Create my ad-hoc definition of hacking.md

notes/my ad-hoc definition of hacking.md

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+---
+title: my ad-hoc definition of hacking
+date: 2024-12-21
+tags:
+- hacking
+- definitions
+---
+a very broad-strokes definition of the word "hacking" I spurted out in a text conversation.
+
+> when people say hacking they mean one of several things  
+> the (positive) sense is that used by hackspaces, to hack is to make something do something beyond its initial purposes  
+> technologically, a lot of the time, that means taking apart an old TV and reusing parts of it to make a lightning rod, or replacing a phone battery by yourself (the phone companies do not desire this), or adding a circuitboard to your cat flap that uses the chip inside the cat to detect if it's your cat and if not lock the flap  
+> more "software based", it can be like scraping a government website to collect documents into a more readable format, turning trains back on via software that were disabled by their manufacturer as a money-grabbing gambit, getting access to academic papers that are unreasonably locked behind expensive paywalls  
+
+>> If someone says 'my facebook got hacked' what does that mean  
+
+> usually what they mean is that someone has logged into it without their permission  
+> and most (all) of the time, that person has guessed their password because they said it out loud, they watched them put it in, they guessed it randomly (probs rare), or (rarest) they found the password in a passwork leak for a different website and tried it on Facebook (because the person uses the same password on multiple accounts)  
+> I'd call that a second thing people say hacking for 
+and a third is the money extorting hackers, who hack into [the British library] and lock all their documents unless they pay [a ransom]