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Isn't reverse engineering what hackers are largely about? Taking things apart and figuring out how they work, or does reverse engineering have a more specific definition?

RE to me is not, and has never been, a bad noun/verb though I often see others frowning upon it.

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It depends on which 'hacker' you mean. The 'Hacker News' hacker or 'the movie Hackers' hacker? Though I bet you could shoe-horn reverse engineering into both without any trouble. That's a big part of the problem. People pick which part of the 'hacker' label they want to apply to themselves while discarding the undesirable parts. The end result is several related terms and multiple definitions, often overlapping or contradicting.

> RE to me is not, and has never been, a bad noun/verb though I often see others frowning upon it.

Perhaps because it was associated with breaking proprietary software and people still retain this image.

At the moment, the department where I work is officially called "Reverse Engineering Department" and I see nothing wrong or illegal in the work I do.

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