I'm not angry at Reuters for using the word hacker in the common way, since it is used by everyone that way, and they are not in the wrong for using a term with the definition the public uses. I'm angry that Reuters used Mark saying that he is a hacker to imply that he is associated with people who damaged Fortune 500 companies, especially when he (Mark) defines hacker to mean something completely different to the common, and they use that in the article. This entire article was a thinly veiled attempt to launch an ad hominem attack against Silicon Valley for opposing SOPA. The opposition of SOPA by Silicon Valley was even mentioned in the article.
I absolutely agree. This article is an awkward attempt by the author to take a subject which he is clearly opinionated about, and somehow tie the story-du-jour to it in order to draw attention. The two had nothing to do with each other, and the connections he attempted to make were nonsensical.
The article seems to be a better example of a potentially successful SEO strategy than of good journalism.
I actually think that mentioning opposition to SOPA was a good thing for our industry.
People should be reminded who the Silicon Valley companies are and their worth, otherwise you're losing the context: if people had to choose, what would be worse for the U.S. - losing Hollywood, or losing Silicon Valley?
MPAA keeps mentioning how many jobs and money are lost because of piracy. I'm not seeing enough of the opposite perspective: how many jobs and how much money is generated by companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple (yes, it's a little weird mentioning Apple considering that they haven't expressed opposition, but remember that the music and movies industries actually hate iTunes because it has been disruptive to their business and not in a good way).
Wait, what? He clearly quotes Mark saying, "In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done." Then he (the author) says, "That’s a spirited defense of a means of protest that has wreaked havoc on a litany of Fortune 500 companies over the last year." How is building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done, a means of protest, and how does that wreak havoc on Fortune 500 companies?
And I found this pretty insulting too, "Wall Street probably won’t mind all the idealism as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the stock price -- provided Anonymous isn't a featured speaker at the next shareholders meeting."
What happened to proper journalism, where the author did at least a little bit of background research before publishing an article?
"What happened to proper journalism, where the author did at least a little bit of background research before publishing an article?"
I doubt there are more than a few dozen real journalists left in the U.S. It seems like virtually all of the good longform articles I read are written by the same handful of people.
I think the author was not willing (or it did not strike him at all) that the meaning of word 'hacker' could be anything different than what he had in mind.
Once any one does that, the rest of the explanation can be used to support the definition already in mind. The "testing the boundaries..." could have left him with an impression that Zuckerberg is supporting "hacking" because it 'tests the boundaries of what can be done in general'.
Plus, this was written by a pro-Hollywood news site, so I'm assuming the author probably knew a little bit, but decided to attempt to twist Mark's words in a negative. Admittedly, he pretty much failed.
To us and other technologically-informed people, he failed. But to the general public who already associates the term "hacker" with a destructive force, the author probably further reinforced the negative connotations. People hear (read) what they want to hear, especially if it already agrees with their current understandings.
And it's a shame really. I wonder if some day, with the help of hackers, technology, and the resultant spread of information, the general public won't be so ignorant.
What happened to proper journalism, where the author did at least a little bit of background research before publishing an article?
It flourished for a few decades, from 1920 say to 1980, and they it declined, dying in the web era when people stopped reading newspapers, online media make just pennies and need to gather humongous eyeballs to view their ads even for that, and reader attention is lacking.
Just a note to everyone: this isn't "Reuters" writing this. If you notice the byline, "By Brent Lang at TheWrap", this is content syndicated from "The Wrap", which appears to be some Hollywood celeb gossip rag.
This story appears on Reuters.com with the Reuters layout and Reuters branding. Whether it is syndicated or not, it is Reuters-endorsed content that, in my opinion, should bear the same weight as the Associated Press. It's kind of sad that content of this quality has made it to their site.
I will definitely agree that Reuters missed Zuckerberg's point.
But this made me think of another point: Who are we to assign connotations to "hacker"? The only complaint we legitimately have is the corruption of language, if you want to make the argument that the definition of the word was originally 'tinkerer' and not 'exploiter of systematic weaknesses or loopholes' (or even more crudely, digital breaker-and-enterer).
If somebody is using a systematic weakness in IP to take down a website, that's within a class of thing, we can call it A. If somebody wants to take apart a device and re-purpose it, that's within another class of thing, we can call it B.
