Estoy un poco cansado del mal uso que se hace de la palabra hacker, siempre ligado al mundo de la informática y al lado oscuro: el cracking.

Esta semana recibía desde Suecia un paquete con un regalo muy especial por parte de la gente de Pingdom: unas chapas con su emblema: “Born to hack!”. Se las enseñaba a una persona y lo primero que me preguntó es que qué quería decir, a qué se refería. Como muchas veces es complicado describir qué es hacking y a la vez mejorar lo escrito, mi respuesta está escrita por Stallman en un fantástico artículo titulado On hacking!

It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have “hack value”.

Y respecto a la confusión y mal uso entre el término hacker y cracker:

Yet when I say I am a hacker, people often think I am making a naughty admission, presenting myself specifically as a security breaker. How did this confusion develop?

Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think.

You can help correct the misunderstanding simply by making a distinction between security breaking and hacking—by using the term “cracking” for security breaking. The people who do it are “crackers”. Some of them may also be hackers, just as some of them may be chess players or golfers; most of them are not.

Y como muestra de lo que es un hacker está el autor de la impresora 3D artesanal.