Vocabulary of the week: geek hats

Talking about hackers is always complicated. In the general public's mind, hacker is a 13 year old geek kid locked in his room trying to get into the Pentagon's system and deploy some cool missiles to some uncool places. Or a shady type who tries to get credit card codes to transfer zillions of dollars to his own account.
Other people say that these malicious guys (or girls) are actually crackers. Hackers would be those who like to study vulnerabilities of different systems, but do not mean harm to anybody, or don't try to take advantage of these vulnerabilities themselves.
I just came up with two other ways of describing the differences between hackers:

• White hat
• A white hat hacker, also rendered as ethical hacker, is, in the realm of information technology, a person who is ethically opposed to the abuse of computer systems.
• Black hat
• A black hat is a person who compromises the security of a computer system without permission from an authorized party, typically with malicious intent.