Reuters totally clueless about the meaning of "hacking"
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.