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Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

In the very strict interpretation probably nothing is unhackable, just not hacked yet. But one should also be pragmatic about what "unhackable" means in context. Without the power of hindsight, a consumer device that stayed unhacked for ~13 years can be reasonably called unhackable during this time.

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We don't need to contribute to word inflation. There's "really hard," there's "nearly impossible," there's even "impossible – as far as we know." I don't think it shows a lack of pragmatism to assume a technological claim, made by a technology company, should't be taken at face value. On the contrary, I'd advise more pragmatism to anyone failing to disregard an "unhackable" claim made by Microsoft specially even after fixnum years without known exploits.

I think it's like calling a ship "unsinkable". Yes, you engineered it to not sink, in accordance with strict maritime standards no doubt, but just don't call it unsinkable. If you call it unsinkable you're just begging for a century of snickering at your hubris.

It has no relation to hubris whatsoever if the "unhackable" label is not something self-proclaimed at launch but something descriptively applied by other people who were unable to hack it. Nobody would have snickered if the Titanic were described as unsinkable by people who had been trying to sink it for 10 years.

> Nobody would have snickered if the Titanic were described as unsinkable by people who had been trying to sink it for 10 years.

Pedantic: I'm sure somebody would have snickered about "unsinkable" if the Titanic sank after 10 years. Pragmatic: if the "unsinkable" Titanic lasted 10 years (or at least to profitability) before being sunk by people intending to sink it, that might certainly count as being "unsinkable" for the time it hadn't sunk.

Hubris: Titanic was claimed to be unsinkable before it was launched.

And they believed their own bullshit.

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