Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the po'-white-folks-that-hack dept.
rcp writes "The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for those of you not from The Great White North) has an article on why the media use the term hacker versus cracker. " Well, at least it's an understanding of why they use the terms incorrectly.
Can someone please explain to me why it matters so much if the mainstream press gets such an insignificant term wrong? There are far more atrocities of error everyday in the common press for far many more things (even computer tech). Worrying about a term that so few people care about is exactly whats wrong with most of the proponets of open-source/linux/today's computer flavour... the problem is mis-directed energy. I really miss the days when your choice of operating system was more on its merits than on a "sport's team" mentality; at least when people bickered then, if they lost the fight they would go back and try to improve their OS to match the other one. These days its nothing but rhetoric from every side of the fence. Blah.
There's a difference in lingo and language. Language is defined by the mainstream. If a majority of the people use a word in a certain sense, then that's what the word means. If you don't use it the same way, you're either using the word wrong or you're speaking a specific lingo.
I've been in the Navy for 15 years. If I ask another sailor the location of the nearest head, he'll direct me to the restroom without any problem. If I ask a waiter in a restaurant where the head is, I'll likely get some really strange looks. It isn't the waiters fault, however, it's mine.Head does not mean restroom in the English language, only in naval lingo.
In geek-speak, hacker means one thing. To the rest of the world, it means something else. If you use geek-speak to a non-geek and are misunderstood, the fault is yours, not theirs.
--
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
GET OVER IT!!!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5
I know all you guys think its really cool to call yourselvers "hackers" and pretend that you are some sort of antisocial wizards.
I know you are all wrapped up in the misunderstood genius syndrome.
I know you all think the world would be better off if it would just blindly accept your intellectual superiority and form a huge technocracy.
Unfortunately, the rest of the pathetic, stupid world still clings to the silly notion that there is more in life than overclocked Celerons and k-rad Perl scripts.
"Hacker" is what 90% of the world uses to refer to a someone who gains improper access to a computer. Let it go. Get on with your lives.
Seriously. Right now -- close your web browser, get up, go outside, and go for a walk. If you are in Minnesota, take an umbrella.
A cracker is a saltine. A hacker is an axe murderer.
The press routinely uses the wrong language to describe its stories. Anything to make the headline scarier to grab more attention. A prefect example is ANY 'gun' story. The press will routinely say that an 'arsenal' of guns was found whenever cops find a large amount (for the press that usally means more than 2) of weapons. The correct term is actually 'armory' but that doesn't scare people since many have some sort of National Gaurd armory near their town. People are used to the term armory. An armory is where weapons are stored, an arsenal is where they are manufactured. Another example is using the term 'clip' instead of 'magazine'. They are different items. In general just about all modern (post Korean war) weapons now use magazines to hold their rounds. But again, a magazine is newsweek or time, a clip is not as familier of an item.
What I find funny, is the word 'hack' actually had/has another meaning, even before the computer term arose to it's current status.
MIT is famous for it's constant barrage of practical jokes around campus. These usually range from putting a police car on the top of one of the buildings to Smiley Faces placed at strategic points. These jokes are referred to as 'hacks', and to my knowledge, always have been.
There's some pretty creative stuff in there, and most of the hacks follow a strict "Code of Ethics" guideline, and usually anything that violates the code wouldn't be considered a hack. (A tip of the hat to the CORRECT usage of the word.)
The page gets it right when it says: "Note that this has nothing to do with computer (or phone) hacking (which we call "cracking")."
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
--
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.:P)
Words and meanings and the value of 'hacker.'
by
Lemmy+Caution
·
· Score: 5
Some notes:
First, there are no such things as "true meanings." Meaning in language is created when reference is secured. Even among us, saying that "a hacker is in the system" quite reliably constructs a consistent meaning. (Let's leave Quine, Ayers, and Putnam out of all this for now, you language philosphers. If I hear about twin earth, I'll plotz.)
The article has the issue square to rights by referring to canonical sources - established dictionaries. At this point, the geek community may as well say that the word "hacker" refers to white-tufted thrush, and that the appropriate term is "pendejo," for all the good it will do. The institutions that have the general authority to determine meaning in media, government, and education - the dictionary writers (who fill the void left by the absence of the sorts of language academies that France and Spain use) - have made their claim.
