I have seen the term "hacking" been used to describe using a device via its interface, as intended..
Starting my car with a key is not hacking, starting my neighbors car with his key is neither. Obtaining the key without consent, might be. But that again could in fact be social engineering.
In comparison, using another (master)key that happens to fit would be akin to "cracking". If one engineered the key himself, thàt (along with the required investigative research work) might be hacking.
A minority community can take ownership of a pejorative. A pejorative is often a word appropriated by a majority. Both of the previous sentences apply here. And no, you are incorrect.
Thanks for outright saying I'm was incorrect, really inspires confidence in one's self. Thanks for shining some clarity on this for me. I was merely asking a question followed by a thought, I didn't claim to be correct. I was simply asking.
Isn't the definition of hacker infact a cracker? I don't think a community (not HN, just in general) can just coin a term and expect to change the definition for all.
> Hackers from this subculture tend to emphatically differentiate themselves from what they pejoratively call "crackers". This has been going on for tens of years. Hackers feel like the media has wrongly appropriated the word, but nothing has changed in the meantime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28programmer_subculture...
I think there's a bit of an attempt to retroactively broaden the historical scope of this specific usage of "hacker", though, which is part of the confusion. Until at least the mid/late-1980s, "hacker" in this sense was more or less local MIT slang, used at MIT itself and at some MIT-linked organizations (the FSF, Symbolics, Lucid, etc.). I don't believe it was in use by people doing similar things in other locations, without MIT ties. For example, nowadays people cite Woz and the Homebrew Computer Club as archetypical examples of the hacker ethos, but as far as I know, they didn't use the term themselves in that period to describe what the HCC was doing.
This is probably as futile and misguided as Stallman's effort to get everyone to say "GNU/Linux". Once a word serves its functional purpose within a community it's going to be used to communicate whatever idea it communicates. Words are often used contrary to what their etymology and history would seem to imply. I don't use "hacker" to mean "intruder," but I'm not going to waste any effort "correcting" people who do.
I agree. I think the generally accepted meaning has evolved over time. Hacker, to most people, now means cracker/intruder.
Perhaps a more positive way to approach this is to popularise a different term for what we mean by hacker (tinkerer, maker). It's not admitting defeat by abandoning the original meaning - it's taking the path of least resistance and evolving with the language.
Either resign to the fact, or simply come up with a better term to describe what a hacker is.
In fact, what is a hacker anyway, just a talented coder? What about hardware hackers? A maker? Someone technical, but concerned with beauty? What about jailbreakers, are they crackers?
Back in the 90's and early 2000's this is what I thought 'Hacker' and 'Cracker' meant Hacker - A person who circumvents a walled network. Cracker - A person who circumvents a walled software.
By the late 90s this is exactly how I understood the terms.
Even now I don't hear many people in the local tech community (Scotland) refer to hackers as we mean here (unless it's prefixed with something, for example "Python hacker").