> Jesus, it was reverse-engineered, not "hacked". Did Linux engineers "hack" into every single piece of hardware they wrote drivers for?
I think reverse-engineering definitely falls under the "hacking" umbrella. I would go so far as to call the winner of the Adafruit prize a hacker, not to mention kernel devs who manage to get a device working without proper documentation.
Yes, I would call people that work on this hackers in the older more positive sense, but the common, inflammatory meaning of the word "hacked" usually has something to do with a security exploit. As in Headline: "Blahblah.com was recently hacked." As a headline, you would never think that means blahblah was reverse-engineered, but that it was vandalized or people's accounts were stolen.
I see it as a positive thing that the media is shifting to using the word 'hacked' as it was intended to be. Sure it may confuse some people but over time it may return to being used exclusively in the older sense.
I think reverse-engineering definitely falls under the "hacking" umbrella. I would go so far as to call the winner of the Adafruit prize a hacker, not to mention kernel devs who manage to get a device working without proper documentation.