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The Cardinals probably didn’t ‘hack’ the Astros, damn it

By now you’ve probably heard that the St. Louis Cardinals “hacked” into an internal network used by the Houston Astros to scout and recruit new players.

Talk about a neat story. A federal investigation into a baseball team hacking another team? Bring in Chris Pratt as the lead actor and you have a blockbuster. But that’s only until you realize that the “hacking” was, or appears to have been, little more than someone using an old password to log into a rival’s network.

That’s a hack in the same way that a student peering over a teacher’s shoulder as they enter a password is a hack — which is to say that it’s nothing of the sort.