Reuters totally clueless about the meaning of "hacking"
reuters.com
reuters.com
The article seems to be a better example of a potentially successful SEO strategy than of good journalism.
Unsurprising given that this was originally published in a Hollywood Biz rag: http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/facebook-ipo-mark-z...
People should be reminded who the Silicon Valley companies are and their worth, otherwise you're losing the context: if people had to choose, what would be worse for the U.S. - losing Hollywood, or losing Silicon Valley?
MPAA keeps mentioning how many jobs and money are lost because of piracy. I'm not seeing enough of the opposite perspective: how many jobs and how much money is generated by companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple (yes, it's a little weird mentioning Apple considering that they haven't expressed opposition, but remember that the music and movies industries actually hate iTunes because it has been disruptive to their business and not in a good way).
And I found this pretty insulting too, "Wall Street probably won’t mind all the idealism as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the stock price -- provided Anonymous isn't a featured speaker at the next shareholders meeting."
What happened to proper journalism, where the author did at least a little bit of background research before publishing an article?
That's always been rare. Deadlines, on the other hand, are never in short supply.
And it's a shame really. I wonder if some day, with the help of hackers, technology, and the resultant spread of information, the general public won't be so ignorant.
I doubt there are more than a few dozen real journalists left in the U.S. It seems like virtually all of the good longform articles I read are written by the same handful of people.
Once any one does that, the rest of the explanation can be used to support the definition already in mind. The "testing the boundaries..." could have left him with an impression that Zuckerberg is supporting "hacking" because it 'tests the boundaries of what can be done in general'.
It flourished for a few decades, from 1920 say to 1980, and they it declined, dying in the web era when people stopped reading newspapers, online media make just pennies and need to gather humongous eyeballs to view their ads even for that, and reader attention is lacking.
http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/thewrap-replaces-th...
But this made me think of another point: Who are we to assign connotations to "hacker"? The only complaint we legitimately have is the corruption of language, if you want to make the argument that the definition of the word was originally 'tinkerer' and not 'exploiter of systematic weaknesses or loopholes' (or even more crudely, digital breaker-and-enterer).
If somebody is using a systematic weakness in IP to take down a website, that's within a class of thing, we can call it A. If somebody wants to take apart a device and re-purpose it, that's within another class of thing, we can call it B.
So you and I, more or less, consider A as a subset of B. Over here, we define "hacking" as B, while the media tends to define it as A. Meanwhile we get up on our high horse, saying that "real hacking" is actually B (which, again, encompasses A). But, apart from the corruption of the language, who cares? I think that our reaction to the media calling A both evil, and "hacking", puts us on the defensive, because we think of "hacking" as B, and as such, to us it sounds like the media is attacking tinkering as dangerous.
But that's nonsense, the media doesn't care about, or understand, tinkering. We could just as well change the name of B to "tinkering" and dodge any negative connotation. The only reason we stick to "hacking" for better or worse (I'm not saying we should run away), is that it's our legacy, in a way. So given all that, I think we're in the position of promoting a definition of "hacker" that is new to the media, rather than telling them that they're using the "wrong" definition.
I certainly don't consider myself much of a hacker, and I don't think many here are either.
We are programmers. We build stuff. We need to know everything there is to know about security risks, but most of us stopped coding windows trojans and worms after high school.
I don't think many of us know (or care) how to write keygens and cracks for games, or invisibly extract cash from a bank via social engineering.
That's the definition I subscribe to. Hackers are highly specialized in computer security, whether they're white-hat or black-hat.
So Reuters is not using the wrong definition. It just feels like school kids giving new meanings to words, then laughing at their 'lame' parents who don't understand.
"Tinkering" sounds kind of lame, but it is what it is.
EDIT: Oh yeah, I'm posting on Hacker News! The new meaning is fine, but don't act like other people are stupid for not getting it.
And the "thing" (for lack of a better word) about computing (and also to some extension all sorts of other fields) that interested the relevant loosely-defined subculture consisted, while certainly not entirely, at least substantially of the insides of things. So you ended up dealing with security even if that wasn't your primary interest.
