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109-805: Benjamin Mako Hill is a free software activist, hacker , author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible , The Official Ubuntu Server Book , and The Official Ubuntu Book . Hill is an associate professor in Communication at the University of Washington . Hill has an undergraduate degree in Literature & Technology from Hampshire College ,

218-478: A PHP wiki engine with a MySQL database; this software was custom-made for Misplaced Pages by Magnus Manske . The Phase II software was repeatedly modified to accommodate the exponentially increasing demand. In July 2002 (Phase III), Misplaced Pages shifted to the third-generation software, MediaWiki, originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker . Some MediaWiki extensions are installed to extend the functionality of MediaWiki software. In April 2005, an Apache Lucene extension

327-475: A flatbed scanner to take ultra-high-resolution photographs or using an optical mouse as barcode reader . A solution or feat has "hack value" if it is done in a way that has finesse, cleverness or brilliance, which makes creativity an essential part of the meaning. For example, picking a difficult lock has hack value; smashing it does not. As another example, proving Fermat's Last Theorem by linking together most of modern mathematics has hack value; solving

436-617: A transclusion system for templates , and URL redirection . MediaWiki is licensed under the GNU General Public License and it is used by all Wikimedia projects. Originally, Misplaced Pages ran on UseModWiki written in Perl by Clifford Adams (Phase I), which initially required CamelCase for article hyperlinks; the double bracket style was incorporated later. Starting in January 2002 (Phase II), Misplaced Pages began running on

545-538: A "Knowledge Equity Fund", to provide grants to organizations whose work would not otherwise be covered by Wikimedia grants but addresses racial inequities in accessing and contributing to free knowledge resources. In January 2016, the Foundation announced the creation of an endowment to safeguard its future. The Wikimedia Endowment was established as a donor-advised fund at the Tides Foundation , with

654-473: A "hack" refers to a program that (sometimes illegally) modifies another program, often a video game, giving the user access to features otherwise inaccessible to them. As an example of this use, for Palm OS users (until the 4th iteration of this operating system ), a "hack" refers to an extension of the operating system which provides additional functionality. Term also refers to those people who cheat on video games using special software. This can also refer to

763-666: A caching cluster in an Equinix facility in Singapore , the first of its kind in Asia. The operation of Wikimedia depends on MediaWiki , a custom-made, free and open-source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MariaDB database since 2013; previously the MySQL database was used. The software incorporates programming features such as a macro language , variables ,

872-440: A combinatorial problem by exhaustively trying all possibilities does not. Hacking is not using process of elimination to find a solution; it's the process of finding a clever solution to a problem. While using hacker to refer to someone who enjoys playful cleverness is most often applied to computer programmers, it is sometimes used for people who apply the same attitude to other fields. For example, Richard Stallman describes

981-566: A critically large population and encouraged the spread of a conscious, common, and systematic ethos. Symptomatic of this evolution were an increasing adoption of common slang and a shared view of history, similar to the way in which other occupational groups have professionalized themselves, but without the formal credentialing process characteristic of most professional groups. Over time, the academic hacker subculture has tended to become more conscious, more cohesive, and better organized. The most important consciousness-raising moments have included

1090-559: A different end, to get inside cultural systems on the net and make them do things they were never intended to do. A successful software and hardware hacker artist is Mark Lottor (mkl), who has created the 3-D light art projects entitled the Cubatron , and the Big Round Cubatron . This art is made using custom computer technology, with specially designed circuit boards and programming for microprocessor chips to manipulate

1199-580: A fake police car atop the dome on MIT's Building 10, that was a hack in this sense, and the students involved were therefore hackers. Other types of hacking are reality hackers , wetware hackers ("hack your brain"), and media hackers ("hack your reputation"). In a similar vein, a "hack" may refer to a math hack, that is, a clever solution to a mathematical problem. All of these uses have spread beyond MIT. CSO Online defined ethical hacking as going into devices and computer systems belonging to an organization, with its explicit permissions, to assess and test

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1308-470: A feeder project to supplement Nupedia . The project was originally funded by Bomis , Wales's for-profit business, and edited by a rapidly growing community of volunteer editors. The early community discussed a variety of ways to support the ongoing costs of upkeep, and was broadly opposed to running ads on the site, so the idea of setting up a charitable foundation gained prominence. That addressed an open question of what entity should hold onto trademarks for

1417-699: A graduate researcher at the MIT Media Laboratory. At the lab, he has worked in both the Electronic Publishing and Computing Culture groups on collaborative writing and decision-making software. One project, Selectricity is a voting tool which received prizes and grants from MTV and Cisco . He was a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the MIT Center for Civic Media. He served on

1526-538: A grant agreement was reached with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to build a search engine called the " Knowledge Engine ", a project that proved controversial . In 2017, the Sloan Foundation awarded another $ 3 million grant for a three-year period, and Google donated another $ 1.1 million to the Foundation in 2019. The following have donated $ 500,000 or more each (2008–2019, not including gifts to

