I've been coding since the 80s and as far back as I can remember hacking has always meant breaching security, it wasn't until the 90s that I started hearing people trying to 'reclaim' the use.
Clearly some tech communities were using it earlier amongst themselves, but language evolves, expecting the world to use another term is just arrogant.
I have here a copy of the first edition of The Hacker's Dictionary, published in 1983 (same year as the newspaper article cited).
Under the definition for "hacker", it lists multiple possibilities, including #7:
A malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover information by poking around. For example, a "password hacker" is one who tries, possibly by deceptive or illegal means, to discover other people's computer passwords. A "network hacker" is one who tries to learn about the computer network (possibly because he wants to improve it or possibly because he wants to interfere -- one can tell the difference only by context and tone of voice).
I don't see anything indicating that this was considered a wrong or invalid definition at the time, just not a primary one.
The current incarnation of The Hacker's Dictionary, perhaps now better known as the Jargon File, seems fairly direct about the distinction between hacking and security breaching.
No offense to Stallman, but isn't it the definition of anti-social to be at a dinner table and proceed to play with everyone else's utensils disregarding their desire to use them for, you know, eating?
The essay defined hacker in a clear and focused manner. Clearly it's broader than the definition than you would choose, but I suspect it might also exclude things you might define as hacking.
My impression is that people expect hacking to require the use of technology, but that doesn't necessarily mean what we would expect it to. A chopstick is after all a technological tool.
We might restrict it to electricity, but then that might preclude mechanical devices, so perhaps we allow machinery in general, but then a pair of chopsticks might be a sort of simple machine...
Only if adding salt was somehow forbidden, would push the boundaries of known human experience, or playfully exciting in some way. I do think the Chefs on Planet Green's Future Food are hackers in their own way: http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tv/future-food/meet-chefs.h... - a while ago I saw them cook food with liquid nitrogen and preparing numerous dishes using nothing but road-side weeds spiked with miracle fruit.
No, he is using it in exactly the sense the article goes to great lengths to illustrate: approaching any situation by thinking outside of usual conventions. As far as clothing goes, you can't argue Lady GaGa doesn't think outside of the box. Some of the items she has turned into clothing probably took a lot more creativity than finding a way to use three chopsticks in one hand.
rms' definition of hacking doesn't necessarily involve technology. That was the whole point of the chopsticks story.
> As far as clothing goes, you can't argue Lady GaGa doesn't think outside of the box.
Her outfits draw heavily on the prior art of performers like Grace Jones, David Bowie and Madonna. There's a very extensive history of music performers wearing crazy outfits. Some further examples are Elton John, Jayne County, Kiss, Gwar, Divine.
True, but there is no denying the conventionality of her actual music; she's a product of the same old awful music industry machine, producing meaningless trash, whether or not she 'hacks' weird outfits which get her attention.
There is a sense that RMS has dropped that one in to seem more 'down with the kids' than he really is, which doesn't speak of pride as a hacker...
He said "Lady Gaga's approach to clothing seems like hacking to me.". There no mention about music and whether it's conventional or not is irrelevant. I can eat food conventionally (without using six chopsticks) and still be a hacker.
Actually, fair enough - I suppose I feel there is an an ethical aspect to hacking - you do it because you love it, not for any other compromised reason, I like to think it's better than that. I get the impression the music is just a means to an end, as it seems so generic + soulless to me (of course that's imho), however with regard to her fashion - that is probably just as sincere as it appears.
Apologies - allowing my prejudices to affect my judgement.
I don't know to what extent some of the stuff is preprogrammed (presumably the loop lengths are), but it really seems like all the sounds were made during this one recording.
But it's possible to appreciate the hacker aspect and skill. It is easy to dismiss her music as silly, unoriginal or poor because we don't like it, but that can be unfair :)
Well... it's possible to notice it's silly and unoriginal even if you do like it, and saying it's poor seems like another way of saying that one doesn't like it.
If her goal is to get famous and have hit songs though, I suppose we do have to grant that she accomplishes this expertly. It might be nice if she had loftier goals, like creating something with actual integrity, but I have to admit she's at least effective.
