I'd sure love to be told how this type of attack is any less worthy than buffer overflows, or similar attacks upon old school systems? This guy obviously understands where vulnerabilities can be found and is pretty good at exposing them.

Worthiness? They're all examples of cracking as well.

However, although he's cracking sites, this guy's obviously a pretty leet hacker.

As such, "hacked" and "cracked" are equally good in the title as far as I'm concerned.

This is actually called hacking, not cracking. Cracking refers to removing software protections.

A group of people exists that uses "hacker" for people coming up with creative solutions to problems, and "cracker" for any sort of malicious breaking of security, etc. But I fear that ship has sailed.

Then again, Hacker News isn't about new ways to break into boxen, so...

Bollocks. People have been differentiating between cracking and hacking since basic passwords were put on mainframes for accountancy reasons. Predates software protection by a decade or two.

I'm aware of Eric S Raymond's attempt to change the definition. It's still not correct. Nobody uses it that way other than misinformed pedants. This includes the general public, the media, security professionals, and the people who maliciously break into other sites. Just accept that "hacker" means both and move on.

I admire your tenacity, but I think you're trying to fight a battle that was lost a long time ago.