1635-680: A grid of cells, or the pixel values of an image. The same rule is applied to every cell, to determine its next state, based on the previous state of that cell and its neighboring cells. There are many interesting cellular automata rules, and they all look very different, with amazing animated dynamic effects. ' Life ' is a widely known cellular automata rule, but many other lesser known rules are much more interesting. Some hacker artists create art by writing computer code, and others, by developing hardware. Some create with existing software tools such as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP . Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. , abbreviated WMF ,

1744-436: A hacker is a person who follows a spirit of playful cleverness and loves programming. It is found in an originally academic movement unrelated to computer security and most visibly associated with free software , open source and demoscene . It also has a hacker ethic , based on the idea that writing software and sharing the result on a voluntary basis is a good idea, and that information should be free, but that it's not up to

1853-492: A keynote address at 2008 OSCON . Hill has worked for several years as a consultant for FOSS projects specializing in coordinating releases of software as free or open software and structuring development efforts to encourage community involvement. He spends a significant amount of his time traveling and giving talks on FOSS and intellectual property primarily in Europe and North America. Hill earlier pursued research full-time as

1962-693: A master's degree from the MIT Media Lab , and a PhD in an interdepartmental program involving the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab . As of fall 2013, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington . He is also a Fellow at the MIT Center for Civic Media where he coordinates the development of software for civic organizing. He has worked as an advisor and contractor for

2071-588: A more easily consumable way, the data of the Wikimedia projects, including Misplaced Pages . It allows customers to retrieve data at large scale and high availability through different formats like Web APIs , data snapshots or streams . It was announced in March 2021, and launched on October 26, 2021. Google and the Internet Archive were its first customers, although Internet Archive is not paying for

2180-641: A move as letting down those who elected me." He subsequently added that while on the Board, he had pushed for greater transparency regarding the Wikimedia Foundation's Knowledge Engine project and its financing, and indicated that his attempts to make public the Knight Foundation grant for the engine had been a factor in his dismissal. Heilman was reelected to the board by the community in 2017. In January 2016, Arnnon Geshuri joined

2289-454: A notorious example) to expose or add functionality to a device that was unintended for use by end users by the company who created it. A number of techno musicians have modified 1980s-era Casio SK-1 sampling keyboards to create unusual sounds by doing circuit bending : connecting wires to different leads of the integrated circuit chips. The results of these DIY experiments range from opening up previously inaccessible features that were part of

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2398-402: A project undertaken on bad self-advice; 3) an entropy booster; 4) to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack(3)", and "hacker" was defined as "one who hacks, or makes them". Much of TMRC's jargon was later imported into early computing culture, because the club started using a DEC PDP-1 and applied its local model railroad slang in this computing context. Initially incomprehensible to outsiders,

2507-787: A single server until 2004, when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture . Server downtime in 2003 led to the first fundraising drive. By December 2009, Wikimedia ran on co-located servers, with 300 servers in Florida and 44 in Amsterdam . In 2008, it also switched from multiple different Linux operating system vendors to Ubuntu Linux . In 2019, it switched to Debian . By January 2013, Wikimedia transitioned to newer infrastructure in an Equinix facility in Ashburn, Virginia , citing reasons of "more reliable connectivity" and "fewer hurricanes ". In years prior,

2616-691: A stated goal to raise $ 100 million in the next 10 years. Craig Newmark was one of the initial donors, giving $ 1 million. Peter Baldwin and Lisbet Rausing , of Arcadia Fund , donated $ 5 million in 2017. In 2018, major donations to the endowment were received from Amazon and Facebook ($ 1 million each) and George Soros ($ 2 million). In 2019, donations included $ 2 million from Google, $ 3.5 million more from Baldwin and Rausing, $ 2.5 million more from Newmark, and another $ 1 million from Amazon in October 2019 and again in September 2020. As of 2023,

2725-545: A trustee recently elected to the board by the community, was removed from his position by a vote of the rest of the board. This decision generated dispute among members of the Misplaced Pages community. Heilman later said that he "was given the option of resigning [by the Board] over the last few weeks. As a community elected member I see my mandate as coming from the community which elected me and thus declined to do so. I saw such

2834-659: Is B60 ( Adult , Continuing education ). The Foundation filed an application to trademark the name Misplaced Pages in the US to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences on September 14, 2004. The mark was granted registration status on January 10, 2006. Trademark protection was accorded also by Japan on December 16, 2004, and by the European Union on January 20, 2005. Subsets of Misplaced Pages were already being distributed in book and DVD form, and there were discussions about licensing

2943-484: Is a founder and coordinator of Debian Non-Profit, a Debian custom distribution designed to fill the needs of small non-profit organizations. In addition he served on the board of Software in the Public Interest from March 2003 until July 2006, serving as the organisation's vice-president from August 2004. Hill is also a core developer and founding member of Ubuntu , and continues to be an active contributor to

3052-441: Is always the understanding that a more skillful or technical logician could have produced successful modifications that would not be considered a "hack-job". The definition is similar to other, non-computer based uses of the term "hack-job". For instance, a professional modification of a production sports car into a racing machine would not be considered a hack-job, but a cobbled together backyard mechanic's result could be. Even though