So you and I, more or less, consider A as a subset of B. Over here, we define "hacking" as B, while the media tends to define it as A. Meanwhile we get up on our high horse, saying that "real hacking" is actually B (which, again, encompasses A). But, apart from the corruption of the language, who cares? I think that our reaction to the media calling A both evil, and "hacking", puts us on the defensive, because we think of "hacking" as B, and as such, to us it sounds like the media is attacking tinkering as dangerous.
But that's nonsense, the media doesn't care about, or understand, tinkering. We could just as well change the name of B to "tinkering" and dodge any negative connotation. The only reason we stick to "hacking" for better or worse (I'm not saying we should run away), is that it's our legacy, in a way. So given all that, I think we're in the position of promoting a definition of "hacker" that is new to the media, rather than telling them that they're using the "wrong" definition.
In this article, the author clearly uses the hacker to mount an ad hominem attack on the entire technology industry, programmers etc. giving examples of Fortune 500 companies being damaged by individuals who illegitimately took down the sites of those companies. The author was basically saying "See, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook is a hacker. This is why Silicon Valley is wrong in supporting SOPA, since they are on the same side as people who damaged Fortune 500 companies."
In the general sense, I think it comes from the public's condescending view on people who are legitimate and call themselves hackers, like on hacker news. For example, if I'm on Hacker News on my phone on the way to school, and one of peers sees me on there, he gives me a weird look and assumes it's the illegitimate form of "hacker". Even my dad was worried when he saw me on Hacker News, saying "Stay away from there." Obviously he thought it was community for the illegitimate form of hacking. Even after I explained the real meaning to him, he was still quite suspicious.
> But this made me think of another point: Who are we to assign connotations to "hacker"?
Hackers, and thus by definition the people with the most reasonable claim to define the term, having done so originally.
I do think that at this point attempting to stop the mainstream usage of "hacker" to mean "person who breaks security" amounts to tilting at windmills. However, an article specifically quoting someone who used the term with its original meaning ought to know better, and either carefully distinguish or choose an alternate term. I'd suggest that they almost certainly did know better, but intentionally exploited the ambiguity to push their agenda (namely, the pro-SOPA agenda).
That said, someone with as much PR experience as Mark Zuckerberg ought to have known better than to use the term in the first place. Quoting Linus: 'In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.'
Specifically, if you're going to use the word "hacker" in a context which mentions "testing the boundaries" shortly after widely-publicised boundary-breaching "hack attacks", people are going to connect the dots in their mind. Especially if their perception of you as an individual is largely based on a film portraying you as a wayward and unscrupulous genius with a penchant for pissing people off.
It's even more likely to get your position caricatured than starting a sentence with "As a classical liberal..."
> Hackers, and thus by definition the people with the most reasonable claim to define the term, having done so originally.
and in the first half of the 20th century the word 'gay' meant 'happy'. shall we insist that's still the proper meaning of the word because that's how it was defined originally, by people with the most reasonable claim to define the term at the time?
You're forgetting that non of this is accidental. It is the media that has deliberately redefined the word "hacker" to equal criminal.
They know what it means, and there is no clearer example than this article. Zuckerberg explains what it means in no unclear terms, and still the author chooses to bury it under unfounded accusations.
We use another word, they will just do the same thing. We can promote all we like, and they will ignore it.
Anyway, who cares. We will still be here long after "the media" is gone and these hacks are either unemployed or doing PR for some corporation or politician. This type of "journalism" is dying anyway.
It's not that they've deliberately redefined the word, but they've misunderstood its context because they didn't research widely enough -- and this is because hacking is not generally sensational.
So, if I may offer a pseudo-history:
A bunch of people break into a bunch of sites. Real Journalists discover it, and investigate. And I think they're sincere enough in their investigation.
Some of the Real Journalists discover that there is a distinction in the culture between the "script-kiddies" and the "hackers". This is the familiar distinction: the hackers make the tools. "Hacker" versus "Software Engineer" is I suppose like "amateur" versus "professional"; hackers are doing it for the love of programming -- but this distinction is lost in this context where the professionals are agents and spies. Still, the distinction of "hacker" is important because the "script-kiddies" have no idea how to develop the tools, but merely use them to break into systems. And in observing the distinction, the journalists discover that the hackers are much more important, in the sense that people pay them some sort of homage and respect.
