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Hacking is putting something together quickly, just enough so that it barely works. Bypassing, disabling, removing a copy protection or extracting the data fro
by Annatar 8y ago
Hacking is putting something together quickly, just enough so that it barely works.
Bypassing, disabling, removing a copy protection or extracting the data from a protected medium is cracking, the metaphor being that the protection cracked as glass would have. Those had to work perfectly, and they were often bug fixed, trained and level-packed as well as single-sided, thus making them better, faster and smaller than the original. That's not a hack.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoIn my mind hacking is fiddling with things with a vague end result in mind and learning as you go. I think a lot of cracking falls into this category.
- Annatar 8y agoNot a chance. There was no fiddling, and the end result was crystal clear: disable copy protection and release the cracked version before any of the other groups do. For lots of commercial copy protections, the steps or concepts to disable them were well understood.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago> Hacking is putting something together quickly, just enough so that it barely works. That's one definition of a hack. The word famously has many different meanings depending on context. http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html
- Annatar 8y agoYes, but that's the original and correct one, true to its English language roots. It's what people here do a lot as opposed to system engineering.