Noel Schutt » crack

More on the definition of ‘hack’

Noel — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:39:46 +0000

To go along with yesterday’s post, here are two stories that were shared with me:

First, Ben Popper of Betabeat realized that he had been using the term hack incorrectly, and mostly fixed his usage in his article “Hacked to Death: A Brief History of Tech’s Most Two-Sided Term”.

Second, David Goldman of CNN demonstrates the common incorrect usage in his article “The cyber Mafia has already hacked you”. Showing their ignorance, CNN even includes the incorrect usage in the headline.

As I have been telling people for years, the proper usage of the word hack is an important shibboleth separating those with competence in computers and technology from posers. Remember, hacking is not the same as cracking, phreaking, or any of their script kiddie relatives.

The News of the World Scandal

Noel — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:46:25 +0000

I can’t take it anymore! Nearly every time I have listened to or read the news few weeks I have heard the term “hacking” abused, usually in reference to News of the World. The constant references to “The News of the World phone hacking scandal“ show that these reporters are hopelessly clueless in technical matters, and should not report on anything technology related until they do some research. According to the reports, all that was involved was voicemail PIN guessing and a little social engineering, neither of which fit under the definition of hacking. Guessing default passwords is easy, and in no way can be considered hacking, though it can be considered cracking. Since the PINs were guessed to gain access to voicemail, it could fit under a loose definition of phreaking, but not hacking. The other part of gaining access to the PINs involved talking to the phone companies. This is called social engineering, though apparently those involved called it “blagging”. This is also not a form of hacking.

Since no hacking was involved in the scandal, it would be more proper to call it “The News of the World voicemail scandal”, or “The latest News Corp scandal”. Since this hasn’t been common, it is clear that these are hack reporters and their stories should be treated with greater than usual skepticism. This is unfortunate, since these reports came from usually reliable sources such as The New York Times, ProPublica, McClatchy, and NPR. Heck, on NPR there have even been a number of non-Murdoch related stories where hack has been abused. Remember, misusing the word hack is one of the signs that someone doesn’t have basic competence in technology. This is also a good time to mention Steven Levy’s book Hackers. If you don’t understand the definition of hack, you should read this book.

BibTex:

@book{levy,
  title={Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution},
  author={Steven Levy},
  isbn={9780385312103},
  url={http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/hackers},
  year={1984},
}

While I’m at it, here’s an article posted today that uses hacking correctly.

University server “hacked”

Noel — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:14:56 +0000

I just received an email from the university saying that the server for faculty and student webpages has been compromised. The message goes on to say it was due to a Microsoft bug and that “pages were defaced, indicating they were hacked.” This one email shows two serious problems. The first is that University Computing Services doesn’t even know enough to say the server was “vandalized by a cracker.” Instead, they misuse the word hacker. It is one thing when an average person makes this mistake, but it is a sign of incompetence when it comes from an IT department. The second problem is that they are using a gaming operating system on a server, instead of a proper server OS. But hey, what do you expect from a university that wastes money Blackboard (which makes even MS look good), instead of using one of the many superior open source alternatives. There is good news though. Yesterday I learned that my undergrad university’s IT department is replacing some of their Windows servers with Unix. (The CSE department has always had Unix/Linux servers.)