On the O’Reilly editors’ list, Mark Brokering sent around a link to a Wall Street Journal article entitled FBI Says Companies Need to Report Hackers.
Jonathan Gennick wrote:
I wish for more quotes in the article. It sounds like, though, that
the FBI wants businesses to report “cyber attacks” and that the
Journal translated “cyber attacks” into “hackers”. And thus the
reading public is once again subtly led down the path of equating
“hacker” with “criminal”.
Mark replied:
I think the hack writer who wrote the Wall Street Journal headline came up with the word “hacker.” The AP story got it right. So did the Washington Post.
(As with the recent discussions about Web 2.0, this is an interesting example of something we might call a “meme war”, where a meme is on the loose, and different groups are fighting over its meaning. In the end, a word means whatever the white rabbit of popular usage says it means. But it’s also true that words have different meanings in subcultures, and that sometimes, a subculture meaning transforms the mainstream meaning, as the mainstream culture tries to absorb the “hipness” of the subculture that originated the term. We like to think that it’s still possible to recapture the positive association for the term “hack.” We know that geeks are now chic, so let’s hope those headline writers get the message: If you want to be cool, use the word “hack” like we do!)