3161-463: Is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco , California , and registered there as a charitable foundation . It is the host of Misplaced Pages , the seventh most visited website in the world. It also hosts fourteen related open collaboration projects, and supports the development of MediaWiki , the wiki software that underpins them all. The Foundation

3270-501: Is organized by a committee supported usually by the local national chapter, with support from local institutions (such as a library or university) and usually from the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimania has been held in cities such as Buenos Aires , Cambridge , Haifa , Hong Kong , Taipei , London , Mexico City , Esino Lario , Italy , Montreal , Cape Town , and Stockholm . The 2020 conference scheduled to take place in Bangkok

3379-417: Is the process of software engines running real-world cyber threats to assess the survivability of a company's digital structure. Ethical hackers play the role of cyber attackers by executing assessments, penetration tests, and modeling tactics, techniques, and procedures used by threat-actors. This careful examination provides an organization with the identification of weaknesses in its security systems, enabling

Benjamin Mako Hill - Misplaced Pages Continue

3488-430: Is worth doing or is interesting. This is something that hackers often feel intuitively about a problem or solution. An aspect of hack value is performing feats for the sake of showing that they can be done, even if others think it is difficult. Using things in a unique way outside their intended purpose is often perceived as having hack value. Examples are using a dot matrix impact printer to produce musical notes, using

3597-565: The Charities Aid Foundation , scheduled to be funded in five equal installments from 2012 through 2015. In 2014, the Foundation received the largest single gift in its history, a $ 5 million unrestricted donation from an anonymous donor supporting $ 1 million worth of expenses annually for the next five years. In March 2012, The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation , established by the Intel co-founder and his wife, awarded

3706-479: The LED lights. Don Hopkins is a software hacker artist well known for his artistic cellular automata. This art, created by a cellular automata computer program, generates objects which randomly bump into each other and in turn create more objects and designs, similar to a lava lamp, except that the parts change color and form through interaction. Hopkins Says: Cellular automata are simple rules that are applied to

3815-612: The One Laptop per Child project. He is a speaker for the GNU Project , and serves on the board of Software Freedom International (the organization that organizes Software Freedom Day ). In 2006, he married Mika Matsuzaki and used mathematically constrained wedding vows at the marriage ceremony. Since 1999, Hill has been an active member of Debian . He has served as a delegate of the Debian Project Leader, and

3924-571: The San Francisco Bay Area . Considerations cited for choosing San Francisco were proximity to like-minded organizations and potential partners, a better talent pool, as well as cheaper and more convenient international travel. The move was completed by January 31, 2008, into a headquarters on Stillman Street in San Francisco. It later moved to New Montgomery Street, and then to One Montgomery Tower . On October 25, 2021,

4033-507: The University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University were particularly well-known hotbeds of early hacker culture. They evolved in parallel, and largely unconsciously, until the Internet , where a legendary PDP-10 machine at MIT, called AI, that was running ITS , provided an early meeting point of the hacker community. This and other developments such as the rise of the free software movement and community drew together

4142-758: The Wikimedia movement 's websites. WMF is now the registrant of the domain wikipedia.org , owner of the trademark and operator of the wiki platform. It runs projects like Wikibooks , Wikidata , Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons ; it raises money, distributes grants, controls the servers, develops and deploys software, and does outreach to support Wikimedia projects, including the English Misplaced Pages . It also engages in political advocacy regarding copyright, press freedom and legal protection of websites from liability related to user content. The Wikimedia Foundation mainly finances itself through donations from

4251-701: The jailbreaking of iPhones . Hacker artists create art by hacking on technology as an artistic medium . This has extended the definition of the term and what it means to be a hacker. Such artists may work with graphics , computer hardware , sculpture , music and other audio , animation , video , software , simulations , mathematics , reactive sensory systems, text, poetry , literature , or any combination thereof. Dartmouth College musician Larry Polansky states: Technology and art are inextricably related. Many musicians, video artists, graphic artists, and even poets who work with technology—whether designing it or using it—consider themselves to be part of

4360-479: The 'hacker community.' Computer artists, like non-art hackers, often find themselves on society's fringes, developing strange, innovative uses of existing technology. There is an empathetic relationship between those, for example, who design experimental music software and hackers who write communications freeware . Another description is offered by Jenny Marketou: Hacker artists operate as culture hackers who manipulate existing techno- semiotic structures towards

4469-664: The Bazaar and many other essays, maintainer of the Jargon File (which was previously maintained by Guy L. Steele, Jr. ). Within the computer programmer subculture of hackers, the term hacker is also used for a programmer who reaches a goal by employing a series of modifications to extend existing code or resources. In this sense, it can have a negative connotation of using inelegant kludges to accomplish programming tasks that are quick, but ugly, inelegant, difficult to extend, hard to maintain and inefficient. This derogatory form of

Benjamin Mako Hill - Misplaced Pages Continue

4578-523: The Foundation announced what was then its largest donation yet: a three-year, $ 3 million grant from the Sloan Foundation . In 2009, the Foundation received four grants. The first was a $ 890,000 Stanton Foundation grant to help study and simplify the user interface for first-time authors of Misplaced Pages. The second was a $ 300,000 Ford Foundation grant in July 2009 for Wikimedia Commons , to improve

