Ask Slashdot: Do We Need a New Word For Hacking?

goombah99 writes: Hacking and Hackers get a bum rap. Headline scream "Every Nitendo switch can be hacked." But that's good right? Just like farmers hacking their tractors or someone re-purposing a talking teddy bear. On the other hand, remote hacking a Intel processor backdoor or looting medical data base, that are also described as hacking, are ill-motivated. It seems like we need words with different connotations for hacking. One for things you should definitely do, like program an Arduino or teddy bear. One for things that are pernicious. And finally one for things that are disputably good/bad such as hacking DRM protected appliances you own. What viral sounds terms and their nuances would you suggest? Editor's note: We suggest reading this New Yorker piece "A Short History of 'Hack'", and watching this Defcon talk by veteran journalist Steven Levy on the creativeness and chutzpah of the early hackers.

Comments

As with most question titles: NO

[argStyopa]

What you're asking for is not a new word, but for the public to understand a nuance of something they don't frankly give a shit about. A new word is just as likely to be misunderstood/misused by I-can't-be-arsed-to-report-precisely journalists and bloggers, and far more likely to actually ADD confusion.

Face it: words like 'hack' 'drone' and 'troll' have vanished into the collective linguistics of the culture; we're no longer able to recover them and insist they still have the specificity of meaning they used to carry when used by insiders in the tech culture.

Re:As with most question titles: NO

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I do agree that there's no point trying to reclaim "hacker", the public has defined it their own way and we're not going to get them to redefine it. But we can certainly figure out something else to call the non-malicious hobbyists who are doing cool stuff.

The problem is that the public uses it in very inconsistent ways to mean basically "Something happened that I don't like", "Here's a new idea I thought of", "My computer got broken into", and other wildly differing meanings. Just last week I read a blog post from a guy complaining (with no real hard evidence) that a sports related post he made on his own blog was copied by a sports writer who gets paid to write about sports. The complaining guy wasn't hacked if the blog is publicly readable (I think it is) and the contents aren't copyrighted. But the complaining guy said "I got hacked". Doesn't sound like hacking to me. And then we have people who talk about "hacks" with regards to food, like dumping the ground beef from a Taco Bell taco onto a slice of pepperoni pizza. "Hack" as a term reminds me of a saying we have about email - when it's everybody's responsibility, in reality it's nobody's responsibility. When hack has turned into a word that means anything and everything, it has no real meaning any more. Yes, we need a new word.

Re:As with most question titles: NO

[Miser]

100% correct.

Hacker is a tinkerer. Someone who likes to play with tech and learn.

Cracker is the criminal element, doing things systems weren't designed to do for "bad" or whatever your definition may be.

Or perhaps just call them what they also may be: white collar criminal.

Maybe I'm tech-splaining now? ;)

Betteridge's Law: No

[UnknownSoldier]

A new world will NOT solve the problem. The media will just hijack it like they have in the past:

i.e.

* Piracy = practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea --> illegal copying of numbers
* Hacking = implementing a quick fix or investing systems for curiosity's sake --> digital breaking and entering