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People can be pretty stubborn about that, look at the title of this website. :-)

The battle about the meaning of hacker (vs. cracker) was lost in the 80ies, yet some communities continue to use it in the old sense of the word to set themselves apart.

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>The battle about the meaning of hacker (vs. cracker) was lost in the 80ies, yet some communities continue to use it in the old sense of the word to set themselves apart.

Part of the reason for that is the hacker community made up a word that no self respecting person would use to describe themselves. The modern 'computer hacking' culture came out of the phreaker community and IMO is the proper description for this activity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking

Rereading this hours later, I realize that the way I wrote it makes it sound like I'm talking about the word hacker. I'm actually talking about the word cracker, which was essentially a made up term that I'm fairly sure no 'hacker' ever used to describe themselves. The actual 'cracking' community broke DRM schemes and was affiliated with but basically orthogonal to the hacker/phreaker community.

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