Language is created by usage. Very few attempts to engineer the use of language are successful, unless there is some real-world social or political tumult associated with it. If there is a civil-rights movement for hackers, perhaps the language about it will come under greater scrutiny. (Of course, that means, that if the public ended up meaning by 'hacker' what some folks here want them to mean by 'hacker,' the dictionary writers will eventually follow suit. I don't see any mechanism for that to happen - there isn't enough motivation on the part of the public.)
On another level, I think it is misguided to completely toss out the Hollywood hacker media fantasy. Of course there aren't teen-model wunderkind hackers rollerblading around the city. Of course [cr|h]acking doesn't involve 3d imagery and heart-stopping graphics. But the mediated image of the hacker does reveal a sort of public anxiety that so much of our infrastructure is now opaque to all but those with the technological expertise to decode it. It is a testimony to our (we being high-tech cognoscenti of different stripes) status, and the general public awe that it inspires. We should, if not embrace the glamorized image, at least be somewhat pleased that we can inspire it.
If you have to define it, you can do it right.
by
Frater+219
·
· Score: 5
Seeing as the journos seem to see the need to state a definition for "hacker" most every time they use it ("This Web-site vandalism is just another of the recent works of 'hackers', malicious users who break into Internet-connected computers"), it's clear that they believe that the word "hacker" is not yet clearly-enough defined in the common parlance to stand on its own.
One does not, after all, state a definition for common words like "golfer", "policeman", or "beer"; that one states a definition indicates that one believes the word to need defining. ("The driver had been drinking 'beer', an alcoholic beverage made from fermented barley spiced with hops.")
Therefore, to say that they rely on the common parlance for the meaning of "hacker" is disingenuous. They might as well say "This Web vandalism is just another of the recent works of so-called 'crackers', malicious users who break into Internet-connected computers." Doing this would serve the cause of education -- improving, rather than damaging, the common parlance -- and further would avoid pissing off hackers.
Sorry, but 99 percent of the general public thinks a hacker is someone who steals secrets and trashes computers. That's not going to change no matter how much you whine about it. You may as well give up. You sound like the people who complain because they can't use the word gay to mean happy anymore. The meanings changed. Deal with it.
Now weary traveller, rest your head. For just like me, you're utterly dead.
Some people have suggested vandal, which is fine since they're all dead and won't write any e-mail complaints to the CBC.
Umm... what about those of us who are University of Idaho Vandals?? Hmmm?? I would think that among people currently at my graduate alma mater, the people at the CSDS might have just as many (valid) issues with "vandal" being used as we in the obsessive-compulsive programmer community do with "hacker".
Personally, I don't see any good reason not to use "cracker". Applying a term that is basically a racial epithet for "poor white trash" to a different class of trash entirely seems ironically appropriate; perhaps it's actually not-so ironic -- has anyone done a study to determine how many system intruders grow up in environments conducive to being bereft of both values and motivation?
My opinion only, IANAL.
--
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
Re:English is a Democracy
by
Spud+Zeppelin
·
· Score: 3
Actually, to take your political analogy a bit farther though, English isn't a "democracy" at all... if anything, it resembles one of the anarcho-oligarchies of modern Latin America. You have a few families (dictionary publishers) laying down their version of "central authority", but at a lower level, no real governance exists beyond the local constabulary (local usage).
Case in point: "Sacratomato" -- you certainly won't find California's capitol spelled/pronounced that way in any dictionary, but there are literally millions of people (anyone who listened to Bay Area radio in the '70s) for whom that word both denotes AND connotes meaning.
Conversely: "Bubbler" -- the Merriam-Webster has adopted the Wisconsin-specific definition of the word (drinking fountain), but I'm quite confident the vast majority of the world's English speakers are completely unaware of that usage.
So there you have it -- a thin veil of central authority over what is really anarchy at any scale larger than the provincial. Which, not surprisingly, is much the same way that Mark Twain characterized our language a century ago....
My opinion only, IANAL.
--
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
Perl programmers aside, I think the problem is that programmers and computer techies have never liked context sensitivity.