Hmm, well my point was more that her music is technically very good. From a sort of academic perspective the music is very clever and carefully designed. It hacks for popular listening.
Although I realise such a point of view is probably the by-product of having a brother who's finishing up a music degree and so I get bored to death with lectures about this stuff :)
No. Drummond and Cauty hacked the popular music industry in the late 80s, then literally wrote the book on how to do it.
Compared to them Gaga is a script kiddie.
Take Gaga's attitude and bluster away and you have Dale Bozzio. Interesting -- her stuff was more listenable and she looked cuter in those ridiculous outfits.
Why do these people always try to convince the world, that their chosen word has another meaning then everybody knows. Seriously, is that just too hard or asks for too much playfulness?
Btw to describe a person in German, who is breaking computer based security systems, you call him a "Hacker".
> Why do these people always try to convince the world, that their chosen word has another meaning then everybody knows.
Historically, the hackers at MIT chose the term "hacker" to simply describe themselves and other people with a similar attitude. Later, the mass media misused this term to describe solely criminal actors, which then became the mainstream understanding of the term.
So the mass media, not the hackers, were using the term with another meaning than everybody else (at that time).
> Seriously, is that just too hard or asks for too much playfulness?
I'd put it the other way around: Is is just too hard for the mass media or asks for too much playfulness to respect a (minority) group's self-chosen name?
> Btw to describe a person in German, who is breaking computer based security systems, you call him a "Hacker".
Small correction: This is true for the greater part of the German population. However, within groups like the CCC or FSFE, the term "Hacker" has a much broader meaning, quite similar to what RMS describes.
In other words: Even in Germany, the people who are usually called "Hacker" use themselves the term in a broader sense. I think this is simply an international phenomena.
My point is this: Hackers are still great hackers, if they call themself differently. And then they would spend considerably more time solving "hard" problems "playful" instead of discussing about words who actually don't matter at all.
Mass media calls people whatever makes the most money for them. They are happy with that. And they have won the masses in this case. So hey, let's go on to the next fight.
"Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think."
I agree with this sentiment. I've been hearing the 'hacker vs cracker' argument for years and it gets old. Move on. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that the media has defined or changed the meaning of words in our language. Languages change over time. Stop trying to fight the current. If you prefer one definition over another, cool, but your time and energy is better spent fulfilling its definition rather than proselytizing to strangers on the Internet over the semantics of a word.
"You can help correct the misunderstanding simply by making a distinction between security breaking and hacking—by using the term "cracking" for security breaking. The people who do it are "crackers". Some of them may also be hackers, just as some of them may be chess players or golfers; most of them are not."
A very bad player. Somewhat synonymous with "duffer" in that they both apply to poor players. But "duffer" is sometimes used to denote weaker players in general, while "hacker" is often applied to a single golfer as an insult. Hacker is a little bit stronger than duffer, in other words.
Is it hacking to do something because you want to call it a hack? Or proclaim that you're hacking? This sort of practice has sort of peeved me a little. I may not be a hacker in the proper sense, and perhaps that's my problem, but when someone thinks to themselves "I wonder if I can make a hack out of this" in regards to chopsticks, it seems like less of a hack than "I wonder if I can use all 6 at once!"
The distinction, in my mind, is "intent to hack" vs "intent to do/achieve/circumvent".
It was such a miniscule part of what he said, but that part sincerely rubbed me the wrong way :/
"I did not know any way to do that, so I realized that if I could come up with a way, it would be a hack. I started thinking. After a few seconds I had an idea." I'm referring to this part, at the very beginning. "I realized that if I could do this, it'd be a hack". I don't know, it just seemed like he was trying to do something because it would therefore be called a hack. That's how I perceived what he said. This is all personal, and that sort of thing rubbed me the wrong way, as though he was trying to do something just to prove he was a hacker, not wanting to do something to see if he could and that happening to be a hack. It's a subtle distinction, but seems to result in very different things.
And yes, I know this is Richard Stallman we're talking about. There is no question of his hacker-ness.
Clearly some tech communities were using it earlier amongst themselves, but language evolves, expecting the world to use another term is just arrogant.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=-VsrAAAAIBAJ&sjid=4...