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.
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.