Here is where you keep missing the point with all your semantic squirming.
“Hacking” was considered bad in the data processing community many years before Hollywood ever heard the word, (the MIT-influenced subculture notwithstanding).
“Hacking” (meaning unauthorized access) was always potentially harmful and it was never ethical (even if the government had not gotten around to passing laws to make it illegal). That is why “hacker” has meant a bad person in the computer business years before Hollywood got involved.
Hollywood did not distort the meaning of the cool crowd at MIT’s private word; Hollywood disseminated the actual meaning of an existing word as it was used everywhere outside the little MIT enclave.
You continue to squirm around different definitions of what is bad while complertely ignoring the salient fact that Hollywood had nothing to do with the meaning of the word. Hollywood used the common understanding of the word outside the MIT-influenced subculture.
As a side note, if you do not feel that deliberately tresspassing on my property, violating my sense of place and sanctuary is malicious, regardless if you do not choose to inflict physical harm, then I do not want you in my neighborhood or even in Ohio. I really hope you never have to suffer the violation that accompanies such an invasion.
But as tomndebb pointed out, spying on people’s computer systems is harmful, regardless of whether you damage anything. Violating people’s right to keep certain information private is a form of harm – that’s why it’s illegal. Just like you’d be harming me if you stuck a camera in my bedroom to spy on me, whether you used the pictures for anything or not. You’d still be violating my privacy.
So, in other words, there were “good” hackers already doing illegal, unethical things before the word ever entered the popular lexicon – at best, your complaint seems to be that Hollywood is portraying these illegal, unethical activities as even more illegal and unethical than they typically are.
“Hacking” was considered bad in the data processing community many years before Hollywood ever heard the word, (the MIT-influenced subculture notwithstanding). " You keep saying that you sincerely believe it to. However, for whatever small use it is worth, to haven’t show more then the react that people disagree about this, via your cites.
Also, if you consider asking for proof, rather then stating opinions to be squirming, then I have lost all respect I may have ever had for you.
Same goes with defining “malicious” incorrectly. True, if I, a person in their right mind were to walk into your house intentionally, then I would be maliciously. However, if I were to wonder into a house through a unlooked door while I was drunk, under the impression it was my own house, I would be invading your home, but not maliciously. This has nothing to do with hacking, but everything to do with the meaning of a word, one that conveys intent. Besides, a situation involving a home, and accessing computer are not one on one equal situation. Almost, but not quite.
tim314, my complaint was in the title of this post, before I previewed. People are confusing word usage with word meaning. Frankly, I will not stop until I see this, the latest question on the board using Steven Levy’s defintion of hackers. Personally, I bet those who insist on word usage will not stop, either.
Word usage is, de facto, word meaning. There is no meaning independent of use. If no one has ever used a hypothetical word to communicate, it has no meaning.
Levy himself can’t declare by fiat a “proper definition” of “hacker” in contraversion of popular usage – no matter what he’s written and no matter his position of authority within the community.
You can’t prove any of those statements, and information from people who are better acquainted with the subject and have explained how they know the term have already pointed out that this is simply factually incorrect. We’ve discussed before your tendency to argue from information that is factually wrong, so you’ll have to excuse me if I trust those who - as I mentioned above - took the time to explain where they became acquainted with the term. You’ve obviously subscribed to some sort of silly revisionist history.
Secondly, as I mentioned, you are also displaying your rather profound ignorance of language; even if this were the original meaning of the word, which plainly it isn’t, semantic shift is a normal thing in language, and it’s inexorable. There is no point to claiming that the common usage of a word is ‘wrong’, and it doesn’t really even make sense, as what are words? They’re arbitrary symbols whose meaning derives from common agreement on the part of the users of language. You don’t get to copyright a word and insist that it only be used in a certain way; insisting that a word secretly means something different than what it actually means - what the users of the language use it to mean - doesn’t make sense.
Hacker has actually undergone a semantic shift, and I suspect Hollywood is a part of it. It has acquired a far more positive definition in comparison to its original meaning, and one that now exists in parallel. The new definition means someone who is extremely skilled with computers, and Hollywood has actually done an excellent job of glamorizing the subculture (do you think most hackers look like Neo and Trinity? Or even like Angelina Jolie in the delightfully bad movie Hackers?) I suspect that’s part of the reason that the word has acquired whatever caché it now possesses.