When the Real Journalists bring this description back to the Media, of course they bring back this sense of respect for the Hackers. But the Media has a problem: we don't really have a word for people who penetrate security measures. "Crackers" are things you eat; "penetration testers" are probably machines at a dildo factory.
What we'd really like is to use Dutch grammar. In Dutch, someone who "finds out" things becomes an "outfinder." These people "break in" to things; they should be "inbreakers". We have it in some words like "withhold" -- to hold with -- but it's not a general part of our language.
Alas, English is not Dutch and the inbreakers weren't called inbreakers. Instead, just as the Christians are named around the title of their savior, "Christ", so the inbreakers are named around the title of their most-respected "Hacker".
Was it a deliberate choice? In one sense yes, in another sense no. There are impersonal forces at work which conspired to fix "hacker" in the mind of the Media as a synonym for "inbreaker" -- but it is a deliberate choice for the Real Journalists to not run stories about the other hackers out there, and to not coin a new word that could be useful for the discussion.
It's always seemed to me that "hacker" is the only term that geeks can get defensive about without the anti-prescriptivist police coming in to ruin the party.
Yes the old MIT use of hacker has been superseded and arguing about it is like retired colonels writing to the Times complaining about the changed use of "the fine old english word Gay".
Not sure I saw Mark Z as either sort of hacker a DLF who you would need to check yor rings after shaking hands with but a hacker not real.
I actually don't think too many engineers are 'hackers'.
I certainly don't consider myself much of a hacker, and I don't think many here are either.
We are programmers. We build stuff. We need to know everything there is to know about security risks, but most of us stopped coding windows trojans and worms after high school.
I don't think many of us know (or care) how to write keygens and cracks for games, or invisibly extract cash from a bank via social engineering.
That's the definition I subscribe to. Hackers are highly specialized in computer security, whether they're white-hat or black-hat.
So Reuters is not using the wrong definition. It just feels like school kids giving new meanings to words, then laughing at their 'lame' parents who don't understand.
"Tinkering" sounds kind of lame, but it is what it is.
EDIT: Oh yeah, I'm posting on Hacker News! The new meaning is fine, but don't act like other people are stupid for not getting it.
To be clear, I don't know that it's a new meaning. Stallman always says that the "tinkerer" is the original meaning, and that the "tinkerer with security holes" subset became the popular definition later.
I think it might be better to say that in the days when the meaning of the word "hacker" was still entirely up in the air, getting at the insides of things (especially infrastructural things) was often associated with being "one of the bad guys."
And the "thing" (for lack of a better word) about computing (and also to some extension all sorts of other fields) that interested the relevant loosely-defined subculture consisted, while certainly not entirely, at least substantially of the insides of things. So you ended up dealing with security even if that wasn't your primary interest.
That's about as clearly as I can put it, anyway. Please do note that I'm not saying it's a good thing.
You've got your history backwards. The "tinkering" meaning is the original, the "security expert" meaning is the new one, and we're all clinging to/trying to bring back the old one.
That's not true. I'm all in favour of our beloved eponymous usage, but the earliest known occurrence of "hacker" did have to do with breaking into forbidden systems.
What? We all know that book was published in 1984. 20 years later doesn't count as an "earlier confirmed source".
What's proven is that by 1963, people were writing "hacker" to mean "security breaker". To insist this is a perversion is rather silly when the "perversion" occurs so early and is in fact the earliest citation.
It seems likely the two usages are coeval. The benign one is how hackers saw themselves and the malicious one is how they were perceived by authorities.
Every programmer I know I'd call a hacker or a prankster, and a tinkerer. The kind of person laughing at the WAT video from recent past, or the kind of someone who would program his talking bathroom scale to read your weight in a foreign language. Hackers make things, and are still changing the world, and having a great time doing it too.
So, just on the off chance Mark Zuckerberg ever has any doubts about writing that letter, or takes any ribbings for it: yeah, it was the right thing to do.
The role of news agencies like Reuters is to produce quality news on matters that smaller papers might not have the resources to report themselves... like TheWrap just exemplified.
I found it funny that the in-text "also read this" spam was about Megaupload. Might be something in my adblock, but it didn't show up any different than the article text and wasn't a link.
