That's what wikipedia will tell you.
A hacker is a person who learns the lanuage of his computer,
finds holes and bypasses around restricted things.
Being a hacker is a sense of mind, that you are
finding these bypasses, and evetually move on to web/network
security.
From there, you learn how to make your server secure,
while you exploit others to find holes or backdoors.
Hacking is not all the "breaking into hotmail" type stuff.
That's for script kiddies, and they normally get caught at it.
Breaking into other persons, personal and private information
is considered cracking, which is what can get you in trouble,
(and what I have done a few times....)
So really, the definition never changed, it's just that
wikipedia never got it right the first time...
(PS> I'm gonna search CS.NET for a definition that someone else wrote,
much better than me
)
_ISR_m3rc_