsible for keeping these operations safe, and they mostly did this by personally watching them as they ran. Regarding systems compromise, the professionals and skilled individuals broke themselves into groups unfortunately called "blackhats", "greyhats", and "whitehats". They mostly identified as white men, so there may have been a little racism. How dark the color was related to how much time was spent doing things that seemed a little wrong. Spying or changing data. So in my inexperienced opinion, a whitehat may still compromise the system of another, but they are going to be the people surreptitiously removing the viruses from other's systems to calm situations down, rather than the people directing those viruses. A blackhat was the kind who would break something, but many did so in order to help the public understand the severity of the problems with digital security. Most viruses around the start were things made for fun. They might spread or destroy things, but again they were mostly just people showing off, because computers weren't running anything important yet. The cultural norm was that your skill as a hacker was how your system was defended. If your system wasn't defended well, it was your fault and the intruder was helping shore your defenses up. This is because most of these people were childhood computer wizards with lots of free time and incredible ease finding a job, not people struggling to make things work. 3b. It was well-known that students and new hires had far more skill at computers than their teachers or bosses. However, academia and business wanted to get on the technology bandwagon fast, and started offering degree programs and careers around hacking. Unfortunately, the people running these things were far behind the education curve, as they were pushing out graduates and selling products, and in order to save face had to claim they were experts. So a lot of professionals were churned out who simply believed things that were false, unfortunately, and these professionals then trained other people. 4. As governments and businesses got more involved in hacking, they ended up hiring, imprisoning, disrupting, and hounding into hiding the hackers, severely changing things. Policies and economics changed to reduce the personal power held by hackers, of any whiteness or blackness. One thing I've noticed is a sense of military spy agencies still using that chest-beating "gotcha" regarding system vulnerabilities, but hounding people out of their careers and homes instead of _helping_ them secure their systems, the latter of which was the norm. It reveals that groups have been hired to pretend to be hackers in order to destroy them, because they don't understand the reasons for the chest-thumping. The pattern of reflecting disrupting behaviors on people, that people have expressed towards governments and corporations, is a common and highly effective one, because individual people do not have the resources of a government or corporation, and feel bad when they experience harm at the behaviors they may have engaged in themselves. It additionally ends up being inhuman, because such people can suffer so much. In the 80s through 2000s, one of the most exciting things systems people tried to enter was schools, governments, and banks, because these things could give them so much power, and doing so was easy in the early days because the people running them could never cognitively compete with people who had spent their whole lives learning their internals. These disruption left governments and corporations with a lot of fear and a lot of injury, that likely stimulated the harsh lashbacks over the past couple decades. The thing to remember is that hackers know how to secure systems, and are trying to make them all be secure, to protect everyone: but rather than learning these things, the people whose systems were compromised have persecuted them via the crackers' own techniques. The cracker culture didn't originally understand how scared people felt when these things happened, because they were used to cracking other hackers, not normal kind people. "cracking" means compromising the systems of others "hacking" means very skilled engineering, usually of software or electronics 5. Now most cracking looks like it is done by international groups with ties to governments and corporations who can defend them. I think of them as military spy agencies, but I don't really know anything about them. Somebody who has to work a job, isn't going to have as much skill as an old hacker had. But if you're the only people doing it, then you're basically in charge. Luckily, all of hacking is derivable from engineering and there are many disciplines studying it. Unfortunately, we have a situation now where everything is incredibly insecure, because the people who understood security were attacked when they tried to talk about it in the language they knew, for many years. Back to 3 and 4: The way to make something secure is honestly to spend weeks completely understanding and developing it in your basement because it's what you do for fun. This takes a lot longer than corporations want to pay for, and often is done best by people who don't know how to smile or wear a tie. So, since marketing makes so much money, products were made that were known insecure, marketed as secure, and dispersed everywhere, and this is still done today. If you bring a computer to a repair center, they will make it work, usually ignore the underlying cause of the issue, and give it back to you quickly, which makes them more business when you return. 6: That's a good chunk of what I've got, starting to have my psychotic amnesia again now. Thanks for reading. I infer the norm of this list was to ask people to learn to be a hacker in order to really get involved. I also infer that people have so much security need now, compared to the time needed to learn to be a hacker yourself, that something else will develop. With strong AI out there, it's hard to know what is needed, and in what way.