> Check this article http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-2296494,00.html
> 
> It seems that the Hebrew Academy for Lashon had decided that
> a Hacker is a "Computer Breaker"... Now it is part of hebrew...

This "hacker vs. cracker" issue has nothing to do with Hebrew. They were
making a decision on how to translate the *English* word "hacker". And what
*does* the English word "hacker" mean when you see it written in newspapers,
spoken by most people, etc.? I'd wager that 90% of the time, they mean a
computer intruder, a cracker. So that's why the Hebrew Academy *had* to
translate that (again, English) term that way, unfortunately.

If you look for "hacker" in a m-w.com (a good English dictionary which I
use all the time), you'll see 4 definitions. One of them is, amusingly
enough, "a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity"
(note *in*experienced). Another is the computer intruder: "a person who
illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a
computer system". They include the definition you want, "an expert at
programming and solving problems with a computer", but apparently if you
go and do the statistics, this kind is definition is rarely used - except
by the hackers (in the good sense) themselves.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Saturday, Dec 7 2002, 3 Tevet 5763