No, that's not hacking

My god, people are ignorant sometimes.
In my school, we have really crappy Dells (with Pentium 4s!) as our main machines. Oftentimes, these get infected with assloads of malware and become unusable, so I usually bring a flash drive with Ubuntu installed on it to use in place of Windows. That’s when the issues start.

Person: What’s that?
Me: It’s Ubuntu. It’s just another opera-
Person: Are you hacking?
Me: No, I’m-
Person 2: Hacking? Where?
Person 3: Can you hack my Xbox?
Me: :smack:

I’m really fking tired of this. I’m not hacking, I’m just using a god damn console. Apparently, using a CLI means that you are a “hacker” and that you are being a criminal. Personally, I’m going to blame the media for this one, because no one has any motherfking clue what a “hacker” is. Like these:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/03/holder-defends-alleged-hackers-prosecution-158655.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/02/19/fascinating-video-tracks-a-real-chinese-hacker-in-action/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57570811-93/hacker-says-security-flaw-let-him-access-any-facebook-profile/
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/08/hacker-steals-12000-worth-of-bitcoins-in-brazen-dns-based-attack/

These asshats aren’t hackers, there either crackers (criminal dealing with exploits in software) or just a bunch of script kiddies (people who “hack” by running other’s scripts without knowledge of what they do). Yes, I’m a hacker. I build lots of small electronics projects. I code. I love to open things, modify them, and make them better. What I am not is a criminal.

I’d not say anything like this in front of any girl (or guy!) you are trying to impress.

No, no. “Hacking” is when you post something on someone’s Facebook because they forgot to log out.

That’s not when the issues start.

Ubuntu is for n00bz. Can’t you hack on something l33t and useless like Plan 9?

No, no- “hacking” is what you do with an axe when the machine crosses you for the last time.

I guarantee you, you do that once or twice, and they’ll never question you again.

When I was in high school they each person had a login for the school network. Once logged in, you had a ‘local’ drive. It was on the school network somewhere, but no matter where you were signed in, calling h:\ would provide you access to the files you put there.

At some point, one by one, the VP called a ton of students down to his office. He had done a sweep of all the student’s drives and if he found a file in the *.exe format he deleted it and you got a slap on the wrist. According to him (by way of a comp sci teacher), any exe file was a game and you can’t have games on the system, so he deleted it.

Now, this was around 1996 or so and, honestly, 95% of the exe files that students loaded on to the network were actually games. They did that so they could play games while in computer class or study hall.* The problem was that for me, and a handful of others, we were in upper level comp sci classes that used compilers. That is, we would write the code and then turn it into an exe file to run it. Luckily most of us still had the source code on the network drive so it was easy enough to get it back. I explained that to him and he apologized and said he would talk to the comp sci teacher to clear it up.

I was lucky I had that excuse when he deleted some of my games (but I did lose some of my comp sci work as well).

I don’t know what he did after that though. I mean, he could have run all the exe files to see what they were. Most comp sci exe programs would be pretty boring. Oooh, look a program that sorts numbers or draws a picture. Of course, some of the more advanced students wrote pretty well polished games that could easily have been mistaken for a ‘real’ game.

Well it’s understandable really. Lunix is a popular hacker operating system, designed as such by the Soviet computer hacker Linyos Torovoltos. The OP is clearly a disturbed individual: concerned parents are directed to this citation for further advice: Top 10 Signs Your Son is a Hacker.

Wow, the first page of comments on that article has a dumb-to-clever ratio beyond the range of my instruments. I dare not probe further.

That top10 list made my head hurt even though I stopped reading anything beyond the headers at the end of the first sentence. goes off in search of ibuprophen

I thought that was “fraping”?

Now that article is trollerific!

From the article:

Dude, he was wanking himself into a hairy-palmed semi-blind stump. Leave the kid alone.

Edit: Oh god that’s a parody, isn’t it?

Yeah, I’ll agree.

Word. Preach it. I get tired of hearing the word hacker used for anything even remotely related to computers.

A hack at its most basic level is a way to use something to do something that it wasn’t normally meant to do. I once read a quote from Captain Crunch (although I can’t seem to find it now) where he said ‘It would be a great hack if I could somehow use that lamp to get me a beer.’

This has to be fake. It just keeps getting sillier as it goes on.

Cmon, there’s no way this is meant to be serious. Right? Please? Someone say it aint so…

IIRC one of the first uses of the term “hack” actually referred to what we’d term “cracking” today. Rather than sophisticated knowledge of access levels and exploits and whatnot, it was mostly trial and error. Other hackers didn’t even write a line of code, just relied on social engineering. I think the term encompasses quite a lot.

I’ve seen The Net. It’s not hacking unless you’re doing it to a mainframe.

…or the Gibson.

I was originally bothered by these uses of the term hack, but is become ubiquitous to the point that it’s just not worth fighting anymore. Yeah, to someone knowledgable in the field, it’s worth having different terms, but to your average user who left their facebook open or accidentally gave away their email password or whatever, why does it matter? Even in those cases, it’s usually pretty clear what happened. “My WoW account was hacked!” Well, actually, it was probably phished or cracked, but all they’re really saying is someone gained access to it without their consent. Unless we’re actually talking about account security, that amount of specificity doesn’t really matter.

So, yeah, if you’re talking to other knowledgable people, it’s reasonable to use the more precise language. Otherwise, I think that battle over and it’s not worth fighting anymore.

As for being thought a hacker for using CLI. I’ve never gotten that, but then again I’m a computer scientist, so I’m very seldom around people who aren’t familiar with it, and I’ve never gotten that.