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Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

I remain mystified why people who – based on their deep tech reporting – I can only assume know better than this keep abusing the terms "hacker" and "hack". 🙄

"Researchers", "pranksters", "attackers", "malicious actors" are so much better and more clear in any relevant context.

Similarly "compromise", "break-in", "leak", "vulnerability".

The audience of any tech-related piece will understand these terms just as well as "hacker" or "hack". Or *better*.

There is no good reason for this.

Like, it's not even that much work!

And any piece of writing will be better for it if the heavily stereotyped, nebulous, unclear, "hacker" / "hack" terms are replaced by more specific, clearer alternatives.

For example, framing a story not as "hackers hacked <Some Service>", but as "<Some Service> got compromised" removes the "evil hackers" as the implied explanation of why the compromise happened. Making it easier to talk about potential failures on part of <Some Service>'s operator.

@rysiek ah but that's the Passive Voice and therefore eternally forbidden

@alilly heh. Some Voices were clearly not created equal.

@alilly @rysiek the media usually likes the passive voice when it comes to car crashes

@jay_peper @alilly I would argue that "hackers hacked <Some Service>" is effectively a thinly veiled passive voice anyway.

The "hackers" are, after all, implied. Nobody *actually* knows anything about them – beyond the fact that if there was a compromise, there "had to" necessarily be some "hackers" involved.

I've seen someone actually claim the above with a straight face when asked why they added "hackers" to a news item about a statement that did not include that term…

@rysiek @jay_peper they'll be in for a real shock when it turns out the system actually compromised itself

@alilly @jay_peper or that it was compromised by a disgruntled employee, or that it was only shown to be compromised by security researchers, or that it was not a compromise but a temporary service unavailability due to the link being posted on fedi and getting effectively DDoSed by thousands of instances pulling OpenGraph data, or…

@rysiek
"SomeService failed to secure against basic attacks from a teenager in Wisconsin"
@mwl

@rysiek Once they trained the public to more immediately recognize - and have a negative reaction to -- "hacker" ... it was too late.

@tychotithonus it's never too late. Public trained one way can be trained the other. And again, there is no good reason to stick with it. None.

@rysiek Oh, agreed. But there may be plenty of less-good reasons cough*clicks*cough. And countering that incentive is ... hard.

@tychotithonus well, a good way to start is to call them out and show how silly they look.

@rysiek

there is a reason for it (i didn't say good)

hollywood

@benroyce and yet I think if that scene involved breaking into a safe and the line was "I think we got a locksmith", we still would not end up with silly headlines like "locksmiths rob a local bank" or "car dealership locksmithed".

@rysiek I hate the way people use "hacked" to describe what happens when their dumb ass has fallen for a social engineering scam. No. You haven't been hacked. You've been had.

@rysiek
Didn't the naming used to be "hacker" (pushing the limits of hardware or software) and "cracker" (someone that breaks into others' systems)? I always preferred that.
@Szescstopni

@dancingtreefrog @rysiek We can't expect journalists to use proper words – their livelihood depends on this.

@Szescstopni @dancingtreefrog well as a person who writes a regular tech-related column, I can assure you that nobody's livelihood depends on this.

@rysiek @dancingtreefrog Well when I wrote on tech for a newspaper decades ago I was luckily independent enough to resist infrequent pressure from editors to change something I wrote because it was too direct.

@elomatreb fair enough, it was a bit too much. Unboosted.

@rysiek
There is excellent reason for this. It's the same reason they use the word "anarchists" to describe rioters, terrorists and strikers.

When you use the wrong terms you can stick any connotation you like onto groups of people you don't like.