Language change is inexorable, as I said. It happens as the result of simple utility - words are coined or stretched to meet new needs, grammatical structures appear or disappear, and so on. A cultural shift made “formal” and “informal” you (the T-V distinction, which once existed in English) irrelevant and thus grammatical formality disappeared. These same processes occur constantly, but they usually can’t be identified until well after they’ve happened. That’s how language works: it’s in many ways essentially arbitrary and exists by consent of speakers, so when something is no longer useful, it disappears from use. Claims about correct and incorrect usage are simply unjustifiable, as language is a complete system that exists in the heads of those who use it. The use of words like “correct” always indicates that someone is trying to force some sort of change in the language, as when we’re taught that it’s wrong to put a preposition at the end of a sentence (wholly false; it arose as a superstition due to the fact that such usages don’t exist in Latin.)
It’s certainly not the privilege of these folks at MIT to decide that “hacker” means something different than what it plainly does. Their choice to identify with a word that has negative connotations (but clearly not only negative connotations) is perfectly fine; their insistence that we must start to mean something different when we use the word isn’t even rational. All sorts of groups of people decide to reclaim negative words, but I don’t have some particular right to decide that “faggot” is actually a term of praise, and it would be bizarre and nonsensical for me to do so. People would probably be puzzled if I did so, and inventing a false history for the word to support my irrational demands would make me a liar. Telling people that they’re speaking “wrong” (especially when as I mentioned in a previous post there is simply no meaningful criterion that would call this a wrong usage) is not how one reclaims a word.
FWIW, I could date the use of the word “cracker” to at least as far back as 1989. The difference as me and my cousin (who’s handle was Hacker the Cracker) remember it from our Commie 64 days was that a hacker is someone who broke into computer systems, while a cracker was someone who broke past copy protection schemes in games. You’d have software piracy outfits like Eaglesoft who would crack the copy protection schemes on the latest games and release them into the public. The people who made these cracks were properly termed crackers.
“Malicious” has several meanings; I suspect Scott has decided to use the term in reference to a specific one - I think that one may decide to invade someone’s home without malicious intent in the sense that they’re not acting out of a desire to do harm to someone. However, Wiktionary gives an additional meaning that I actually think is pretty accurate - “wrongful and done intentionally without just cause or excuse; as, a malicious act.” Entering a person’s house and invading their privacy, even without doing vandalism or thievery is wrong and intentional. It’s clearly a malicious act.
Taking it upon oneself to “test” another person’s security systems by invading them is a pretty malicious act, and I’d be pretty hard to convince that it was done strictly out of an altruistic desire to benefit the other party. Indulging your own wish to test your mettle against a private computer security system may not be on the level of knocking over a liquor store, but it’s hardly a charitable act of goodwill.
You and I have had are differences. However, I recall nothing of the sort. Care to provide a link? I recall you claming I was wrong, in the past, but this issue is a matter of opinion, (I believe I am right, you believe you are right. I feel I have made my case, at least to those as nit-picking as I am.)
The factual question that I raised, whether there was some sort of historical basis behind this silly attempt to rewrite language, has been answered; people have explained the origins of the term, and they were as I thought.
I have also thoroughly explained why there isn’t any point to this kind of effort, and I’ve explained why the idea that the agreed-upon usage of a word could be wrong is nonsense. If you disagree, it’s certainly your perogative. If you feel you could rebut my point, then the thread might oughta move to Great Debates where one does that sort of thing.
The particular instance I was thinking of when I said you argue using incorrect information was when you insisted that the Catholic Church has a doctrinal stance that evolution is false, which of course is not true. I’m afraid I was left with a rather poorer impression of you after that. If you still wish to claim you’re right about that, you might as well do so to your cat, right after perusing the Catholic Encyclopedia, which you might find enlightening. Disagreements over factual information are not matters of opinion, and it’s further mendacity to claim they are.
If I am parsing this correctly, you are claiming that the fact that I have pointed to a thread in which at least three posters who worked in the computer industry in the 1970s and earlier recall using the word in a negative manner is not sufficient in your mind for a citation. (If that is not what you intended, please resubmit your comment in English and I will attempt to respond to that.)