That's about as clearly as I can put it, anyway. Please do note that I'm not saying it's a good thing.
http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of...
What's proven is that by 1963, people were writing "hacker" to mean "security breaker". To insist this is a perversion is rather silly when the "perversion" occurs so early and is in fact the earliest citation.
It seems likely the two usages are coeval. The benign one is how hackers saw themselves and the malicious one is how they were perceived by authorities.
http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html
Wow, I had no idea it went this far back. I've always been curious about etymology. After seeing this whole thread, I dug up these references:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hacker.html
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/hackers-and-cracke...
So, just on the off chance Mark Zuckerberg ever has any doubts about writing that letter, or takes any ribbings for it: yeah, it was the right thing to do.
In the general sense, I think it comes from the public's condescending view on people who are legitimate and call themselves hackers, like on hacker news. For example, if I'm on Hacker News on my phone on the way to school, and one of peers sees me on there, he gives me a weird look and assumes it's the illegitimate form of "hacker". Even my dad was worried when he saw me on Hacker News, saying "Stay away from there." Obviously he thought it was community for the illegitimate form of hacking. Even after I explained the real meaning to him, he was still quite suspicious.
Hackers, and thus by definition the people with the most reasonable claim to define the term, having done so originally.
I do think that at this point attempting to stop the mainstream usage of "hacker" to mean "person who breaks security" amounts to tilting at windmills. However, an article specifically quoting someone who used the term with its original meaning ought to know better, and either carefully distinguish or choose an alternate term. I'd suggest that they almost certainly did know better, but intentionally exploited the ambiguity to push their agenda (namely, the pro-SOPA agenda).
That said, someone with as much PR experience as Mark Zuckerberg ought to have known better than to use the term in the first place. Quoting Linus: 'In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.'
Specifically, if you're going to use the word "hacker" in a context which mentions "testing the boundaries" shortly after widely-publicised boundary-breaching "hack attacks", people are going to connect the dots in their mind. Especially if their perception of you as an individual is largely based on a film portraying you as a wayward and unscrupulous genius with a penchant for pissing people off.
It's even more likely to get your position caricatured than starting a sentence with "As a classical liberal..."
and in the first half of the 20th century the word 'gay' meant 'happy'. shall we insist that's still the proper meaning of the word because that's how it was defined originally, by people with the most reasonable claim to define the term at the time?
Not sure I saw Mark Z as either sort of hacker a DLF who you would need to check yor rings after shaking hands with but a hacker not real.
They know what it means, and there is no clearer example than this article. Zuckerberg explains what it means in no unclear terms, and still the author chooses to bury it under unfounded accusations.
We use another word, they will just do the same thing. We can promote all we like, and they will ignore it.
Anyway, who cares. We will still be here long after "the media" is gone and these hacks are either unemployed or doing PR for some corporation or politician. This type of "journalism" is dying anyway.
So, if I may offer a pseudo-history:
A bunch of people break into a bunch of sites. Real Journalists discover it, and investigate. And I think they're sincere enough in their investigation.
Some of the Real Journalists discover that there is a distinction in the culture between the "script-kiddies" and the "hackers". This is the familiar distinction: the hackers make the tools. "Hacker" versus "Software Engineer" is I suppose like "amateur" versus "professional"; hackers are doing it for the love of programming -- but this distinction is lost in this context where the professionals are agents and spies. Still, the distinction of "hacker" is important because the "script-kiddies" have no idea how to develop the tools, but merely use them to break into systems. And in observing the distinction, the journalists discover that the hackers are much more important, in the sense that people pay them some sort of homage and respect.
When the Real Journalists bring this description back to the Media, of course they bring back this sense of respect for the Hackers. But the Media has a problem: we don't really have a word for people who penetrate security measures. "Crackers" are things you eat; "penetration testers" are probably machines at a dildo factory.
What we'd really like is to use Dutch grammar. In Dutch, someone who "finds out" things becomes an "outfinder." These people "break in" to things; they should be "inbreakers". We have it in some words like "withhold" -- to hold with -- but it's not a general part of our language.
