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History of term

The modern contrast between white hat and black hat derives from the convention in Western films in which heroic characters were associated with white hats and villains with black hats. By the mid-1960s, white hat was being used more generally in American English to mean a person perceived as one of the "good guys" or as being on the side of right.

The computing sense developed from this wider moral contrast. The Oxford English Dictionary records white hat in computing slang from 1990, defining it as a person

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