However, you have also not provided any citation that your “Hollywood” claim is anything more than wishful thinking and I believe that there are good reasons to accept my citations over your assertion: Tron, WarGames, and the TV series Whiz Kids were all released around the time you were born. These were the very first movies that seriously (if in a typically silly Hollywood way) addressed the issue of breaking into computers. I do not recall the words hack or hacker being used in the first two, although they might have been. However, at least five years prior to the release of those movies, I heard the word being used by the MIS manager of the company for which I worked to indicate someone attempting unauthorized access to our computer. So the word was clearly in use in a negative fashion by the computer industry several years before the possibility of Hollywood spreading that meaning.
Yep. And more accurately, the word “hacker” meant “programmer” or “a person knowledgeable about computer systems.” Thus, a programmer confronted with a software bug might say to his boss “I’ll hack some code to fix that, and have it for you by tomorrow.”
tomndebb: Note that the concept of “hacking code” predates the times when a “hostile invader” really became an issue. (Which is in the mid-1970s as you say.) Way back in the early days, computers were rarely connected remotely. Thus way back in the early 1960s, “hacker” could only mean “programmer”. I suspect the reason that “hacker” came to mean “hostile invader” is that “hacking code” usually meant crude programming. A “hack” was a “quick and dirty fix” to a bug. In theory programmers would like to write elegant, bug free code. However, when the system went down and the boss was screaming about it, a “code hack” would have to do.
I agree that the earliest origins of the word hacker would not have implied either malice or (necessarily) incompetence. However, the word’s meaning expanded to include those people who were gaining access to other people’s machines very soon after such communication became possible.
Regardless, my specific objection is to the rather silly notion that the word was corrupted in Hollywood and that hoi polloi were led astray by ignorant writers for entertainment media. The point is that regardless of how the word changed meanings, originally, by the time the popular entertainment was using hacker to mean tresspasser, the computer industry (outside the MIT ghetto) had already been using hacker to mean tresspasser for quite a few years.
There are several very different discussions being mixed together here.
One of them is when the word “hacker” started referring to people who did bad things. Some folks from the 70s recall the word “hacker” being pejorative? I was there, too. It was used more as a verb in my circles (e.g., “I hacked the driver so it recognizes the new device”) but came up as a noun now and then (e.g., “I can’t get this code to run on the new machine. Get one of the hackers to fix it”). I don’t recall it being used to refer to committing illegal or immoral acts until the 80s. They called me a hacker in the 70s and I certainly wasn’t committing electronic vandalism, stealing code, or breaking things.
The second issue is the objection most “old-school” hackers have to the current use of the word. Whether you think of it as doing good things or bad things, anyone in the 70s that was considered a hacker was good with computers. They were skilled. Nowadays, the media calls people hackers even if all they do is sweet-talk a secretary into giving them her password. There’s no computer skill whatsoever, and that’s something all of the “real” hackers object to, no matter what color hat they wear.
Finally, we have the discussion of breaking into other people’s computers, whether you call it hacking or not. Are tomndebb’s three folks from the other thread perhaps just saying that (a) people who break into computers are often called “hackers” today, and (b) breaking into computers was a bad thing in the 70s, therefore (c) “hackers” were bad in the 70s? Again, I remember the title “hacker” being a compliment back then.
White hat hackers don’t break into systems unless asked to by the owner of the system as part of a security check. Unauthorized entry into a computer is definitely a “black hat” thing to do.
“The belief that system hacking for fun and exploration is ethically acceptable as long as the hacker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.”
I began playing with computers in the late 1970s, and began working full time with them in 1984. During that time I’ve worked with dozens of different programmers in our shop, plus programmers in 50 different IT departments of various customers.
In all those years, in all those places, a hacker was just that, someone who hacked away (usually not very well) at a problem. A hacker, or hack programming, or hacking, was used to mean bad code, quick and dirty code, or temporary solution to something long before Hollywood got a hold of the phrase.
Since networking machines has become more common, the usage has expanded to include the unauthorized entry meaning.
In none of those shops was a hacker ever the good programmer, and a hack was never the elegant solution.
Now these were all IBM midrange/mainframe shops, and IBM shops definitely have their own culture. MIT obviously danced to the beat of a different chain printer, but they don’t have any magic control over a term in general usage.
Exactly, although I would say it can be dated even further back, like the early 80’s (at least that’s as far back as I know) in C64 and AppleII circles.
However, the term is still used today in the underground ‘scene’ of spreading /copyrighted/ software. “Cracker” is the person who breaks (“cracks”) the copy-protection of the software in question.
I’m not 100% sure of course, but I’m pretty certain it still does not signify the action of breaking into computer systems (as in, a “cracker” equals a malicious “hacker”).