Alas, English is not Dutch and the inbreakers weren't called inbreakers. Instead, just as the Christians are named around the title of their savior, "Christ", so the inbreakers are named around the title of their most-respected "Hacker".
Was it a deliberate choice? In one sense yes, in another sense no. There are impersonal forces at work which conspired to fix "hacker" in the mind of the Media as a synonym for "inbreaker" -- but it is a deliberate choice for the Real Journalists to not run stories about the other hackers out there, and to not coin a new word that could be useful for the discussion.
Journalist: "That's all well and good, but I define hacker as y and will now go on to attack you as though your definition is y instead of x"
http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/facebook-ipo-mark-z...
Not saying they did a good job of it here... but the principle is sound.
It shouldn't happen, but it does - a lot.
So when a man known to be highly intelligent and very successful makes a statement which you find "bizarre", you don't write an article "Zuckerberg makes baffling statement", you think "Why am I baffled? Clearly I'm missing something about what's going on here", and you do more research. The concept 'I am confused' is not newsworthy.
4:28MEZ “The word ‘hacker’ has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers,” Zuckerberg wrote.
YEP!
4:28MEZ “In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. [...]"
Yeah, kinda...
4:28MEZ That’s a spirited defense of a means of protest that has wrecked havoc on a litany of Fortune 500 companies over the last year.
Erm? Troll?
4:28MEZ Back on HN.
Most people still don't know what silicon valley and HN mean when they say hacker yet.
They don't mean that VeriSign was hit by people who built cool software over the weekend.
Reuters is a major news organization, and they should know the definition as Zuckerberg is using it... especially since he explains it in the quote. But they aren't making up a new definition out of thin air.
You don't have to give attention to every lame story that "doesn't get it." Even if this was a story by Reuters, which it is not, it still wouldn't matter. Welcome to 20 years ago when the media stopped giving a shit about giving hackers a fair shake.
For example, a few weeks ago the NYTimes Public Editor made a blog post about whether it should be their policy to note in articles when public figures are obviously lying in their remarks. (They're worried about seeming like the liberal media and they think they should "fairly balance" truth and fiction on issues like climate change or what percentage of planned parenthood's money is spent on abortions.) This resulted in immediate outrage from the commenters and vicious comments. Not profanity -- articulate rebuttals that just made the NYTimes look like idiots. Comments switched off. Later they attempted to walk it back, poorly. Same articulate rebuttals, NYTimes look like idiots again. Comments switched off even faster. Not even sure why they enabled them on the second post to begin with.
Not content with mere ignorance about what "hacking" is and conflating it with cracking and script kiddies, the author ices the article by demonstrating ignorance about cracking and script kiddies as well.
LOL
I've reprinted his quote of Zuckerberg with parenthetical glosses showing how the author and anyone not innoculated by knowledge of hacker culture would probably interpret it.
"In reality, hacking (breaking into computers) just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it (breaking into computers) can be used for good (to fight what you perceive as unjustice) or bad (personal gain or schadenfreude), but the vast majority of hackers I've met tend to be idealistic people (hippies who hate corporations) who want to have a positive impact on the world (by getting rid of capitalism)."
With that reading, I think most of us too would be disappointed or even furious with Zuckerberg. I'm glad that wealth and fame haven't compromized Zuckerberg's view of himself as a hacker in our sense of the word, but I think he did a really bad job explaining to the media that the word is used completely differently by techies. That is unfortunate since he is one of the few people with enough influence to get the public to understand and adopt our usage of the word.
Fortunately, about 50% of the eyeballs are protected by adblockers, but still a great day at the office, for which I suspect he will get much kudos, and be asked to write similar crap again.
While that may be your opinion -- and I don't necessarily disagree with it -- the point remains that the author took Zuckerberg's comments about hackers to mean that he considered himself what we know as a "black hat" hacker, which he clearly did not.
Except for the fact that's just not going to happen.
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-02/zuckerberg-s-hac...
Send him a message and let him know.