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 Same for "cyber" please...
@rysiek ah but that's the Passive Voice and therefore eternally forbidden
@alilly heh. Some Voices were clearly not created equal.
@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…
@jay_peper
Or police crimes. Or IDF attacks.
@alilly @rysiek