But hopefully you can see that it would be appalling to write an article entitled "Is Science the Next Threat to Our Food Supply?" about a pesticide disaster, saying, "Scientists sprayed pesticides on a farm, poisoning hundreds of people who ate the food;" and that this article isn't talking about anything you or I would recognize as "hacking" or "hackers". At the point where you're extorting ransom there's nothing playful about it anymore, and it's very likely that the vulnerabilities being exploited were already known.
By virtue of self-identifying as "a hacker", or at least a would-be hacker, you are getting into the line of fire. So you should stand up against it.
I've been surrounded by hackers, and none of them caught legal or social flack for being called a hacker in public. I also don't see people getting turned off from doing computer security or other computer work because of hacking being used to describe computer crime.
I'm not clear what "hacking has originally started as describing computer crime" is supposed to mean, but "hacking" in the sense of "finding clever ways to surpass what was thought to be possible" goes back to the 01960s, while its "computer crime" meaning was created by journalists and then Hollywood in the 01980s, after Steven Levy's book "Hackers". They did this because they despised and distrusted the kind of people described in the book, us, and projected their greatest fears about computers onto us.
It's not impossible to get people to stop using a group identity term in a derogatory sense. "Gay" is, perhaps, commonly used in US high schools to mean "contemptible", and "jew" in some parts of the US is still used to mean "negotiate an unfair business deal", but no US newspaper would dare to use either term that way today.
If we value our lives, we need to force them to treat "hacker" in the same way.
We'll think about it when we get there :)
no they said it has been used for a while now, not was originally used. The problem is that both uses have existed concurrently and it can be annoying to people who believe themselves to be a member of the non-criminal set of hackers. It can also be annoying when you can't tell from context what it should mean, I guess being on HN I kept thinking - but it should be "Is Agriculture the next struggle for Hacking?" because I didn't think the criminal usage would prevail here.
The criminal types were never part of the hacker community. Someone who sends spam or deploys ransomware is motivated by profit, not curiosity or playfulness.
There are still plenty of breaking into systems people in the hacker community. They work in cryptanalysis, security research, penetration testing, etc. You can find them at their traditional conferences such as Defcon, Blackhat, and Chaos Communication Congress.