"Dear media, please stop using a word your readers understand, instead say a racial epithet that's been used for the last 140 years."
Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'
#52We'd have more luck just inventing and adopting a new word to replace hacker, any suggestions?
I always saw hacker as a computer security term (so did popular culture) and not a term for tinkering/making.
This community is using the wrong term not the media.
Re: Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'
#53Back 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.
And so does everyone else over 30. You can't just take a word to mean something new and petition to have the old meaning 'removed'.
Re: Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'
#54[deleted]
Re: Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'
#55I would like to sign a petition not to use 'Hacker' to hype basically anything. Shorter even banks will look for "Hacker" accountants.
Re: Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'
#56Better to petition them to use the term "malicious hacker".
Re: Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'
#57We'd have more luck just inventing and adopting a new word to replace hacker, any suggestions?
I think we already have words for these people. Criminal and suspect cover the general case. To get more specific we have vandal, thief, industrial spy, stalker, fraudster, and so on. I guess there are some newish crimes - virus wrangler and DDoS participant? They're so different it's hard to make an umbrella term for them.
Re: Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'
#58This 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 was at a start-up in the late 90s that refused to use the term everyone else used in their press releases, and they used "cracker" instead, and then the business withered up and turned into a zombie.
Sometimes you need to accept your losses and move on.
Re: Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'
#59Earliest recorded usage of the term "hacker" in a technology context: ---- 1963 The Tech (MIT student newspaper) 20 Nov. 1 Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Prof. Carlton Tucker, administrator of the Institute phone system. … The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging th…
Yep, sorry guys - I know I'll get crap for this, but: The word is the clue as it implies 'invasive force'. Any other meaning is only going to be accepted when enough of you agree 'it is so'. The original meaning (and I've always known it as such, 30+ years) is perfectly outlined by the paragraph above. It does not refer to white-hat stuff. The original word is 'hack': cut with rough or heavy blows. hack off the dead…
Actually, that definition matches the other usage, too: people force a system to do things it isn't supposed to do; they "hack" at it until it works.
(But I agree that "hacker" has meant invading systems as long as it has meant anything else)
Re: Change.org Petition: Tell media not to use 'Hacker' when they mean 'Cracker'
#60How to accomplish this: need some group to determine and call themselves 'hackers' and sue everyone for actually associating with crackers by calling them hackers. Hence it'd be politically incorrect to call them hackers. Done!