hacker being - on the meaning of being a hacker.html

1000 HOWTOs for various needs [WINDOWS]

that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never
forgive me for.
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[...]
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In these words, you will see the frustration of living in a defective world, that deprives the individuals that wish to rise above the mediocre, of the very information and resources they desire, to know what is kept hidden, and it condemns them hypocritically as criminals.
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But the desperate search of knowledge is only one of the characteristics of the hacker. Another sure one is the pursute of extreme perfection.
An interesting article, is the one that narrates the history of the first hackers, and of how they developed "Spacewar!"
(the first videogame in history, born as a demo for the TX-0, meant as a "killer application" for this computer, with all its features exploitable), is "The origin of Spacewar", written by J. M. Graetz, and published in the August, 1981 issue of Creative Computing magazine.<BR>
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One of the forces driving the dedicated hacker is the quest for elegance. It is not sufficient to write programs that work. They
must also be "elegant," either in code or in function -- both, if possible. An elegant program does its job as fast as possible, or is
as compact as possible, or is as clever as possible in taking advantage of the particular features of the machine in which it runs,
and (finally) produces its results in an aesthetically pleasing form without compromising either the results or operation of other
programs associated with it.
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But the elegance and the perfection of hackers is not always comprehensible to the average individual. A hacker can often be in ecstasy reading some code written by another hacker, admiring his ability and "tasting" his style, as if he was reading poetry. 
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For example, normally to exchange the content of two variables (a and b, in this case), the statement most commonly used is this, which uses a third temporary variable:
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dummy = a : a = b : b = dummy
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The following method, instead, doesn't need the third variable, because it exploits a mathematical peculiarity of the boolean operator XOR:
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a = a XOR b : b = a XOR b : a = a XOR b
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Even if this system is at least three times slower than the first one because it requires the execution of three mathematical operations, (however it allows the saving of memory that the third variable would normally occupy), a hacker will surely admire the ingeniousness and the elegance of this method, to him it assumes the taste of a Japanese <I>haiku</I>.
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Talking about the perfectionism of the hackers, in "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" written by Steven Levy in 1984, in the chapter 2 ("The Hacker Ethic"), we read:
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Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the
systems--about the world--from taking things apart, seeing how
they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more
interesting things.  They resent any person, physical barrier, or
law that tries to keep them from doing this.  
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This is especially true when a hacker wants to fix something that
(from his point of view) is broken or needs improvement. 
Imperfect systems infuriate hackers, whose primal instinct is to
debug them.  This is one reason why hackers generally hate
driving cars--the system of randomly programmed red lights and
oddly laid out one-way streets causes delays which are so
goddamned UNNECESSARY that the impulse is to rearrange signs,
open up traffic-light control boxes . . .redesign the entire
system.  
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In a perfect hacker world, anyone pissed off enough to open up a
control box near a traffic light and take it apart to make it
work better should be perfectly welcome to make the attempt. 
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It's just in the name of such principle that the Linux operating system and the Gnu C compiler have been developed, their code is open and available to be changed and modified by anyone.<BR>
Lately, many important commercial software producers also started moving in this direction, as Netscape: Netscape Communicator 5, will, in fact be the first software, originally born as a "closed" commercial product, to be developed with this type of philosophy.
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A hacker is never satisfied with the default settings of a program or of the custom installations, he always has to open the configuration menu and set the options to get the maximum performance, and to make the product work as close as possible to his "way". A hacker must be able to use, to modify and to check all the possible features of a program.
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But after all, what motivates hackers? Why do they create programs that exploit advanced techniques and then distribute them free? And why do they freely distribute knowledge that was incredibly difficult to obtain?<BR>
A good answer could be found in the site of the KIN (Klever Internet Nothings, <A HREF="http://www.klever.net">http://www.klever.net</A>), they
are not exactly a hacker crew, but a group of people that write programs and release them freely on the Internet:
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What makes people write software and distribute it for free? Vanity, you said? Well, maybe.. But after all, what is this business all about? Is it all about money? Ask anyone - it's not. Most people I know in the industry will tell you that.<BR>
Their idea is "just leave me alone and let me do what I love to do".
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In short, it's not about money. It's about feeling free to do what you want, and, just possibly, to find someone that appreciates your work.
