What I meant wasn't about HN, but about the "outside" world--I don't think "hacker" is a positive word among general public. And they did positive work--they he

What I meant wasn't about HN, but about the "outside" world--I don't think "hacker" is a positive word among general public. And they did positive work--they helped train companies and revealed some Bad Stuff going on. If police takes someone's computers, then it's forensic investigation performed by forensic investigators, and not hackery performed by hackers. But of course on technical forums like HN we call it hacking ("we" includes myself). To address some of your points: > they did something someone attempted to prevent them to do Well, Newag claims they didn't add any shady stuff to the firmware, i.e. they didn't prevent anyone from anything. Which means Dragon Sector didn't break any protection mechanism, they were just debugging potential glitches! :) I've debugged a lot of software in my life and no one has ever called me "hacker" for finding that missing CSS class :)). > Hacking a train so that it accepts third party repairs and hacking a credit card reader to steal your money make use of the same techniques. This is a very low level discussion ("low level" as in "assembler", and not intellectually, for the lack of a better word), but in this case there's one significant different--train firmware is supposed to be unchanged (according to Dragon Sector). And credit card reader's fw has been modified. So for me, again, they acted as forensic investigators/"debuggers". > The ethical distinction is between white hats and black hats. The people in the article are white hats, that is, they work legally, ethically, and they are open about their activities. Yes, I agree. But I would still prefer if the non-tech world called them something like "forensic investigators", as white hats are still a kind of hackers.