4687-465: The Foundation approved, finalized and adopted the thematic organization and user group recognition models. An additional model for movement partners, was also approved, but as of May 19, 2022 has not yet been finalized or adopted. Wikimania is an annual global conference for Wikimedians and Wikipedians, started in 2005. The first Wikimania was held in Frankfurt , Germany, in 2005. Wikimania

4796-568: The Foundation as affiliates officially when its board does so. The board's decisions are based on recommendations of an Affiliations Committee (AffCom), composed of Wikimedia community members, which reports regularly to the board. The Affiliations Committee directly approves the recognition of unincorporated user groups. Affiliates are formally recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation, but are independent of it, with no legal control of or responsibility for Wikimedia projects and their content. The Foundation began recognizing chapters in 2004. In 2012,

4905-438: The Foundation launched Wikimedia Enterprise , a commercial Wikimedia content delivery service aimed at groups that want to use high-volume APIs, starting with Big Tech enterprises. In June 2022, Google and the Internet Archive were announced as the service's first customers, though only Google will pay for the service. The same announcement noted a shifting focus towards smaller companies with similar data needs, supporting

5014-590: The Foundation received a $ 40,000 grant from the Open Society Institute to create a printable version of Misplaced Pages. It also received a $ 262,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation to purchase hardware , a $ 500,000 unrestricted grant from Vinod and Neeru Khosla , who later that year joined the Foundation advisory board, and $ 177,376 from the historians Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin ( Arcadia Fund ), among others. In March 2008,

5123-561: The Foundation's "awards and grants" expenses. In September 2021, the Foundation announced that the Wikimedia Endowment had reached its initial $ 100 million fundraising goal in June 2021, five years ahead of its initial target. In January 2024, the endowment was reported to have a value of $ 140 million. The Foundation summarizes its assets in the "Statements of Activities" in its audited reports. These do not include funds in

5232-690: The Homebrew Club's days, but the interests and values of both communities somewhat diverged. Today, the hobbyists focus on commercial computer and video games , software cracking and exceptional computer programming ( demo scene ). Also of interest to some members of this group is the modification of computer hardware and other electronic devices, see modding . Electronics hobbyists working on machines other than computers also fall into this category. This includes people who do simple modifications to graphing calculators , video game consoles , electronic musical keyboards or other device (see CueCat for

5341-561: The Late Middle English words hackere, hakker, or hakkere - one who cuts wood, woodchopper, or woodcutter. Although the idea of "hacking", in the modern sense, existed long before the modern term "hacker"‍—‌with the most notable example of Lightning Ellsworth , it was not a word that the first programmers used to describe themselves. In fact, many of the first programmers were from engineering or physics backgrounds. "But from about 1945 onward (and especially during

5450-585: The Stanton Foundation pledged to fund a $ 3.6 million grant of which $ 1.8 million was funded and the remainder was to come in September 2012. As of 2011, this was the largest grant the Wikimedia Foundation had ever received. In November 2011, the Foundation received a $ 500,000 donation from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation . In 2012, the Foundation was awarded a grant of $ 1.25 million from Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin through

5559-508: The Wikimedia Endowment): The Foundation's board of trustees supervises the activities of the Foundation. The founding board had three members, to which two community-elected trustees were added. Starting in 2008 it was composed of ten members: Over time, the size of the board and details of the selection processes have evolved. As of 2020, the board may have up to 16 trustees: In 2015, James Heilman ,

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5668-453: The Wikimedia Endowment, however expenses from the 2015–16 financial year onward include payments to the Wikimedia Endowment. A plurality of Wikimedia Foundation expenses are salaries and wages, followed by community and affiliate grants, contributions to the endowment, and other professional operating expenses and services. The Wikimedia Foundation has received a steady stream of grants from other foundations throughout its history. In 2008,

5777-689: The Wikimedia Foundation a $ 449,636 grant to develop Wikidata . This was part of a larger grant, much of which went to Wikimedia Germany, which took on ownership of the development effort. Between 2014 and 2015, the Foundation received $ 500,000 from the Monarch Fund, $ 100,000 from the Arcadia Fund and an undisclosed amount from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation to support the Misplaced Pages Zero initiative. In 2015,

5886-425: The Wikimedia movement, such as regional conferences, outreach, edit-a-thons , hackathons , public relations , public policy advocacy, GLAM engagement, and Wikimania . While many of these things are also done by individual contributors or less formal groups, they are not referred to as affiliates. Wikimedia chapters and thematic organizations are incorporated non-profit organizations. They are recognized by

5995-660: The Misplaced Pages Education Program (and the spin-off Wiki Education Foundation ). In March 2011, the Sloan Foundation authorized another $ 3 million grant, to be funded over three years, with the first $ 1 million to come in July 2011 and the remaining $ 2 million to be funded in August 2012 and 2013. As a donor, Doron Weber from the Sloan Foundation gained Board Visitor status at the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. In August 2011,

