How the word 'hacker' got corrupted

Quoting:Somewhere along the way the word "hacker" escaped into the wild but with its meaning twisted.

There seems little point trying to turn back the tide now.

What's sad is how really old this dusty cobweb encrusted bit of trivia really is. The author states, "this sense of the term is surprisingly new". On what planet? I knew the story behind the corruption of the term hacker long before I even started using Linux, 15 yrs ago. Def Con has been going on fer what? Twenty years? How old is this guy? Twelve?

The odd thing is that among large segments of the technical community the meaning of the word "hacker" hasn't changed (http://hackaday.com http://hackernews.org http://hacknmod.com etc.). So we basically have the original meaning of hacker and the corrupted meaning existing side by side depending upon among whom the conversation is taking place.

it has totally been put into A battle sense like "white hat" "black hat" with both into security; hacker for most is about that. I am more old school who looks at something as simple as a game mod(before developers made mod friendly games) as a hack or any thing modified or jimmyriged. if you have to make it work outside its intended use you hacked it.

does the observation that some people are not aware of the age of this dispute indicate that the preferred definition of "hacker" is stronger and more spread then we may think? i mean how else could someone get the impression that the twisted definition is new?

greetings, eMBee.