How does one distinguish between the good hackers who bring us the wonders of technological advancem ent and the evil hackers who steal our credit card num bers? The term cracker was coined to distinguish evil hackers from the good ones. Journalists were told that crackers were supposed to be the bad guys, while hackers were the good guys. Hackers stayed true to the Hacker Ethic, while crackers were only interested in breaking the law and m aking a quick buck. Crackers were considered to be m uch less talented than the elite hackers, as they sim ply m ade use of hacker-written tools and scripts without understanding how they worked. Cracker was m eant to be the catch-all label for anyone doing anything unscrupulous with a com puter— pirating software, defacing websites, and worst of all, not understanding what they were doing. But very few people use this term today.