Most people have no idea what the word hacker means
betabeat.com
betabeat.com
Now to make myself a hypocrite: One aspect of this phenomenon that I find amusing is how low the bar is set in terms of programming to qualify as a "hacker." e.g. "I hacked together this RoR site over the weekend" makes me think, "You used a popular, well documented website building framework for it's intended purpose... how exactly is this hacking?" "I hacked together a cake this weekend; even hacked my own cream cheese frosting!" People (like myself) who would once have had to settle for a more boring title like "software engineer" or "computer scientists" are all "hackers" now. :p /my 2¢
It's a third sense of the word, meaning something like "put together without a plan, by trying things until they worked". When someone says "I hacked together this program", they mean "I threw code at it, and now it seems to do what I want".
"This is a bit of hack" to describe a solution that is very fragile and subject to breaking, or just ignores good practices.
Technically, you could argue that this is in fact the original usage, as the solution's fragility typically is due to ignoring the conventional semantics and exploiting the actual underlying implementation of something.
I'll argue that it is hacking, where "hacking" is largely about exploring the unknown and/or creating things that didn't exist before. Just because the tool your using is common, doesn't mean the result is. So depending on what the RoR site is (or maybe I should say, what it does) I think it's construction could justifiably be called hacking. But that's just me...
A while back I made http://crimesagainstcode.com/ as a weekend hack. It's built on Rails 3.1/CoffeeScript simply because that's was I was also playing with at the time, but the "hack" part for me was the fiddling with QR codes in a pretty obtuse manner to see what I could safely manipulate, not the underlying technology of the site itself.
This is the definition that I find the most acceptable, so for me using a television to watch Glee is not hacking; you're using the tool as it was meant to be used. Making your television receive analog FM radio signals to listen to NPR, on the other hand, is hacking, because you're misusing the technology to some useful end. MS Kinect hacking is a good example here: users making the tool do things it wasn't intended to do my Microsoft.
That's why I find most - but not all - coding to be hacking... if your coding and creating something new, that's enough to meet my personal bar of "hacking." I will admit that it's a fuzzy and subjective bar though...
Based on your other examples, I don't you should consider this hacking. None of the MS Kinect hacking has made it do anything that it wasn't actually intended to do.
"Kinect hacking" is akin to having a tv that only has composite input, and you figuring out a way to get HDMI input to composite. I guess it's slightly more of a gray area, but the Kinect's sole purpose is to output depth data to USB with the intent for it to be used with motion capture, and that is all that "hackers" use it for.
On the other hand, my "definition" means that it would be technically impossible to hack with the Arduino because it's intended for hacking. :p So back to the drawing board :)
Most people know exactly what the word "hacker" means within their respective social circles.
It seems almost bizarrely religious to me for someone to say something to the effect of, "the way most people use a word is not the same as my own way or its origin, therefore most people ought to change."
-- Linus TorvaldsHow is that wrong?
Actually, technically, it is. It just so happened that it was really, really easy.
What is it? :)
"The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and one of the most celebrated model railroad clubs in the world, because of its historic role as a wellspring of hacker culture."
Perhaps password guessing and SQLi is "script kiddie stuff" but it makes me think of a "skilled thief" who scales a building and deftly opens a locked window 3 stories up, while a less experienced accomplice tries the back door and finds it unlocked. It's silly to condemn someone for using a simple method if that method is effective.
EDIT: Kevin Mitnick is cool guy, I don't mean to criticize him.
Kevin Mitnick was a social engineer primarily.[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick...] Thus, him calling anyone 'not a real hacker' as in the context presented in the article is ironic.
In this case hacker means someone who tries to steal your shit by breaking into their computer with viruses.
"What News Corp. did, guess pin codes, spoofing voicemails, that is amateur script kiddie stuff."
Is itself kind of interesting, as there's no use of computer scripting languages at all here. He's using "script kiddie" to mean not "someone who uses pre-written scripts to break into computer systems and then boasts of their skills" but rather "someone whose skills I don't respect."
Then again, I consider the meaning of "hacker" to include both the "amateur script kiddie" types AND people like Peter Norvig, Gerald Sussman, and Rob Pike. It's just a matter of degree and of focus, with context to provide illumination.
>Mr. Mitnick, who ... is publishing his first book in August...
Er... Following the link to his "first book" leads to Mr. Mitnick's website, whose products page lists his... other books...
Not to mention the well-known tech writer Stevy Levy. :-)
Then techies reclaimed hacker as a positive, even if the media doesn't uses it another way.
Now there is hacker, the compliment among engineers, and hacker, the computer criminal in the press.
There's no way to "take back" a word if popular use dictates it's something else. It started as one thing, it ends as something very different. (ex. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fag http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinhead)
I know many people who have campaigned to try to make the word into a positive, to "take it back", but the majority of people don't care what we do or why. The media shapes the conversation and the people have it without us.
"Hacking" = trying out different random changes to a codebase until you stumble on the one that does what you want
Those are the definitions (from 1980's Australia/NZ) that stick in my brain, despite being exposed to the "new", more positive, definition from Hacker News.
And while you think "OMG did he just compare calling someone a hacker to the scourge of racism that we have yet to purge ourselves from?" Yes, I did. You see at some point I suspect it will become, from a non-technical person, a vicious form of character smear to insinuate that a technical person uses their skills to steal from society. And these 'technists' if you will, will arise from a population that is afraid because they depend heavily on technology in their day to day lives and yet they don't understand it, and they are at the mercy of people who do understand it, and that makes them angry because for some, they will feel inferior. And folks who are angry and afraid lash out in vicious and brutal ways to try to salve that fear and anger.
I've tried for years to split the meaning by using 'cracker' vs 'hacker' or simply 'criminal' but to no avail.
[Late Edit] I was rather suprised by the implication that the term hacker came from the M.I.T. model rail club. As a model railroader I've never heard the term used in the community. Bash (ie: kitbash) is way more popular.
s/will wish I had done it years ago when I/should/
The most articulate chat that I had was with someone who asked me if I was into social engineering, and explained that he had read _The Art of Deception_ and found it quite inspiring.
"To make furniture with an ax"
To take tools at hand, oft not ideal for the goal, use them to make the more ideal tools if time allows, then to make something beautiful entirely due to the skill, talent, and/or creativity of the wielder.
Most people have no idea what the word hacker means to us.