'Hacker' is context sensitive. It means different things at different times to different people. Most English words are like. This makes it easier to express yourself accurately, not harder.
In the UK, hacker has long meant someone who hacks into computer systems. Because of the (more US based) meaning of 'skilled, unorthodox programmer' it has _two_ meanings. Wow.
'I was up all night rebuilding the mail server after some hacker trashed it' - can you guess what meaning is in use here?
'It was a fun company to work for, they had some pretty smart hackers there' - how about now?
Is it really so difficult that we must must must have a special word?
Yes, the phrase ' I think of myself as a hacker ' on its own might be ambiguous. But, in real life you simply would never get that phrase on its own. A live conversation would allow an unsure listener to ask what meaning the speaker intended. A written email or letter would never simply be that phrase all on it's own.
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone please explain to me why it matters so much if the mainstream press gets such an insignificant term wrong? There are far more atrocities of error everyday in the common press for far many more things (even computer tech). Worrying about a term that so few people care about is exactly whats wrong with most of the proponets of open-source/linux/today's computer flavour... the problem is mis-directed energy. I really miss the days when your choice of operating system was more on its merits than on a "sport's team" mentality; at least when people bickered then, if they lost the fight they would go back and try to improve their OS to match the other one. These days its nothing but rhetoric from every side of the fence. Blah.
F /...
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
I know all you guys think its really cool to call yourselvers "hackers" and pretend that you are some sort of antisocial wizards.
I know you are all wrapped up in the misunderstood genius syndrome.
I know you all think the world would be better off if it would just blindly accept your intellectual superiority and form a huge technocracy.
Unfortunately, the rest of the pathetic, stupid world still clings to the silly notion that there is more in life than overclocked Celerons and k-rad Perl scripts.
"Hacker" is what 90% of the world uses to refer to a someone who gains improper access to a computer. Let it go. Get on with your lives.
Seriously. Right now -- close your web browser, get up, go outside, and go for a walk. If you are in Minnesota, take an umbrella.
A cracker is a saltine. A hacker is an axe murderer.
The press routinely uses the wrong language to describe its stories. Anything to make the headline scarier to grab more attention. A prefect example is ANY 'gun' story. The press will routinely say that an 'arsenal' of guns was found whenever cops find a large amount (for the press that usally means more than 2) of weapons. The correct term is actually 'armory' but that doesn't scare people since many have some sort of National Gaurd armory near their town. People are used to the term armory. An armory is where weapons are stored, an arsenal is where they are manufactured. Another example is using the term 'clip' instead of 'magazine'. They are different items. In general just about all modern (post Korean war) weapons now use magazines to hold their rounds. But again, a magazine is newsweek or time, a clip is not as familier of an item.
MIT is famous for it's constant barrage of practical jokes around campus. These usually range from putting a police car on the top of one of the buildings to Smiley Faces placed at strategic points. These jokes are referred to as 'hacks', and to my knowledge, always have been.
The MIT Hack Gallery is here:
http://hacks.mit.edu/Gallery.html
There's some pretty creative stuff in there, and most of the hacks follow a strict "Code of Ethics" guideline, and usually anything that violates the code wouldn't be considered a hack. (A tip of the hat to the CORRECT usage of the word.)
The page gets it right when it says:
"Note that this has nothing to do with computer (or phone) hacking (which we call "cracking")."
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
First, there are no such things as "true meanings." Meaning in language is created when reference is secured. Even among us, saying that "a hacker is in the system" quite reliably constructs a consistent meaning. (Let's leave Quine, Ayers, and Putnam out of all this for now, you language philosphers. If I hear about twin earth, I'll plotz.)
The article has the issue square to rights by referring to canonical sources - established dictionaries. At this point, the geek community may as well say that the word "hacker" refers to white-tufted thrush, and that the appropriate term is "pendejo," for all the good it will do. The institutions that have the general authority to determine meaning in media, government, and education - the dictionary writers (who fill the void left by the absence of the sorts of language academies that France and Spain use) - have made their claim.
