Remember when hackers were people who were able to circumvent the safeguards of a system to get it to do what they wanted and were sometimes played by the adolescent Angelina Jolie?

The Boston Globe today on the front page promises to show us how to “hack” our iPods and other devices. The article, by Hiawatha Bray, continues the trend of weakening the term “hack” so that it means tips ‘n’ tricks. For example, the article suggests two ways to “hack” Windows XP: Use the text-to-speech capability built into the system and manage the programs that automatically start up by using the built-in Windows’ utility designed for the job.

Q: What will we call the hacking that subverts and circumvents (for good or for evil)? Extreme hacking? X hacking? Xacking?

A: If Congress has it’s way: Terrorism. [Tags: hacking language hiawatha_bray]

Categories: misc dw