I liked how Emmanuel Goldstein described in this Q&A, some typical situations in the hacker belief by most common people:

This raises several points that I feel strongly about. For one thing, hacking is the only field where the media believes anyone who says they’re a hacker. Would you believe someone who said they were a cop? Or a doctor? Or an airline pilot? Odds are they’d have to prove their ability at some point or say something that obviously makes some degree of sense. But you can walk up to any reporter and say you’re a hacker and they will write a story about you telling the world that you’re exactly what you say you are without any real proof.

So every time a movie like “Hackers” comes out, 10 million people from AOL send us e-mail saying they want to be hackers, too, and suddenly, every 12-year-old with this sentiment instantly becomes a hacker in the eyes of the media and hence, the rest of society. You don’t become a hacker by snapping your fingers. It’s not about getting easy answers or making free phone calls or logging into someone else’s computer. Hackers “feel” what they do, and it excites them.

I find that if the people around you think you’re wasting your time but you genuinely like what you’re doing, you’re driven by it, and you’re relentless in your pursuit, you have a good part of a hacker in you. But if you’re mobbed by people who are looking for free phone calls, software or exploits, you’re just an opportunist, possibly even a criminal. We already have words for these people and it adequately defines what they do. While it’s certainly possible to use hacking ability to commit a crime, once you do this you cease being a hacker and commence being a criminal. It’s really not a hard distinction to make.

Now, we have a small but vocal group who insist on calling anyone they deem unacceptable in the hacker world a “cracker.” This is an attempt to solve the problem of the misuse of the word “hacker” by simply misusing a new word. It’s a very misguided, though well-intentioned, effort. The main problem is that when you make up such a word, no further definition is required. When you label someone with a word that says they’re evil, you never really find out what the evil was to begin with. Murderer, that’s easy. Burglar, embezzler, rapist, kidnapper, all pretty clear.

Now along comes cracker and you don’t even know what the crime was. It could be crashing every computer system in Botswana. Or it could be copying a single file. We need to avoid the labeling and start looking at what we’re actually talking about. But at the same time, we have to remember that you don’t become a hacker simply because you say you are.

How many times real hackers will have to repeat that?