"No. Hackers aren't, contrary to media reporting, the people who break into computers. Those are crackers."
Calling hackers crackers when they really do mean 'hackers' needs to be curbed (or maybe not, language evolves). Crackers break open and reverse engineer software. They are not the security system hackers that most people definitely mean to refer to when they use the word. When the warez scene was huge there was a very clear understanding of what the terms meant and you would have never seen a group misusing the term. Maybe this is occurring because people want to be able to apply the latest popular meaning of 'hacker' to themselves but also want to avoid possible negative connotations.
Or perhaps I have everything reversed and it is the old warez scene that turned 'cracker' on its head and used it for their own purposes. (My Carl Sagan-esque reflection on both possibilities.)
Indeed. And this complicated little distinction is complicated even further by the fact that "cracker" happens to be a derogatory term for poor white people in the American South. Explaining to people that they're using the wrong word, and the right word they ought to be using is a word they always thought was a semi-offensive sort of ethnic slur, is almost impossible, and probably not worth the effort.
Personally, I think we've reached the point where computers are more demystified, and we can talk in neutral terms with people about these things. To me, being a hacker means taking things apart and learning how they work; that's a morally neutral act. You can take things apart and learn how they work in order to steal money, or in order to build a great system for helping deliver donated meals to the homeless, or in order to fix something that's broken.
Forgive me for taking this in a tangential direction, but I wish that with language we also transmitted unique "concept IDs" along with each word or phrase that would help to disambiguate what we mean. Like when you see a single word linked in a sentence and you mouse over it to see the URL (or in the case of Wikipedia, the article/"concept" it links to). It would be a feeling like that.
Isn't reverse engineering what hackers are largely about? Taking things apart and figuring out how they work, or does reverse engineering have a more specific definition?
RE to me is not, and has never been, a bad noun/verb though I often see others frowning upon it.
It depends on which 'hacker' you mean. The 'Hacker News' hacker or 'the movie Hackers' hacker? Though I bet you could shoe-horn reverse engineering into both without any trouble. That's a big part of the problem. People pick which part of the 'hacker' label they want to apply to themselves while discarding the undesirable parts. The end result is several related terms and multiple definitions, often overlapping or contradicting.
Calling hackers crackers when they really do mean 'hackers' needs to be curbed (or maybe not, language evolves). Crackers break open and reverse engineer software. They are not the security system hackers that most people definitely mean to refer to when they use the word. When the warez scene was huge there was a very clear understanding of what the terms meant and you would have never seen a group misusing the term. Maybe this is occurring because people want to be able to apply the latest popular meaning of 'hacker' to themselves but also want to avoid possible negative connotations.
Or perhaps I have everything reversed and it is the old warez scene that turned 'cracker' on its head and used it for their own purposes. (My Carl Sagan-esque reflection on both possibilities.)