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 (s

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).