The purpose of this essay is to examine what we call hackers. Included in that topic is also a definition of some subcultures, for instance crackers and warez d00dz. Crackers are vicious hackers, the ones we meet in the papers after companies have had their websites destroyed or after confidential databases have been bro-ken into. This definition is essential to the essay as a whole as it makes a clear dis-tinction between hackers and crackers. The reason is that this is how the hacker cul-ture wants to define it and that it will make the comparison between them easier. A second purpose with this essay is to explain and show how the hacker culture, also known as the culture of technology, compares to its opponents, namely the cul-ture of secrecy. The latter represented here mostly by Microsoft and its OS Win-dows, but also by the music and movie industry. Even though they are not soft-ware producers like Microsoft they have had problems with pirate distribution over the internet during the last fBAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD ng relevant literature and most of the informa-tion is gathered from the internet, an obvious source when it comes to this topic.