cracker

But if I were to write a cracker, I wouldn't be limited to that. The first thing it would do is grab the low hanging fruit.

Honestly, I think arguing for using the word "cracker" in place of "hacker" has a Stallman-esque feeling to it, now.

It's probably sitting in a database, cleartext, for every rogue employee or cracker to see. That's a load of FUD crap the OAuth and OpenID projects perpetuate.

Don't mistake this "cracker" type for some kind of brave fighter against restrictive copyright regime. According to the article he's in solitary confinement.

They're "exploring the possibility" and I'm sitting here at my PC, playing SimCity in offline mode thanks to the cracker that made it possible.

This means that it's relatively easy for a cracker with a dump of the database to bruteforce passwords, since they can try gazillions of combinations very quickly. Hell, they can even parallelise the task on EC2 and get it all done in an hour.

Just like I’d never simply send you a message that said "hi", Telegraph would be used in ways beyond one simple back-and-forth exchange, so it artificially limits the information available to a cracker. Make sense?

>skeleton key This is the lockpicking equivalent of calling a cracker a hacker. Also, no lock can be 'unbumpable' just because it has a restricted blank, as by definition in those cases, if the blank can be obtained, the lock can be bumped.

It's probably sitting in a database, cleartext, for every rogue employee or cracker to see. Even if you don't care about someone having your credentials, you can't trust them not to intentionally or accidentally misuse your account.

If you regularly connect to random wireless networks in cafes and hotels, you're a moron if you don't connect through a VPN. If you're not connecting through a VPN all your non-SSL/TLS traffic is available for reading for whatever bored cracker has found his way onto the router. Plus, not all sensitive sites implement SSL/TLS and those that do often implement it poorly[1].

Still, my primary definition of being a hacker is someone who is insanely active in hacker and cracker culture, someone very interested in systems security, someone who knows to debug a defunct DSL modem given only an oscilloscope and a bit of tinfoil. That's not me.

Ah, the "hacker/cracker" debate equivalent for software entrepreneurship, complete with the person who says other people have "no business" calling themselves something if they don't meet their specific definition of that something. Bolted, of course, to the top of any thread that mentions "bootstrapping" or "VC".

To be fair, at this point it is too late to reverse the situation and name things appropriately, specially due to the fact that "cracker" is a well known slang for something else... Using the appropriate terms at this point would just confuse people.

While that's definitely a mistake, I don't think it rises to the level of "asinine" and I don't think that gets the importer off the hook any more than it gets a cracker off the hook when he exploits an OS bug to steal credit card numbers.

I'd just like to say that there has never been a hacker/cracker movie like Sneakers, and I doubt there will ever be one like it again. It was the first time I ever learned about cryptography, it featured an awesome scene where they work out where a car is based on the sound of the car going over speed ridges, it had suspense, fully dimensional characters you could care about, math, and tiger teams!

So how annoying it is when you're bootstrapping a company, you have your price-points carefully set, you're doing a cracker job at concentrating on 'how to sustain the company without investors capital' and then boom. Out of the blue some never-heard-of before company that does the same thing you do starts to hit your customers with a price point that you simply can not beat because they are able to 'burn baby burn' or maybe even give away that identical product for free because they're racing for an acquisition before the money runs out.