HaXX0r Sabreurs

[App13]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Uh...because hackers are so admirable? Because their stupidity is worthy of emulation by the masses? They are somehow to be admired and followed?

Sometimes I despair of young people. Their gullibility seems to know no bounds...

Being a hacker is nothing special, I have an angry letter from Microsofts "Club Live" to prove that.

Back when it first began on online games elitists would use leet (1337) to mock players who seemed to know everything and typed like a preschooler (noobs). After that it took on a life of its own. Whenever spoken it is usually used in a way to make fun of someone else, or simply used whilst joking around.


Sincerely,

App13, your friendly neighborhood gamer, geek, and ex-hacker.

[parrythis]

Originally Posted by RITFencing

Writing an update for Windows XP which fixes whatever error by patching over a bad spot of code is a hack.

Well.... not exactly.... A hack is an unauthorized patch, very often written without benefit of the source code. If someone works for Microsoft and they patch a bad spot of code in Windows XP, they are a systems engineer, not a hacker.

[magic_moose]

Originally Posted by parrythis

they are a systems engineer, not a hacker.

Speaking as a guy who was often introduced to customers as "This is our corporate hacker. He can make this work.", I would be inclined to say the terms are not mutually exclusive.

[KD5MDK]

Because everyone knows it doesn't work out of the box.

[peet]

You can definitely hack code with authorized access to the source. I most certainly have code in a number of my own projects that I would describe as "a big fat ugly hack", but it works....

Let's face it, the words "hack" and "hacker" have come to mean a lot of different things to different people; it's unfortunate that most people think "hacker" is the same as "cracker".

-p

[eac]

The following are widely accepted definitions among real programmers:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hack.html
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

referenced above by Brad. The most commonly used sense of 'hack' is probably closest to sense 1, "A quick job that produces what is needed, but not well,' closely followed by sense 2, "An incredibly good, and perhaps time-consuming, piece of [software] work that produces exactly what is needed." These would seem contradictory, but they aren't, and the reason they're related meanings has to do with profound truths about the nature of programming. See "The Word Hacker" http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html for more.

Anyway, nobody who knows what's going on would ever say that a hack ordinarily has anything to do with anything illegitimate, illegal, or otherwise bad. A hack sometimes does something unexpected, or perhaps represents some "thinking outside the box," and so breaks some rules in that sense, but it isn't malicious, and it isn't destructive. Hacking is a creative activity, and most of the best software today is created by people who call themselves hackers, in the sense above. This is a serious and painful rift from how the word is used in journalism, which annoys real hackers to no end.

I write software at a startup in Silicon Valley, where we have five people, four of whom would probably call themselves and each other hackers; the fifth is a mechanical engineer. We considered just putting 'hacker' for my job title on my business card, but ended up saying 'robotics engineer.' We didn't consider for a second the title 'software engineer,' because among hackers (again, people who creatively write good software), that phrase has a connotation of being a drone who wears a suit in a cubicle, and produces reams of completely worthless COBOL. (see http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/COBOL.html)

Note, by the way, that the above links are all links to Eric Raymond's site, but none of them are *his* definitions. They're definitions written in many cases by Guy Steele or other big-time hackers, and they mostly represent the consensus among hackers in the above sense. Many hackers would agree with the particular definitions above, but would spurn the association with Raymond, because of other annoying and arguably stupid things he does.

[Inquartata]

Alas, your word has been co-opted into common usage and is generally understood to have a derogatory and criminal connotation by most of the English-speaking public.

You can still try to make it mean something acceptable or even good if you like, of course. You can also try to describe yourself as gay, meaning happy and light-hearted...but you will have to endure a lot of sniggering and possibly unwelcome requests for dates if you do.

[telkanuru]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Alas, your word has been co-opted into common usage and is generally understood to have a derogatory and criminal connotation by most of the English-speaking public.

The proles being stupid doesn't make them right.


You are also on an internet forum, not CNN. Context is absolutely everything.

[eac]

Right. Context matters. I live largely in contexts that accept my meaning of the word, and I use the word normally the way I say it. There's even a convention, which a couple of my friends went to, called "Hackers," with hundreds of attendees, which invites only people who have accomplished significant things as hackers in the sense I described (this is with the goal of having fun hackerly things to talk about, not to promulgate one meaning of the word over another). I'm not trying to evangelize the word into a new, completely different meaning; I'm just trying to slightly expand the contexts in which it means what I said.

[Inquartata]

Meh, there are in-groups of all sorts, misusing words in common usage or employing them as cant. Us, for example. Doesn't mean that ours is the correct meaning of a word which has a common-usage definition...

[telkanuru]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Doesn't mean that ours is the correct meaning of a word which has a common-usage definition...

It does in the tight context of a debate on the internet about hacking...

Again, context.

[Inquartata]

Nope. Because the majority of the people on the internet talking about hacking are not IT insiders. They're just....the public.

[trazom]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Nope. Because the majority of the people on the internet talking about hacking are not IT insiders. They're just....the public.

And how many of them are talking about one of the many other definitions of hacking? Clearing brush? Political hacks? Hiring a cab? Coughing? Writing or journalism? Tennis? Basketball? Rugby? (all of which have a definition for hack in the dictionary.com).

I don't think many members of "the public" discuss computer hacking online. Spyware, maybe. Virus control, maybe. Reducing spam? possibly. Hacking? no.

[Inquartata]

But when they talk about hacking in the context of computers, they are almost always thinking of malefactors, not swell moral IT experts.