6104-508: The advisory board consists of Jimmy Wales , Peter Baldwin , former Wikimedia Foundation Trustees Patricio Lorente and Phoebe Ayers , former Wikimedia Foundation Board Visitor Doron Weber of the Sloan Foundation , investor Annette Campbell-White , venture capitalist Michael Kim, portfolio manager Alexander M. Farman-Farmaian, and strategist Lisa Lewin. The Foundation itself has provided annual grants of $ 5 million to its Endowment since 2016. These amounts have been recorded as part of

6213-892: The advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation , the advisory council of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the board of the Free Software Foundation . He was a founding member of the Ubuntu Community Council in 2009. 2018-2019 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Social and Behavioral Sciences 2019 Research Symbiont Award—General Symbiont Hacker (programmer subculture) Richard Stallman explains about hackers who program: What they had in common

6322-825: The board before stepping down amid community controversy about a " no poach " agreement he executed when at Google , which violated United States antitrust law and for which the participating companies paid US$ 415 million in a class action suit on behalf of affected employees. As of January 2024, the board comprised six community-and-affiliate-selected trustees (Shani Evenstein Sigalov, Dariusz Jemielniak , Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight , Victoria Doronina, Mike Peel and Lorenzo Losa); five Board-appointed trustees ( McKinsey & Company director Raju Narisetti , Bahraini human rights activist and blogger Esra'a Al Shafei , technology officer Luis Bitencourt-Emilio, Nataliia Tymkiv, and financial expert Kathy Collins); and Wales. Tymkiv chairs

6431-524: The business's very existence. Furthermore, the act of ethical hacking also molds the larger hacker culture. Hacking skills, traditionally associated with breaking the law, have changed dramatically with the emergence of ethical hacking. Ethical hacking helped legitimize hacking skills which can now be talked about publicly. This shift challenges the stereotypical perception of hackers as criminals, allowing for greater emphasis on their positive contributions to cybersecurity. Ethical hacking has drastically changed

6540-530: The canonical document on managing Free and open-source software (FOSS) projects, and has published academic work on FOSS from anthropological, sociological, management and software engineering perspectives and has written and spoken about intellectual property, copyright, and collaboration more generally. He has also studied the sociology of community involvement in web communities, and been widely published and cited about projects like Scratch and Misplaced Pages. He has talked about these topics publicly, as well as giving

6649-550: The chip design to producing the strange, dis-harmonic digital tones that became part of the techno music style. Companies take different attitudes towards such practices, ranging from open acceptance (such as Texas Instruments for its graphing calculators and Lego for its Lego Mindstorms robotics gear) to outright hostility (such as Microsoft 's attempts to lock out Xbox hackers or the DRM routines on Blu-ray Disc players designed to sabotage compromised players. ) In this context,

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6758-400: The commoditization of computer and networking technology, and has, in turn, accelerated that process. In 1975, hackerdom was scattered across several different families of operating systems and disparate networks; today it is largely a Unix and TCP/IP phenomenon, and is concentrated around various operating systems based on free software and open-source software development. Many of

6867-588: The composition of the first Jargon File in 1973, the promulgation of the GNU Manifesto in 1985, and the publication of Eric Raymond 's The Cathedral and the Bazaar in 1997. Correlated with this has been the gradual recognition of a set of shared culture heroes, including: Bill Joy , Donald Knuth , Dennis Ritchie , Alan Kay , Ken Thompson , Richard M. Stallman , Linus Torvalds , Larry Wall , and Guido van Rossum . The concentration of academic hacker subculture has paralleled and partly been driven by

6976-608: The consciousness of the programmer subculture of hackers include Richard Stallman , the founder of the free software movement and the GNU project , president of the Free Software Foundation and author of the famous Emacs text editor as well as the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) , and Eric S. Raymond , one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative and writer of the famous text The Cathedral and

7085-929: The content on the projects themselves. Instead, this is done by volunteer editors, such as the Wikipedians . However, it does collaborate with a network of individual volunteers and affiliated organizations, such as Wikimedia chapters, thematic organizations, user groups and other partners. The Foundation finances itself mainly through millions of small donations from readers and editors, collected through email campaigns and annual fundraising banners placed on Misplaced Pages and its sister projects. These are complemented by grants from philanthropic organizations and tech companies, and starting in 2022, by services income from Wikimedia Enterprise . As of 2023, it has employed over 700 staff and contractors, with net assets of $ 255 million and an endowment which has surpassed $ 100 million. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Misplaced Pages in 2001 as

7194-438: The creation of the first ENIAC computer) some programmers realized that their expertise in computer software and technology had evolved not just into a profession, but into a passion" (46). There was a growing awareness of a style of programming different from the cut and dried methods employed at first, but it was not until the 1960s that the term "hackers" began to be used to describe proficient computer programmers. Therefore,

7303-422: The creative attitude of software hackers in fields other than computing. This includes even activities that predate computer hacking, for example reality hackers or urban spelunkers (exploring undocumented or unauthorized areas in buildings). One specific example is clever pranks traditionally perpetrated by MIT students, with the perpetrator being called hacker. For example, when MIT students surreptitiously put

