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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.

Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

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