The News of the World 'phone-hacking' scandal continues to run and run. What next? A wider admission within the media that many -- if not most -- other newspapers have been up to the same tricks themselves, and not just the reporters inside News International?

That wouldn't surprise me one bit frankly. Because, you see, that term 'hacking' is incredibly misleading. It suggests what the NoW did was somehow a technically difficult exercise, dependent upon knowing experts like those bespectacled geeks who used to advise Scully and Mulder on the X-Files.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact really this isn't hacking at all. Try hacking your own phone and see for yourself (since it's your phone this won't be illegal, of course).

You do it like this.
<ol>
	<li>Turn off the phone or so it manually to voicemail.</li>
	<li>Call the number.</li>
	<li>When the voicemail message kicks in press * to access the menu.</li>
	<li>Type your pin code. Don't know your voicemail pin code? Join the club. Most people don't, which is why they are usually left with the default pin code set by the operator. These are usually published on network web sites (it's 1111 for Orange, for example, and 8705 for O2 and Tesco).</li>
</ol>
Once you hit the correct pin code you're getting any voicemail messages there, whoever you are. This, as far as I understand it, is how the NoW 'hacked' all those phones. It's because people never, ever changed the default pin code on their mobile. Even Peter Mandelson, a cabinet minister and great keeper of the nation's secrets, didn't bother to do that, if today's papers are to be believed, since it seems Gordon Brown warned him his phone had been 'hacked'.

But does this really count as hacking? If you leave your front door open and your house is burgled, then you're still burgled, I guess. And no one would suggest that what went on here is anything less than illegal. But for pity's sake... if you're a public figure with voicemail messages that are confidential, how hard is it to change a four number code? And if you don't... aren't you just asking for trouble?

Hacking, for me, should be defined as 'illicit entry by subterfuge into systems that are supposed to be secure'. Not walking into an empty house with a front door open to the street then taking a note of the contents.