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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
by Don_ 13y ago
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.
- rubiquity 13y agoFair enough. Just let me be angry, darn it!
- lukifer 13y agoThe best we can hope for is to push for modifiers to be added: "malicious hackers", "criminal hackers", etc.
- invalidOrTaken 13y agoActually I think it's salvageable: just keep using it in the original sense. Bloomberg learned to code; it will catch on.
- gruseom 13y agoThe 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).