7412-408: The culture is less tolerant of unmaintainable solutions, even when intended to be temporary, and describing someone as a "hacker" might imply that they lack professionalism. In this sense, the term has no real positive connotations, except for the idea that the hacker is capable of doing modifications that allow a system to work in the short term, and so has some sort of marketable skills. However, there

7521-470: The desired cultural revolution within the realm of the hacking fraternity. Ethical hacking, on its part through focusing on the constructive application of hacking skills, has become an integral activity in the collective effort towards fortification of cybersecurity and redefining hackers' image in the public eye. In yet another context, a hacker is a computer hobbyist who pushes the limits of software or hardware. The home computer hacking subculture relates to

7630-409: The efficacy of the organization's cybersecurity defenses. Generally, organizations engage the services of ethical hackers either through third-party cybersecurity firms or under contract. Their main job is to identify and fix security gaps before threat-actors find them and exploit them. This proactive approach to cybersecurity testing leads to significant cost savings for organizations. Ethical hacking

7739-438: The elaborate college pranks that...students would regularly devise" (Levy, 1984 p. 10). To be considered a 'hack' was an honor among like-minded peers as "to qualify as a hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style and technical virtuosity" (Levy, 1984 p. 10) The MIT Tech Model Railroad Club Dictionary defined hack in 1959 (not yet in a computer context) as "1) an article or project without constructive end; 2)

7848-414: The end of its first fiscal year, ending June 30, 2004, to $ 53.5 million in mid-2014 and $ 231 million (plus a $ 100 million endowment) by the end of June 2021; that year, the Foundation also announced plans to launch Wikimedia Enterprise, to let large organizations pay by volume for high-volume access to otherwise rate-limited APIs. In 2020, the Foundation donated $ 4.5 million to Tides Advocacy to create

7957-1186: The fundamental characteristic that links all who identify themselves as hackers is that each is someone who enjoys "…the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming and circumventing limitations of programming systems and who tries to extend their capabilities" (47). With this definition in mind, it can be clear where the negative implications of the word "hacker" and the subculture of "hackers" came from. Some common nicknames among this culture include "crackers", who are considered to be unskilled thieves who mainly rely on luck, and "phreaks", which refers to skilled crackers and "warez d00dz" (crackers who acquire reproductions of copyrighted software). Hackers who are hired to test security are called "pentesters" or "tiger teams". Before communications between computers and computer users were as networked as they are now, there were multiple independent and parallel hacker subcultures, often unaware or only partially aware of each other's existence. All of these had certain important traits in common: These sorts of subcultures were commonly found at academic settings such as college campuses . The MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ,

8066-445: The general public using the term "hacker", and whose primary focus‍—‌be it to malign or for malevolent purposes‍—‌lies in exploiting weaknesses in computer security. The Jargon File , an influential but not universally accepted compendium of hacker slang, defines hacker as "A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only

8175-417: The hacker may be the same person.) This usage is common in both programming, engineering and building. In programming, hacking in this sense appears to be tolerated and seen as a necessary compromise in many situations. Some argue that it should not be, due to this negative meaning; others argue that some kludges can, for all their ugliness and imperfection, still have "hack value". In non-software engineering,

8284-538: The hacker subculture". According to Eric S. Raymond , the Open Source and Free Software hacker subculture developed in the 1960s among 'academic hackers' working on early minicomputers in computer science environments in the United States. Hackers were influenced by and absorbed many ideas of key technological developments and the people associated with them. Most notable is the technical culture of

8393-537: The hacker to make it free by breaking into private computer systems. This hacker ethic was publicized and perhaps originated in Steven Levy 's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984). It contains a codification of its principles. The programmer subculture of hackers disassociates from the mass media's pejorative use of the word 'hacker' referring to computer security, and usually prefer

8502-475: The hands-on imperative. Linus Torvalds , one of the leaders of the open source movement (known primarily for developing the Linux kernel ), has noted in the book The Hacker Ethic that these principles have evolved from the known Protestant ethics and incorporates the spirits of capitalism, as introduced in the early 20th century by Max Weber . Hack value is the notion used by hackers to express that something

8611-512: The hobbyist home computing of the late 1970s, beginning with the availability of MITS Altair . An influential organization was the Homebrew Computer Club . However, its roots go back further to amateur radio enthusiasts. The amateur radio slang referred to creatively tinkering to improve performance as "hacking" already in the 1950s. A large overlaps between hobbyist hackers and the programmer subculture hackers existed during

8720-505: The hurricane seasons had been a cause of distress. In October 2013, Wikimedia Foundation started looking for a second facility that would be used side by side with the main facility in Ashburn, citing reasons of redundancy (e.g. emergency fallback ) and to prepare for simultaneous multi-datacenter service. This followed a year in which a fiber cut caused the Wikimedia projects to be unavailable for one hour in August 2012. Apart from

8829-561: The interface for uploading multimedia files. In August 2009, the Foundation received a $ 500,000 grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation . Also in August 2009, the Omidyar Network committed up to $ 2 million over two years to Wikimedia. In 2010, Google donated $ 2 million and the Stanton Foundation granted $ 1.2 million to fund the Public Policy Initiative, a pilot program for what later became