Language is created by usage. Very few attempts to engineer the use of language are successful, unless there is some real-world social or political tumult associated with it. If there is a civil-rights movement for hackers, perhaps the language about it will come under greater scrutiny. (Of course, that means, that if the public ended up meaning by 'hacker' what some folks here want them to mean by 'hacker,' the dictionary writers will eventually follow suit. I don't see any mechanism for that to happen - there isn't enough motivation on the part of the public.)
On another level, I think it is misguided to completely toss out the Hollywood hacker media fantasy. Of course there aren't teen-model wunderkind hackers rollerblading around the city. Of course [cr|h]acking doesn't involve 3d imagery and heart-stopping graphics. But the mediated image of the hacker does reveal a sort of public anxiety that so much of our infrastructure is now opaque to all but those with the technological expertise to decode it. It is a testimony to our (we being high-tech cognoscenti of different stripes) status, and the general public awe that it inspires. We should, if not embrace the glamorized image, at least be somewhat pleased that we can inspire it.
One does not, after all, state a definition for common words like "golfer", "policeman", or "beer"; that one states a definition indicates that one believes the word to need defining. ("The driver had been drinking 'beer', an alcoholic beverage made from fermented barley spiced with hops.")
Therefore, to say that they rely on the common parlance for the meaning of "hacker" is disingenuous. They might as well say "This Web vandalism is just another of the recent works of so-called 'crackers', malicious users who break into Internet-connected computers." Doing this would serve the cause of education -- improving, rather than damaging, the common parlance -- and further would avoid pissing off hackers.
Sorry, but 99 percent of the general public thinks a hacker is someone who steals secrets and trashes computers. That's not going to change no matter how much you whine about it. You may as well give up. You sound like the people who complain because they can't use the word gay to mean happy anymore. The meanings changed. Deal with it.
Now weary traveller, rest your head. For just like me, you're utterly dead.
Some people have suggested vandal, which is fine since they're all dead and won't write any e-mail complaints to the CBC.
Umm... what about those of us who are University of Idaho Vandals?? Hmmm?? I would think that among people currently at my graduate alma mater, the people at the CSDS might have just as many (valid) issues with "vandal" being used as we in the obsessive-compulsive programmer community do with "hacker".
Personally, I don't see any good reason not to use "cracker". Applying a term that is basically a racial epithet for "poor white trash" to a different class of trash entirely seems ironically appropriate; perhaps it's actually not-so ironic -- has anyone done a study to determine how many system intruders grow up in environments conducive to being bereft of both values and motivation?
My opinion only, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
Actually, to take your political analogy a bit farther though, English isn't a "democracy" at all... if anything, it resembles one of the anarcho-oligarchies of modern Latin America. You have a few families (dictionary publishers) laying down their version of "central authority", but at a lower level, no real governance exists beyond the local constabulary (local usage).
Case in point: "Sacratomato" -- you certainly won't find California's capitol spelled/pronounced that way in any dictionary, but there are literally millions of people (anyone who listened to Bay Area radio in the '70s) for whom that word both denotes AND connotes meaning.
Conversely: "Bubbler" -- the Merriam-Webster has adopted the Wisconsin-specific definition of the word (drinking fountain), but I'm quite confident the vast majority of the world's English speakers are completely unaware of that usage.
So there you have it -- a thin veil of central authority over what is really anarchy at any scale larger than the provincial. Which, not surprisingly, is much the same way that Mark Twain characterized our language a century ago....
My opinion only, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
Perl programmers aside, I think the problem is that programmers and computer techies have never liked context sensitivity.
'Hacker' is context sensitive. It means different things at different times to different people. Most English words are like. This makes it easier to express yourself accurately, not harder.
In the UK, hacker has long meant someone who hacks into computer systems. Because of the (more US based) meaning of 'skilled, unorthodox programmer' it has _two_ meanings. Wow.
'I was up all night rebuilding the mail server after some hacker trashed it' - can you guess what meaning is in use here?
'It was a fun company to work for, they had some pretty smart hackers there' - how about now?
Is it really so difficult that we must must must have a special word?
Yes, the phrase ' I think of myself as a hacker ' on its own might be ambiguous. But, in real life you simply would never get that phrase on its own. A live conversation would allow an unsure listener to ask what meaning the speaker intended. A written email or letter would never simply be that phrase all on it's own.
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