The key error the author makes is that he fails to Notice His Confusion. When something confuses you, you have to stop and figure out why you're wrong. You can't be confused and right at the same time. If you are confused, then something you believe is false.
So when a man known to be highly intelligent and very successful makes a statement which you find "bizarre", you don't write an article "Zuckerberg makes baffling statement", you think "Why am I baffled? Clearly I'm missing something about what's going on here", and you do more research. The concept 'I am confused' is not newsworthy.
4:28MEZ “The word ‘hacker’ has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers,” Zuckerberg wrote.
YEP!
4:28MEZ “In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. [...]"
Yeah, kinda...
4:28MEZ That’s a spirited defense of a means of protest that has wrecked havoc on a litany of Fortune 500 companies over the last year.
Seriously though, when I first found HN I was wondering what I had stumbled in to. A few days later I was hooked. Now over a year later, when I read the term hacker about someone doing something illegal I react weirdly to it.
Most people still don't know what silicon valley and HN mean when they say hacker yet.
This wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't included the part about Zuck actually explaining what he meant by the "hacker way". It's like they breezed right over it and started making references to Anonymous as if that has anything to do with what he was talking about.
I wrote a corrections request to both Reuters and The Wrap. Little good it will do, I'm sure, but it offends me to see a journalist spend so little effort trying to be correct. How absurd to use quotes which actually indicate the opposite of your conclusion? It's the equivalent of quoting "Many companies in our industry treat their employees poorly, but we're different.", and concluding "Mr. X and his company take advantage of the poor standards of the industry to mistreat their employees".
In all fairness, the word gets used in many ways. Further down the HN front page there's a story "VeriSign Hit by Hackers."
They don't mean that VeriSign was hit by people who built cool software over the weekend.
Reuters is a major news organization, and they should know the definition as Zuckerberg is using it... especially since he explains it in the quote. But they aren't making up a new definition out of thin air.
I note that that story also comes from Reuters. However, it is clear that the definition they are using is an established one. You can tell because our response when the word "hacker" is used that way is "You shouldn't use the word 'hacker' that way. Our definition is older", as opposed to "That's a bizarre and wrong usage of the word 'hacker'".
Just another pointless post upvoted because it has the word 'hacker' in it.
You don't have to give attention to every lame story that "doesn't get it." Even if this was a story by Reuters, which it is not, it still wouldn't matter. Welcome to 20 years ago when the media stopped giving a shit about giving hackers a fair shake.
I was going to leave a comment, but the comments are closed on that article. Reuters allows comments for a "limited period after publication" but the article has only been there for less than 3 hours. Smells a little fishy to me, maybe they were called out for their nonsense?
Fishy but not unexpected. Online publications always switch off comments when they see a huge traffic bump and realize they have made fools of themselves and are being told as much in the comments.
For example, a few weeks ago the NYTimes Public Editor made a blog post about whether it should be their policy to note in articles when public figures are obviously lying in their remarks. (They're worried about seeming like the liberal media and they think they should "fairly balance" truth and fiction on issues like climate change or what percentage of planned parenthood's money is spent on abortions.) This resulted in immediate outrage from the commenters and vicious comments. Not profanity -- articulate rebuttals that just made the NYTimes look like idiots. Comments switched off. Later they attempted to walk it back, poorly. Same articulate rebuttals, NYTimes look like idiots again. Comments switched off even faster. Not even sure why they enabled them on the second post to begin with.
> ... provided Anonymous isn't a featured speaker at the next shareholders meeting.
Not content with mere ignorance about what "hacking" is and conflating it with cracking and script kiddies, the author ices the article by demonstrating ignorance about cracking and script kiddies as well.
I bet Brent Lang from Reuters will really fall off his chair when he realizes his article has been trending second on -- gasp -- Hacker News! You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy...