8938-430: The logo and wordmark. On December 11, 2006, the Foundation's board noted that it could not become a membership organization , as initially planned but not implemented, due to an inability to meet the registration requirements of Florida statutory law. The bylaws were accordingly amended to remove all references to membership rights and activities. In 2007, the Foundation decided to move its headquarters from Florida to

9047-881: The minimum necessary." The Request for Comments (RFC) 1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, amplifies this meaning as "A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular." As documented in the Jargon File, these hackers are disappointed by the mass media and general public's usage of the word hacker to refer to security breakers , calling them "crackers" instead. This includes both "good" crackers (" white hat hackers "), who use their computer security-related skills and knowledge to learn more about how systems and networks work and to help to discover and fix security holes, as well as those more "evil" crackers (" black hat hackers "), who use

9156-474: The noun " hack " derives from the everyday English sense "to cut or shape by or as if by crude or ruthless strokes" [Merriam-Webster] and is even used among users of the positive sense of "hacker" who produces "cool" or "neat" hacks. In other words, to "hack" at an original creation, as if with an axe, is to force-fit it into being usable for a task not intended by the original creator, and a "hacker" would be someone who does this habitually. (The original creator and

9265-424: The organization to employ necessary measures towards fortifying its defense. Cyber-attacks can have significant financial implications for a company. In such cases, the organizations could have been saved from these gigantic financial losses by identifying and fixing the vulnerabilities discovered by an ethical hacker. Moreover, for smaller organizations, the impact can be even more dramatic as it can potentially save

9374-516: The outcome of a race of the two machines could not be assumed, a quick inspection would instantly reveal the difference in the level of professionalism of the designers. The adjective associated with hacker is "hackish" (see the Jargon file ). In a very universal sense, hacker also means someone who makes things work beyond perceived limits in a clever way in general, without necessarily referring to computers, especially at MIT. That is, people who apply

9483-589: The pioneers of the ARPANET , starting in 1969. The PDP-10 AI machine at MIT, running the ITS operating system and connected to the ARPANET, provided an early hacker meeting point. After 1980 the subculture coalesced with the culture of Unix . Since the mid-1990s, it has been largely coincident with what is now called the free software and open source movement . Many programmers have been labeled "great hackers", but

9592-483: The product. A New York Times Magazine article was reporting that Wikimedia Enterprise made $ 3.1 million in total revenue in 2022. Wikimedia affiliates are independent and formally recognized groups of people working together to support and contribute to the Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia Foundation officially recognizes three types of affiliates: chapters, thematic organizations, and user groups. Affiliates organize and engage in activities to support and contribute to

9701-496: The project, until October 2011. His work included contributing to a code of conduct and diversity statement for the project. In addition to software development, Hill writes extensively. He has been published in academic books and magazines, newsletters, and online journals, and Slate Magazine republished one of his blog posts. He is the author of the Free Software Project Management HOWTO,

9810-502: The project. The Wikimedia Foundation was incorporated in St. Petersburg, Florida on June 20, 2003. A small fundraising campaign to keep the servers running was run in October 2003. In 2005, the Foundation was granted section 501(c)(3) status by the U.S. Internal Revenue Code as a public charity, making donations to the Foundation tax-deductible for U.S. federal income tax purposes. Its National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) code

9919-535: The project. In addition to technical responsibilities, he coordinated the construction of a community around the Ubuntu Project as project "community manager" (later ceding the role to Jono Bacon ) during Ubuntu's first year and a half. During this period, he worked full-time for Canonical Ltd. Within the Project, he served on the "Community Council" governance board that oversees all non-technical aspects of

10028-453: The public perception of hackers. Rather than viewing persons with hacker skills as perpetrators of cybercrime, they can be viewed as part of the solution in fighting against cybercrime. The ethical hacker with knowledge and expertise stands as guardian to the digital assets, working beforehand alongside organizations to build up a more secure online landscape. Ethical hacking is not only a proactive defense for organizations but also brings about

10137-674: The public, collected through email campaigns and annual fundraising banners placed on Misplaced Pages, as well as grants from various tech companies and philanthropic organizations. Campaigns for the Wikimedia Endowment have included emails asking donors to leave Wikimedia money in their will. As a 501(c)(3) charity, the Foundation is exempt from federal and state income tax. It is not a private foundation, and contributions to it qualify as tax-deductible charitable contributions. In 2007, 2008 and 2009, Charity Navigator gave Wikimedia an overall rating of four out of four possible stars, increased from three to four stars in 2010. As of January 2020 ,

10246-497: The rating was still four stars (overall score 98.14 out of 100), based on data from FY2018. The Foundation also increases its revenue through federal grants , sponsorship, services and brand merchandising. The Wikimedia OAI-PMH update feed service, targeted primarily at search engines and similar bulk analysis and republishing, was a source of revenue for a number of years. DBpedia was given access to this feed free of charge. An expanded version of data feeds and content services

10355-445: The same skills to author harmful software (such as viruses or trojans) and illegally infiltrate secure systems with the intention of doing harm to the system. The programmer subculture of hackers, in contrast to the cracker community, generally sees computer security-related activities as contrary to the ideals of the original and true meaning of the hacker term, that instead related to playful cleverness. The word "hacker" derives from

