Something tells me that there is probably at least some traffic trying to poke through the Great Firewall from the Isles, and a HUGE amount from the cousins across the pond. If any newspaper leaked that MI6 or CIA were trying to crack into Commie China's intelligence networks, what would be the reaction?

"Super spooks doing their bit for their country! Come join the MI6 and hack evil systems!"

Typical.

I enjoyed the hilarity of Eddie Mair's interview on Radio 4 yesterday with a Lib Dem MP. He appeared to have watched Die Hard 4.0 thinking it was a documentary and rounded off his excitable comments neatly by asserting that it was a terrible act of terrorism sanctioned by the Chinese government (note no factual basis for his comments, but hey, Radio 4 clearly needs livening up), but that was okay if we did it to other countries. Jolly good. If you fancy a laugh, listen again on the BBC site. Eddie Mair does a sterling job of not actually laughing out loud.

I'm sure I won't be the only one to grumble about the Media's insistence on using the word "hacker" in this context - what's wrong with the more correct "cracker" or "black hat"?!

- A. N. Hacker

China is easy to blame, because Iran's infrastructure probably isn't mature enough to support infowar and most people in Venezuela are too poor to have an Internet connection.

Because people on the street won't understand what a "cracker" or (in particular) a "black hat" means.

A friend of mine who hosts (amongst other things) a Falun Gong website has been getting attacked from Chinese military IP addresses for months.

Surely they didn't know what "hacker" meant until the media started using the word?

between this and all the other attacks from Chinese domains all the time for years now they have a problem with bots located there and are very slow to react to messages about them it might help if we spoke Chinese to ask them to block these infected computers mostly owned by the Chinese railway apparently. I may as well ask the wall though no one in the government would understand trojans or botnets it's a blackhat all right he's probably located in silicon valley USA.

"I'm sure I won't be the only one to grumble about the Media's insistence on using the word "hacker" in this context - what's wrong with the more correct "cracker" or "black hat"?!"

Because anyone who's traveled in the American south knows that the average cracker (syn.: "redneck", "white trash") can barely SPELL "computer", much less use one.

(Geeze, I hope this "Post anonymously" click-box works...!)

Titan Rain. It rains on Titan - methane, so the astronomers say. And where does methane come from? Back of a cow, so the True Believers say. Titans Reign - that would be in Whitehall, the Pentagon, etc. QED.

> Surely they didn't know what "hacker" meant until the media started using the word?

Yes, the general public's (mis)understanding of the word hacker didn't come out of thin air, but I really think the term has such a wide currency now - in its meaning of someone doing bad things with/to computer systems/networks - that it'd be hard to change.

One reason is simply that the word sounds right, it sounds destructive - in non-computer terms someone hacking into something suggests - for example - a person hacking into a tree with an axe.

Computer types, including hackers, should just accept that there is a different understanding of the term in specialist circles than there is amongst the general public. This is common across so many other fields apart from computing. Either that or they should give up and come up with a better name for hackers (and "whitehats" is no good, not least because it sounds like they're the KKK!).