Obviously the author of this article has a bone to pick with the technology industry as a result of SOPA being shut down for now, but if we divorce ourselves from our knowledge of tech lingo, this doesn't read as a "thinly veiled attempt to launch an ad hominem attack against Silicon Valley." The author clearly is unfamiliar with the way we use the term "hacker" or even that it has another definition and, therefore, when Zuckerberg says that the term "has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers," he doesn't realize Zuckerberg is trying to say that the term has an entirely different meaning from breaking into computers. He clearly thinks Zuckerberg is saying that hackers (which he reads as "people who break into computers") are unfairly portrayed as people who break into computers to do bad, when in reality they sometimes break into computers for constructive reasons. He doesn't realize Zuckerberg is literally saying that the media mistakenly interprets "hackers" as "people who break into computers, period." Zuckerberg's use of "connotation" instead of "denotation" makes it sound like he's defending cracking philosophically as opposed to saying that hacking has a totally different meaning to people in the tech industry.
I've reprinted his quote of Zuckerberg with parenthetical glosses showing how the author and anyone not innoculated by knowledge of hacker culture would probably interpret it.
"In reality, hacking (breaking into computers) just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it (breaking into computers) can be used for good (to fight what you perceive as unjustice) or bad (personal gain or schadenfreude), but the vast majority of hackers I've met tend to be idealistic people (hippies who hate corporations) who want to have a positive impact on the world (by getting rid of capitalism)."
With that reading, I think most of us too would be disappointed or even furious with Zuckerberg. I'm glad that wealth and fame haven't compromized Zuckerberg's view of himself as a hacker in our sense of the word, but I think he did a really bad job explaining to the media that the word is used completely differently by techies. That is unfortunate since he is one of the few people with enough influence to get the public to understand and adopt our usage of the word.
This was an excellent article, when looked at through the lens of making ad revenue, which is the only lens through which this drivel could flourish. Simply put, online content providers (I refuse to call this crap "news") need eyeballs, and writing crap like this causes eyeballs to appear.
Fortunately, about 50% of the eyeballs are protected by adblockers, but still a great day at the office, for which I suspect he will get much kudos, and be asked to write similar crap again.
Hacktivism is still a fairly big part of "the hacker way", and so it should be. I think the concept of wreaking havoc on fortune 500 companies is actually a fair representation of the hacker spirit, whether it is done by damaging their websites, or creating small startups to compete against them. I prefer the latter, but it is perfectly ok to associate the former as part of the same hacker ideal.
> I think the concept of wreaking havoc on fortune 500 companies is actually a fair representation of the hacker spirit, whether it is done by damaging their websites, or creating small startups to compete against them. I prefer the latter, but it is perfectly ok to associate the former as part of the same hacker ideal.
While that may be your opinion -- and I don't necessarily disagree with it -- the point remains that the author took Zuckerberg's comments about hackers to mean that he considered himself what we know as a "black hat" hacker, which he clearly did not.
Once societal mainstream embraces -- and misuses -- a word that a subset of society previously held dearly, it's time for that subset to let the word go, regardless of how much they romanticized or embraced it.
I agree, but it would sure be nice if people worried more about what they do than what they're called. It's just a word that people get attached to. When I talk to my friends/family about what I do, I certainly don't call myself a "hacker", nor would I even if they all understood the true meaning of the word. The fact that people are so irrationally passionate about the word, to me, says a lot more about them than the people who use it the wrong way.
It's a concept, not just a word and there's no other word for the concept. Sure, if everyone were to agree to start using the word "wizfoo" instead of "hacker" for the concept, maybe that would help avoid the confusion that occurs due to some people confounding different definitions for the word. On the other hand, the English language is filled to the brim with words that have multiple (and sometimes opposite) definitions, so I see no reason why the world can't deal with that fact here. If there's blame to be placed here, it is certainly the fault of the journalists who refuse to acknowledge the distinction, as it is their job to be masters of words, and to understand these sorts of issues.
Hey, if I ever find any reporter at Bloomberg that screws up like this I will personally walk over and fix the situation. If you wanted the same news without the personal editorial, this was our take:
My brother thinks that hackers are all blackhats, and isnt aware of the terms black hat or white hat, lol hes fucking retarded, plus he thinks he knows how to use a computer yet tcip completely slipped out of his vocabulary
Good find, thanks. I wouldn't say Reuters is 'clueless' about the meaning and they quoted Zuck several times laying out exactly what it means to him. Their point really was that the word hacker has different connotations to most people and this was an odd time for him to attempt to sway public opinion on the definition of the word. I agree with them, it was an odd time. That doesn't make it bad, maybe it was brilliant - but it was a strange thing to see in an IPO filing (again strange != bad).
