FW:FW:FW:FW:RE:RE<p>In all seriousness, however, this is something the geek/hacker community has been harping on for decades, and something that nobody else gives a rat's ass about. The MSM will continue to call people who use LOIC or exploit password reset features "hackers", because 99.9% of their audience won't know the difference.<p>If they ask you directly, correct them. Otherwise, just let them do their thing. There's absolutely nothing to gain by insisting that ignorant people use the correct terminology.
I feel that actual "hackers" need to realize that a new name is necessary if they want to disassociate themselves from this depiction. It's like the "begs the question" people (<a href="http://begthequestion.info/" rel="nofollow">http://begthequestion.info/</a>) -- it's simply unfeasible to change such a commonly (if unintentionally) misused interpretation.<p>Edit: Feel free to downvote me, but please let me know why: I'm still new here, and I was trying to be constructive.
This article seems to be more concerned about "hacker" vs "script kiddie" than "hacker" vs "cracker" which most comments here seem to be focused on.<p>But on that topic I'm actually less pessimistic about the use of "Hacker" than I used to be. Self-described hackers are I think more prominent and with movements like hackerspaces which attract crafty & creative types there's leakage into the non-technical social groups as well.<p>Even a company like Facebook uses the term <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990014" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990014</a> even if it leads to misunderstanding.
In the "I can't say what it is, but I can point to one" sense, hackers to me are the ones who show you lines of code they've written for some app, as if to say "This is the magic bit. Look what I've got this language to do!"<p>They're the bright-eyed people who show you how they managed to make a program do something that nobody else with access to the same program can do. They come from the same school as people who build Antikythera Mechanism emulators and Babbage Difference Engines out of Lego.<p>That's a hacker, to me: someone who can make something do cool things. If it makes them money as well, that's just the icing on a very big cake.
The word hacker <i>does</i> mean "people who break into computers" because that is what the vast majority of the people who use the word mean when they say it.<p>It has <i>two</i> archaic uses - the older one is well known to this community and the second one, also falling by the way side, is someone who has a good understanding of computer security and uses it to break into computers.<p>This boat has sailed. And what is more it sailed a long time ago.
I get so sick and tired of people assuming that hacker == cracker or script kiddie.<p>But I don't see much of a solution, except saying "good hacker" and "bad hacker". Non-hackers just don't get it.