So our company is named Haxx and it has been named like this for more than a decade, but the name is considered by some people be a mark of evil or something.
In my closest circle of friends we’ve kind of “always” liked using silly names and we’ve since long had a fascination with double Xes. Once upon the time in the early 90s we teamed up under the name Frexx and we did some funky programs on the Amiga. Most notably a programming language called FPL and the text editor FrexxEd.
When we then during the second half of the 90s needed to start an actual company to easier cater for our “spare time businesses” we wanted a new name but still one in a similar spirit. Being big friends and practitioners of writing “quick hacks” (“hack” in the sense that it is a quickly done program/script that perhaps isn’t always written very solidly or nice but works for the moment) to solve our own problems both at work and at home, we found Haxx to be a perfect name for us – Hack in pluralis, spelled with double-x.
Already at the time we took the name we knew about this bad habit at places that seemed to lump Hackers with Crackers or similar so we knew there would be a risk that some could assume us to be something else based on our name, but what the heck, we liked the name and we are and were hackers and we do and did a lot of hacks. Haxx it was. Haxx it is.
These days we get some minor problems due to this. At some companies (let’s not name any specific but you know the kind) they have black-listed haxx.se web sites (presumably because of the name ‘haxx’ in the domain name), some people get mails from us our the mailing lists we host easier filtered as spam and we get our share of strange suggestions etc.
I guess the upside of it is that we get our chances to whine on people and systems who decide to filter contents purely based on the presence of a single 4-letter word, either in a domain name or in web page or mail contents, and that is actually hilariously stupid.
As always there are people who make no differences between hackers and crackers. Crackers are doing some of the things which hackers do but with a criminal mind. But they are not the same. To say a hacker is a cracker is a wrong conclusion.
(Back in history hackers where people who ‘hacked’ on some hardware only to see what will happen but the view on them has changed by the time. People like the rockboxers that ‘hack’ a player to see what can be done with it are real hackers in my mind.)
Here in germany some people in government and even the press believe that people who play games like counterstrike are potentially trained to be school shooters because many of them played games like this – thats a circular conclusion that does not fit.
Its like saying: Police cars are blue – Peter wears blue clothes – Peter is a police car!