Why is hacking or being a hacker now both a good thing and a bad thing?
Most hackers were never bad in the first place. I was a childhood hacker that got involved in illegal activity for a short period; most people doing the illegal activity were simply using hackers, and weren't themselves hackers. The only thing I ever wanted to do was learn. Many people associate hacking with cracking (breaking into software i.e. security), which is a different act and people who practice it usually have an entirely different mindset. Illegal activity is something entirely different, but none the less can be combined with hacking, just like you can combine knives with murder, but still use them to cut tomatoes better than using your hands. Hacking is just circumventing the norm; life hacks, computer hacks, etc., are all ways of just using things differently, usually apposed to the accepted way of using it, or with counter intuition. The only thing common among all hackers is a tendency to bend or skate on the edge of rules, be they social, legal, or even just habitu