On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 at 06:05:00AM +1000, James A. Donald wrote:
the original meaning [of hacking] was simply bad stuff done by computer -
Not that its relevant to the Aaron discussion, but I think you got that etymology sequence wrong, the original meaning of hacker was more like doing clever but non-malicious things with computers, aka squeezing interesting things out of them that they were not intended or expected to do. And/or relatedly people were less uptight about computer access as most of them were in open collaborative university settings so using computers was less of a locked up possessive mind set. Those were the days before CFAA and Weev getting his door kicked in by a swat team for stumbling upon a broken network API. Hacker in the sense of cracker was a later and much hated co-option and perversion of the term. I expect that's what Rysiek was reacting to partly. Seems like the original hackers lost that etymology battle however long ago. Adam