Josh the Aspie’s Blog

This is a fairly common computing term in the programming circles I frequent. Unfortunately most of my non-programming friends, and even some older programmers I talk to don’t know what the color of someone’s “hat” has to do with the internet, or programming.

The short answer to this is that in old westerns and cartoons about westerns, the hero wears a white hat, and stands for honesty and doing the right thing. The villain, meanwhile, wears a black hat, and is the villain because he doesn’t care who has to get hurt for him to get what he wants. Sometimes a hero will wear a black hat, and the villain a white one, but it’s relatively uncommon, and usually comes up when the villain thinks himself to be a hero, or when the hero has a dark past he has to overcome.

This is similar to how in many books and movies the good knight wears white, or has glistening armor, while the villain of the story wears armor painted a matte black.

Grey is simply the color in between these two extremes. However to get a more in depth understanding of all this, we’re going to have to look at what colors tend to represent in the culture that spawned these idioms.

In many cases in the media, and in legend, the color that someone is wearing says something about them. This isn’t just the case with White, Black, and Grey. Green, Brown, and Red are also prime examples of this.

If you wear browns and greens you probably like nature, or spend a lot of time there (see: Elves, Robin Hood, Druids, ect). Even if you don’t choose to wear brown or green clothes, if you spend enough time in the woods while wearing white, everything winds up brown and green eventually anyway. Green is also associated with poisons and toxins, as used to be associated with witchcraft due to it’s association of the nature spirits known as the fey.

This dualism can be seen in the figure of the green knight, both villain opposing Gawain, and fair host to the same man. Both a huntsman who deals with the natural world, and a man who can survive having his own head removed from his shoulders. Both vengeful and fair (as seen in the way he dealt with the small lie Gawain told him), by nicking his neck, but letting the man live despite Gawain’s promise to him because he had remained, for the most part, truthful.

Red is often a color of passion. Most people that wear this color owe more to their own feelings than to any kind of moral code. Will Scarlet, Electra, Spider man. Red is also the color of fire and blood. Blood is a source of life in all of us, and fire is a wild and uncontrollable thing, both again pointing to passion and unpredictability, but there is also here a hint at destruction and violent intent. Often something to violent to be shown on screen will simply be represented by the color red, whether it be the screen fading to that color, the picture of a red rose falling, or some other elegant symbol of death… or simply showing red blood leaking from under the person, a bright red that slowly turns black.

And now we get to one of the colors of hats that we talked about. Black. Black represents many things, but most of them are not complementary. First and foremost, in western culture, black is the color of Death. Whether this is because death is the final night to which we all must eventually resign our selves, at the end of our brief day in the sun, or whether it is because black is the color of dried blood, is hard to say, but black has definitely become a color of death.

We wear black to funerals. Catholic priests often wear black for their day to day garb and at funerals, and one of the major concerns with which they deal is death, and what comes after. Black is a color somberness as well, because of it’s association with funerals and the church. Black is also a color that people clothe themselves in to make them harder to see at night, the time when most skulduggery and sneaky business goes on. So black has come to be the standard garb of sneak-thieves, and assassins, at least in the media.

In contrast, for the longest time it took a real amount of work to wear white, and even today it’s one of the hardest colors to keep clean, for the simple reason that white is the color that cloth is if it has no other colors in it. In ancient times, few people wore white, because to do so, you had to actually bleach a piece of cloth for over a year… most often in urin. And then to get the smell out was a most laborious process in and of it’s self.

Thus White is a color of purity, and diligence, the color new brides wear to weddings if they have saved themselves only for their husbands. White is at it’s whitest in the bright of day, directly opposed to black, which is at it’s most distilled at night. White is the color of clouds, and of the vestments of priests and acolytes when they hold mass or services, the times at which we are most joyous.

Thus white represents light, purity, diligence, and happiness, while black represents darkness, dishonesty, looking for a quick and easy buck, sorrow, and death. This leads to the color of the stereo-typical good guys being white and the color of the sterio-typical bad guys being black.

In the technical world white hat work is often harder, takes more time, and because of this is more expensive over all. However if someone discovers that you’re only using white hat techniques, your reputation sores, and in the long term this can really pay off for you.

Black hat work is for those out to mack a quick buck, and be gone before anyone catches up to realize that it’s then. Most often the black hat doesn’t mind if he’s exploiting vulnerabilities in other people’s systems, causing harm, or shoving a white hat who’s been working hard, and honestly out of the way, if it leads to him getting some money. If people find out about the technique a black hat is using, they try to close up the holes in their security, warn others about the unethical practices, and fix the problems the black hat created. Unfortunately, the black hat will adapt his techniques, find another hole, or another system, or re-name their software and start all over again, just like the snake oil salesmen that moved from town to town in the old west.

Grey hats work is work that is on the blurred line between the two. Some people think the practices are white hat. Others black. Grey hats are those that don’t want to get the reputation of black hats, but occasionally are tempted by a quick pay off into something that’s a little less than shiningly moral. Some Grey hats continually push the line, trying to find out what people consider grey hat or black hat, changing the line as they ply their trade, risking retribution, but usually being close enough to being white hat that they can at least have a chance at covering up their actions.

Redhat, meanwhile, is a company that makes proprietary distributions of Linux, and sells them, despite the fact that Linux as an operating system is supposed to be free, and was created under a usage license that was supposed to keep it free forever.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Technology, Terms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.