Sometime Today, terrence d'souza assembled some asciibets to say:
> BBC & CNN amongst numerous others are also guilty. Roughly 70 % of
> the time the reference to hackers is derogatory and the balance 30% is
The problem is that the use of hacker in reference to security breakers
was coined in the early 80's / late 70's or around then. In around
1981/82, real hackers tried to use the term `worm' to refer to these
people, but it never caught on. Around 1985, the term cracker was coined
and seems to have had wider acceptence than worm.
15 years of misuse of the term doesn't help. Most people consider a
`cracker' as something that is burst at Diwali (or 4th of July depending
on where you are). A hacker sounds more like someone who hacks through
something with an axe. That pretty much is what we do - we hack through
code with our hands and eyes and brains. We do not make cracks in walls.
The problem is that people are less likely to think of crack when they
hear cracker than they are to think of hack when they hear hacker. This
has got to be changed.
> reluctant to syntax change, it may be a better idea to change ones
> label to something more mundane like "IT professional" or "Linpro" or
No no no. Now you sound like a marketroid. That's never good. Besides,
many of us may not be either IT Professionals (I am a computer scientist
and don't really deal in IT) or `Linpros' - many windows/unix/mac(?)/amiga
hackers out there, not to mention the huge BSD community.
Besides, the term hacker is ours. It was coined by us for us. The term
came into first use in the 1960's by hackers from The Mobile Railroad Club
(TMRC) and the AI lab at MIT (Incompatible Timesharing System) (where RMS
started).
Philip
--
"The C Programming Language -- A language which combines the flexibility of
assembly language with the power of assembly language."
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