Hacker ethic term "hack" arose from MIT lingo, as the word had long been used to describe college pranks that MIT students would regularly devise. However, Levy's hacker ethic also has often been quoted out of context and misunderstood to refer to hacking as in breaking into computers, and so many sources incorrectly imply that it is describing the ideals of white-hat hackers. However, what Levy is talking about does not necessarily have anything particular to do with computer security, but addresses broader issues. The hacker ethic was described as a "new way of life, with a philosophy, an ethic and a
Black and white some of the early home computers; this was to accommodate black-and-white TV sets, which would display a color signal poorly. (Typically a different shading scheme would be used for the display in the black-and-white mode.) In computing terminology, "black-and-white" is sometimes used to refer to a binary image consisting solely of pure black pixels and pure white pixels; what would normally be called a black-and-white image, that is, an image containing shades of gray, is referred to in this context as grayscale. Black and white Black-and-white (B/W or B&W) images combine black and white in a continuous spectrum, producing a