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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

This is probably as futile and misguided as Stallman's effort to get everyone to say "GNU/Linux". Once a word serves its functional purpose within a community it's going to be used to communicate whatever idea it communicates. Words are often used contrary to what their etymology and history would seem to imply. I don't use "hacker" to mean "intruder," but I'm not going to waste any effort "correcting" people who do.

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I agree. I think the generally accepted meaning has evolved over time. Hacker, to most people, now means cracker/intruder.

Perhaps a more positive way to approach this is to popularise a different term for what we mean by hacker (tinkerer, maker). It's not admitting defeat by abandoning the original meaning - it's taking the path of least resistance and evolving with the language.

The thing is, a cracker/intruder is also most likely a hacker, in the more mild sense of the term. They wouldn't be able to crack/intrude without 'hacking' in order to have that ability/knowledge.

The problem is that people think of A when they read B, because to them, they don't understand, or care, enough about the history of word to properly use it.

Most crackers are script kiddies, using exploits or code developed by someone else. So most crackers are not hackers in the Stallman sense.

It started meaning that. http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/

When I was first learning about computing and networks (late 90's), I always knew "hackers" as part of the H/P/V/C/A scene (Hacking/Phreaking/Virus Writing/Cracking/Anarchy) as used in many of the zines, forums and IRC chans of the period.

However, over the years I've seen articles supporting multiple etymologies.

I think we're at a point where we're probably all at least a little right, not that it matters. It would just be useful when relating to the mainstream media and public if we could form some sort of consensus on the terminology.

I was at a start-up in the late 90s that refused to use the term everyone else used in their press releases, and they used "cracker" instead, and then the business withered up and turned into a zombie.

Sometimes you need to accept your losses and move on.

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