10464-482: The second facility for redundancy coming online in 2014, the number of servers needed to run the infrastructure in a single facility has been mostly stable since 2009. As of November 2015, the main facility in Ashburn hosts 520 servers in total which includes servers for newer services besides Wikimedia project wikis , such as cloud services (Toolforge) and various services for metrics, monitoring, and other system administration. In 2017, Wikimedia Foundation deployed

10573-414: The second wiki-based project hosted on the original server. The Foundation's mission is collection and distribution of educational knowledge under free licenses or public domain and promised to keep these projects free of charge. All intellectual property rights and domain names about Misplaced Pages were moved to the Foundation after its inception, and it currently owns the domain names and maintains most of

10682-418: The service through "a lot paying a little". The Foundation owns and operates 11 wiki-based content projects that are written and governed by volunteer editors. They include, by launch date: The Foundation also operates wikis and services that provide infrastructure or coordination of the content projects. These include: Wikimedia Enterprise is a commercial product by the Wikimedia Foundation to provide, in

10791-492: The silent composition 4′33″ by John Cage and the 14th-century palindromic three-part piece "Ma Fin Est Mon Commencement" by Guillaume de Machaut as hacks. According to the Jargon File, the word hacker was used in a similar sense among radio amateurs in the 1950s, predating the software hacking community. The Boston Globe in 1984 defined "hackers" as "computer nuts". In their programmer subculture,

10900-601: The slang also became popular in MIT's computing environments beyond the club. Other examples of jargon imported from the club are 'losing' ("when a piece of equipment is not working") and 'munged' ("when a piece of equipment is ruined"). Others did not always view hackers with approval. MIT living groups in 1989 avoided advertising their sophisticated Project Athena workstations to prospective members because they wanted residents who were interested in people, not computers, with one fraternity member stating that "We were worried about

11009-448: The specifics of who that label applies to is a matter of opinion. Certainly major contributors to computer science such as Edsger Dijkstra and Donald Knuth , as well as the inventors of popular software such as Linus Torvalds ( Linux ), and Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie ( Unix and C programming language ) are likely to be included in any such list; see also List of programmers . People primarily known for their contributions to

11118-481: The term 'cracker' for that meaning. Complaints about supposed mainstream misuse started as early as 1983, when media used "hacker" to refer to the computer criminals involved in The 414s case. In the programmer subculture of hackers, a computer hacker is a person who enjoys designing software and building programs with a sense for aesthetics and playful cleverness. The term hack in this sense can be traced back to "describe

11227-505: The values and tenets of the free and open source software movement stem from the hacker ethics that originated at MIT and at the Homebrew Computer Club . The hacker ethics were chronicled by Steven Levy in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and in other texts in which Levy formulates and summarizes general hacker attitudes: Hacker ethics are concerned primarily with sharing, openness, collaboration, and engaging in

11336-436: Was added to MediaWiki's built-in search and Misplaced Pages switched from MySQL to Lucene and later switched to CirrusSearch which is based on Elasticsearch for searching. The Wikimedia Foundation also uses CiviCRM and WordPress . The Foundation published official Misplaced Pages mobile apps for Android and iOS devices and in March 2015, the apps were updated to include mobile user-friendly features. The Wikimedia Foundation

11445-661: Was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic , along with those of 2021 and 2022, which were held online as a series of virtual, interactive presentations. The in-person conference returned in 2023 when it was held in Singapore, at which UNESCO joined as a partner organization. The Wikimedia Foundation maintains the hardware that runs its projects in its own servers. It also maintains the MediaWiki platform and many other software libraries that run its projects. Misplaced Pages employed

11554-419: Was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales , as a non-profit way to fund these wiki projects. They had previously been hosted by Bomis , Wales's for-profit company. The Wikimedia Foundation provides the technical and organizational infrastructure to enable members of the public to develop wiki-based content in languages across the world. The Foundation does not write or curate any of

11663-521: Was founded in 2003 by Jimmy Wales so that there would be an independent charitable entity responsible for company domains and trademarks, and so that Misplaced Pages and its sister projects could be funded through non-profit means in the future. The name "Wikimedia", a compound of wiki and media , was coined by American author Sheldon Rampton in a post to the English Misplaced Pages mailing list in March 2003, three months after Wiktionary became

11772-417: Was launched in 2021 as Wikimedia Enterprise, an LLC subsidiary of the Foundation. In July 2014, the Foundation announced it would accept Bitcoin donations. In 2021, cryptocurrencies accounted for just 0.08% of all donations and on May 1, 2022, the Foundation stopped accepting cryptocurrency donations, following a Wikimedia community vote. The Foundation's net assets grew from an initial $ 57,000 at

11881-528: Was mainly love of excellence and programming. They wanted to make their programs that they used be as good as they could. They also wanted to make them do neat things. They wanted to be able to do something in a more exciting way than anyone believed possible and show "Look how wonderful this is. I bet you didn't believe this could be done." Hackers from this subculture tend to emphatically differentiate themselves from whom they pejoratively call " crackers "; those who are generally referred to by media and members of

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