Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubiquity | Hacker News Reader

Good to know that mainstream media is still failing at distinguishing between hackers and crackers.

To be fair, at this point it is too late to reverse the situation and name things appropriately, specially due to the fact that "cracker" is a well known slang for something else... Using the appropriate terms at this point would just confuse people.

Fair enough. Just let me be angry, darn it!

The best we can hope for is to push for modifiers to be added: "malicious hackers", "criminal hackers", etc.

Actually I think it's salvageable: just keep using it in the original sense. Bloomberg learned to code; it will catch on.

The word "hacker" has been ambiguous in the same way since its beginning. Its earliest appearance in print had to to with breaking into phone networks at MIT (sorry, no link handy but it's easy to look up). The two meanings of "clever technical feat" and "getting into someone else's system" have always been intertwined, and it's easy to see why—they're not unrelated.

The whole "distinguish hacker from cracker" thing has always seemed to me a classic effort to control language to suit an agenda. Such things are doomed to fail and rightly so. But I may be reading that wrong, as I've never looked into the history of it (correction is welcome).

You mean there was some license-protected application that they cracked? I didn't see that in the article ;)

Seriously though, these words changed their meaning many times. Cracker is not even seen that often and I would really argue against the meaning you expect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com