<P><BR>
<B>THE HACKER ETHIC</B>
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The true hacker doesn't have morals, and he would never censor information or ideas of any kind. An initiative of the Italian priest Don Fortunato di Noto, (<A HREF="mailto:[e-mail]">[e-mail],</A>) who in  January of 1998 formed the "Committee of resistance against the Pedophiles", and who asked for the help of the hacker community to unmask, capture and close the sites of the pedophiles on the Internet, failed miserably as it was only supported by self-acclaimed hackers without any skill.<BR>
Besides, hackers are tolerant by nature, and rarely get angry, but they are irritated by people and tasks perceived to be wasting their time.<BR>
There are however, some things that hackers can be intolerant of. One of these is when lies are told, to, or about them, you can say that hackers are imbeciles (it's an opinion, after all), but you can not say that they steal chickens. And yet, it would still be unusual that hackers would hack a site to remove the lies propogated about them. It would be more typical that they would create another site, refuting the lies against them.<BR>
Hacking can be used like as a form of protest, breaking into and modifying the websites of very well known societies and government or military corporate entities, can be a way to make public certain injustices (especially attacks to the liberty of information or expression) or violations of human rights. The hacks, of the websites of the CIA (that became Central Stupidity Agency) and of the Department of Justice, are famous for being hacked with this intention in mind.<BR>
In the article "Hacking for Human Rights?" by Arik Hesseldahl (<A HREF="mailto:[e-mail]">[e-mail]</A>) published on the online magazine Wired (<A HREF="http://www.wired.com">http://www.wired.com</A>) dated 14.Jul.98 9:15am, the hacker Bondie Wong, (a dissident Chinese astrophysicist who lives in Canada, that temporarily disabled a Chinese satellite in 1997), a member of the famous hacker crew, Cult of the Dead Cow (which in the beginning of 1999 released the Back Orifice trojan) threatened to attack the computer networks of foreign companies that did business with China, causing them serious damages and huge financial losses.<BR>
In an interview conducted by Oxblood Ruffin, a former United Nations consultant, and published on Wired, Blondie Wong says:
<CITE>"Human rights is an international issue, so I don't
have a problem with businesses that profit from
our suffering paying part of the bill"</CITE>.
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Contrary to the complete lack of moral judgement (but, above all, of moralism) of hackers, lies a deep ethical sense, that is something allmost "religious" in most hackers.<BR>
About this point, we can go back to the Jargon File:
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:hacker ethic, the: n.<BR>
1. The belief that information-sharing
is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of
hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and
facilitating access to information and to computing resources
wherever possible.<BR>
2. The belief that system-cracking for fun
and exploration is ethically OK as long as the cracker commits
no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.
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Both of these normative ethical principles are widely, but by no
means universally) accepted among hackers. Most hackers subscribe
to the hacker ethic in sense 1, and many act on it by writing and
giving away free software.  A few go further and assert that
*all* information should be free and *any* proprietary
control of it is bad [...]
<P>
Sense 2 is more controversial: some people consider the act of
cracking itself to be unethical [...]<BR>
But this principle at least moderates the behavior of people who
see themselves as `benign' crackers (see also {samurai}).  On
this view, it is one of the highest forms of hackerly courtesy
to (a) break into a system, and then (b) explain to the sysop,
preferably by email from a {superuser} account, exactly how it
was done and how the hole can be plugged --- acting as an
unpaid (and unsolicited) {tiger team}
[The "tiger team" derives from the U.S. military jargon.
These people are paid professionals who do
hacker-type tricks, e.g., leave cardboard signs saying "bomb" in
critical defense installations, hand-lettered notes saying "Your
codebooks have been stolen" (they usually haven't been) inside
safes, etc.
Serious
successes of tiger teams sometimes lead to early retirement for
base commanders and security officers].
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[...]
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Breaking into a system is not seen by the hacker as a criminal action, but like a challenge. The idea is not to damage the "victim", but to find a way to penetrate its defenses. It's the intellectual challenge, the curiosity, the will to experiment and to explore, this is what moves the hacker, not the will to damage someone or something, and not even to obtain personal profit.
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In another writing of The Mentor, "A Novice's Guide to Hacking- 1989 edition", dated December 1988, the author opens the essay with a call to the ethics of the category, to which follows a list of
<CITE>"suggestions for guidelines to follow to
ensure that not only you stay out of trouble, but you pursue your craft without
damaging the computers you hack into or the companies who own them"</CITE>:
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    As long as there have been computers, there have been hackers.  In the 50's
at the Massachusets Institute of Technology (MIT), students devoted much time
and energy to ingenious exploration of the computers.  Rules and the law were
disregarded in their pursuit for the 'hack'.  Just as they were enthralled with
their pursuit of information, so are we.  The thrill of the hack is not in
breaking the law, it's in the pursuit and capture of knowledge.
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In a file titled "The Hotmail Hack" written by Digital Assassin of the "United Underground" (or "U2", for short), in which a weakness of the HotMail system is illustrated, through which it is possible to enter into the mailbox of another person, the author, at a certain point interrupts the explanation with these words:
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....but before I tell you how to use that line, I'm going to side
track for a little theory behind this hack.  Because there's NO point in a hack, if you
don't know how it works.  That is the whole idea of hacking, to find out how systems work.
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