Journalists need to learn what a 'hacker' really is

In all seriousness, however, this is something the geek/hacker community has been harping on for decades, and something that nobody else gives a rat's ass about. The MSM will continue to call people who use LOIC or exploit password reset features "hackers", because 99.9% of their audience won't know the difference.

If they ask you directly, correct them. Otherwise, just let them do their thing. There's absolutely nothing to gain by insisting that ignorant people use the correct terminology.

Edit: Feel free to downvote me, but please let me know why: I'm still new here, and I was trying to be constructive.

But on that topic I'm actually less pessimistic about the use of "Hacker" than I used to be. Self-described hackers are I think more prominent and with movements like hackerspaces which attract crafty & creative types there's leakage into the non-technical social groups as well.

Even a company like Facebook uses the term http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990014 even if it leads to misunderstanding.

They're the bright-eyed people who show you how they managed to make a program do something that nobody else with access to the same program can do. They come from the same school as people who build Antikythera Mechanism emulators and Babbage Difference Engines out of Lego.

That's a hacker, to me: someone who can make something do cool things. If it makes them money as well, that's just the icing on a very big cake.

It has two archaic uses - the older one is well known to this community and the second one, also falling by the way side, is someone who has a good understanding of computer security and uses it to break into computers.

This boat has sailed. And what is more it sailed a long time ago.

But I don't see much of a solution, except saying "good hacker" and "bad hacker". Non-hackers just don't get it.

Ctrl-F: "Hacking boxes"