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Is HackerNews a place solely for news about people using computers for illegal activity?

• baldfat 9y ago
  Definition of Hacker: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hacker https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hacker 1 :one that hacks 2 :a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity a tennis hacker 3 :an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer 4 :a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system RMS on Hacking and Cracking Yet when I say I am a hacker, people often think I am making a naughty admission, presenting myself specifically as a security breaker. How did this confusion develop? Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think. You can help correct the misunderstanding simply by making a distinction between security breaking and hacking—by using the term "cracking" for security breaking. The people who do it are "crackers" (*). Some of them may also be hackers, just as some of them may be chess players or golfers; most of them are not. https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html