July 21, 2009

Go Out And Hug A Hacker

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that someone had replaced my home page with a picture of a monkey holding a gun, despite all sorts of server and network security. I have passwords for my passwords, and more passwords that allow me to get to the other passwords. And still they got in. And they posted a picture of a monkey holding a gun.

The obvious question is, "Why would anyone want to replace my home page with a picture of a monkey holding a gun?"

People who do things like this are called "hackers." They can be easily identified if they display one or more of the following signs:

1. A computer with at least three monitors.
2. A computer with a water-cooled CPU.
3. A diploma from MIT hanging next to a Led Zeppelin poster.
4. Carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists.
5. A half-inch crust of Doritos crumbs coating the belly of a Led Zeppelin t-shirt.
6. A Dell laptop running "Ubuntu Linux."
7. The remotest idea what "Ubuntu Linux" might be.

Nobody is entirely sure exactly where this connotation of the term "hacker" comes from. The word "hack" derives from the Old English word "tohaccian," which long ago meant "To chop something into pieces and let the remains scatter over the belly of your Ledde Zeppelinne hauberk."

The term apparently first showed up in the early 1960s among a group of computer-addicted undergrads at – you guessed it – MIT. They called themselves the "Tech Model Railroad Club," presumably hoping that they might someday line themselves up a little "caboose."

Hackers seem to take pride in attacking and solving difficult technical puzzles in innovative ways. A good hacker will spend weeks writing code that can sniff a password, then break into and crawl a web server to locate the owner's e-mail address. This approach is a lot more elegant than clicking the "Contact Us" link in the menu on the home page.

Sometimes hackers are simply playing practical jokes, following a rich and storied tradition of binary code-based wit and humor. According to an authoritative (as far as I know) hacker web site called "The Jargon File", a prime example of this hilarity popped up in 2001 when programmers in Bergen, Norway "pinged" each other with – get this – carrier pigeons!

Here is the punchline from classic log they generated on that historic day:
 

— 10.0.3.1 ping statistics —
9 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 55% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 3211900.8/5222806.6/6388671.9 ms
vegard@gyversalen:~$ exit
 

Can you believe those packet times? Man, the laughs just keep on coming!

Other hackers are not quite so harmless. They can cause serious malicious damage to whole networks, steal credit card information, compromise national security and commit all sorts of other crimes. In fact, over the years a whole new field of law enforcement has grown up, designed to catch these evil hackers with the help of other hackers, many of whom have been rendered considerably less evil by spending a couple of years in a cell with no broadband connection. Or Doritos.

The bottom line is that, without hackers, the computer world would be a far less interesting place. For one thing, we would never have developed the kind of razor-sharp computer security protocols we enjoy in Microsoft Windows Vista. This is the cutting-edge operating system that responds to a maintenance update on your copy of Microsoft Word by canceling your American Express card and erasing your hard drive.

So I suggest that we all make an effort now and then to appreciate hackers, those brilliant people who have way too much time on their hands. And who could probably really use a hug.

Copyright ©2009 Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.

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