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How to Become a Hacker

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Re: How to Become a Hacker

#61

Post by neatze »

elwell wrote: post #50
mettamage wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I normally don't call people out on this as we are human and we need wiggle room for conversation and the formulation of opinions. Plus, everyone is guilty of this, me included. In fact, the previous statement is me doing it as well. We are human after all. But I do tend to call people out on this when people stifle curiosity with these type of claims. Knowing myse…

> Some people claim God exists. And I therefore should live quite differently than I am right now. I require extraordinary evidence. Just curious, theoretically speaking, what are some evidences that would be 'extraordinary enough' for you to believe? For sake of argument, let's assume we're talking about the Judeo-Christian god as described in the standard Bible.

I think you will find this debated interesting: https://youtu.be/9wLtCqm72-Y

Re: How to Become a Hacker

#62

Post by platz »

aortega wrote: post #58
platz wrote: post #40

Kevin Mitnick destroyed any faith I had in what being a hacker was about.

He's a corporate man now, but in his youth he was legit.

I felt his story was spun in a way that accredited far more moral weight than I learned was actually warranted

Re: How to Become a Hacker

#63

Post by mettamage »

elwell wrote: post #50
mettamage wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I normally don't call people out on this as we are human and we need wiggle room for conversation and the formulation of opinions. Plus, everyone is guilty of this, me included. In fact, the previous statement is me doing it as well. We are human after all. But I do tend to call people out on this when people stifle curiosity with these type of claims. Knowing myse…

> Some people claim God exists. And I therefore should live quite differently than I am right now. I require extraordinary evidence. Just curious, theoretically speaking, what are some evidences that would be 'extraordinary enough' for you to believe? For sake of argument, let's assume we're talking about the Judeo-Christian god as described in the standard Bible.

Hmm... God comes down, allows the person that tries to convince me to fly and zaps us to another planet where other lifeforms are. If there aren't any others, then he zaps us to a planet that God thinks is simply amazingly cool (and comfortable enough for us humans). God tells us something that humans may found out in 100k years from now. It doesn't have to be knowledge that is valuable for me to use right now. It should be knowledge that I am able to verify.

Obviously, the number 100k is arbitrary.

Oh, and it should be done in such a way that I can know 100% that it wasn't because of some weird mushroom/drug trip. God is all powerful, I'm sure that shouldn't be a problematic requirement.

This is extraordinary enough. At least, with evolution theory, I actually am able to see this to some extent. It helps that I've played poker as a hobby and had to think about probabilities on an emotional level a fair bit.

There simply should be no room for doubt. Whenever I'm able to understand a mathematical proof, then I have that feeling as well. Mathematicians also can make quite some extraordinary claims. And then they back it up.

Re: How to Become a Hacker

#64

Post by ff317 »

seiferteric wrote: post #56
arexxbifs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those guys operated under circumstances vastly different from today. If you can land a job like those at PARC or Bell Labs, then yes, "carreer hacking" is certainly possible. Considering how many IT professionals there are now and how few there were back then, I'd say those kinds of jobs are even more scarce now than they used to be. It's not impossible, but it's not a realistic expectation. > If you’re devot…

Imagine how different being a programmer was before the distractions of the internet. You might not even be in front of a screen all the time. I am sure a lot of time was spent preparing punch cards and in front of chalk boards. Overall I bet it was much better for mental health.

Yes, this is a major factor that's often overlooked. I grew up doing child-level hacking in the 80s and then got into real hacking in the 90s as the commercial internet was first starting to blossom. While the reality I inhabit now as a programmer is dominated by the Internet, my habits are more like pre-Internet programmers.

If I were to make an accurate account of all the time and energy that goes into my most successful and well-engineered software products, the majority of the productive time happens "offline" from the Internet and/or even my laptop's screen.

I spend a ton of time turning the abstract parts of the problem over in my head while doing "nothing" (or during the mundane tasks of everyday life), and even when I do get in front of a screen, I still spend a ton of time just sketching out notes in a text editor - basically arguing with myself until I've managed to jot down some good conclusions on how the design of a Thing should be done. Most of those notes get thrown away eventually, as they materialize into resultant source code. I have sometimes spent weeks or months turning an idea over in my head or in these textual debates with myself before a line of code is ever written.

Re: How to Become a Hacker

#65

Post by zitterbewegung »

techopoly wrote: post #55
zitterbewegung wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this make me a hacker? Donald Knuth was giving a presentation to celebrate someones birthday by debugging his old FORTRAN code. He was having trouble giving it since his PDF of his presentation was autoforwarding using Adobe Acrobat. I figured out that Preview would avoid this outcome. I think this is the largest contribution I will have to Computer Science.

Nice. Mine's not so impressive, but when I was green and in college, I was casually job shadowing an older friend for a day at a major tech company, and was asked to take a look at some code that had an issue. I spotted the bug in 30 seconds. It was then I realized that even at the top of our profession, everyone is still human beings with their own sets of strengths and weaknesses, and I have just as much potential…

Yea, to this day though I don't know how you can configure Adobe Acrobat to autoforward slides.

Re: How to Become a Hacker

#66

Post by ghostpepper »

kebman wrote: post #10

A lot of hacking is done simply because public and private databases and systems just aren't good enough to serve those that they were made to serve. This made me a "hacker," in that I created programs, crawlers and spiders to find and put together the information I needed for my everyday work as a teacher (all legal, of course, though highly unconventional). I once told my boss about one such idea I had, that I thou…

In this article the word "hacker" is actually used in the original meaning - nothing to do with breaking into systems.

Re: How to Become a Hacker

#67

Post by Enginerrrd »

arexxbifs wrote: post #17
markus_zhang wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much what I'm doing but I do hope for a coding job...

Like most things, hacking is a lot like angling in the respect that it's a fun, relaxing and rewarding pastime, but most often neither of these when depended upon for survival.

Ha... boy this describes several phases of my life (with lessons learned) remarkably well. Thanks for the chuckle.

Poker, sports betting arbitrage, bug bounties... All were fun before I tried making them my day job.

Re: How to Become a Hacker

#68

Post by crumbshot »

Their first mistake was taking heed of anything ESR has to say, including his archaic opinion on what hacking is.

If it's nothing to do with software or hardware security, then it's not hacking.

And yes, this site is itself woefully misnamed.

Re: How to Become a Hacker

#69

Post by jtaft »

TrueDuality wrote: post #31
m1117 wrote: post #27

This is confusing. "Hacker" is a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data. "Software Engineer" is the right approach. "Hacker Spirit" lol

The term "hacker" predates electronic computers. It is originally used to refer to someone that creatively uses systems in unexpected, unconventional, and generally creative ways. Media portrayal in the mid 90s grabbed on to this term without understanding its actual context. One potential source of the term is the MIT model train club, but that is up for dispute as some claim it existed before that. There are more s…

What's your stance on the term "cracker"?

I was super into reverse engineering and loved the challenge. It seemed at some point "cracker" moved away from someone who can break software protections through reversing to someone who uses tooling to break into systems, without understanding how computers work. I still prefer "cracker" as someone who can reverse and break software protections.

Also, Thanks for helping out with Defcon! Been there a couple times and plan to go again. At the next live con i'm down to meet and talk about hacker lore!

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