There seemed to be a lot of interesting thoughts and discussion branching off the, for some, recent knowledge that “hackers basically created everything that people love about computers these days.” From, color monitors, audio, to the fact that most everyone owns at least 1 computer (would this be the same if Jobs and Waz (… and i guess in some little way “mr. gates”…) didn’t come along and make it so we could all have one in our houses?) It is very true that most ‘hackers’ these days have a very bad wrap, but since the days of creation that we talked about in class today, what ‘productive’ (as far as society is concerned) inventions and advancements have they made more recently?
The Sneaker — Not the shoe, although most of you are probably familiar with this type of hacker in some way shape or form. Basically a sneaker is a day job that, a lot of, if not most, White Hat (good guy) hackers get paid a helluva lot of money for. If any of you saw the new Die Hard movie this year then yes, the main bad guy (i know… very forgettable, but think hard) used to be employed by the US government to hack into their own security systems to make sure that the general publics info was safe. In this case, it wasn’t — and there you have your base level story line (don’t worry, no spoilers there if you are waiting for DVD). Do you pay bills over the internet, do you make sure you only give out your credit card # when you are on a ‘secure’ website, if so, you can almost certainly thank a hacker for giving you that opportunity. Who do you think created the encryption, and who do you think maintains it so that these places (banks/websites/whatever) are usually one or more steps ahead of other, more deviant, black hat hackers or even just a common curious kid?
I brought up people hacking the iPhone in class today when we were talking about how Apple was created by hackers mainly as a semi ironic point about how everything goes around in circles, but it raises another point that most people (or at least i think) don’t know. Texting, Internet on your phone, downloadable music on your phone, TV channels on your phone…. Yes, I am sure hackers somewhere had something to do with the initial development but I am more concerned with WHY you now have it on your phone and why you should be more than a little pissed at your provider. One simple fact, it has been around for YEARS in the nerd world and it has been available in almost all of your phones from a few years ago too, the only reason you didn’t have it then was it was disabled. Yes, its not always to the same point, those ‘tv channels’ that you can now get weren’t always there because the media wasn’t properly constructed yet, but the option always was there, it used to always be FREE, and all it took was some hacker to break the OS in your phone. It is my understanding (correct me if I am wrong), but most phones in order to make use of almost any feature other than being able to turn on and off again, needs to be activated by your cellular carrier… again, just another block in the programming of the phone put there by carriers in order to make money. Hack the OS, and all those features are there, you just need to be able to jump onto (piggyback) a carrier, often times easily done by piggybacking someone else’s phone signal especially now days with most phones going to the internet.
Open Source is also often directly contributed by or created by hackers, since at core that is what ‘hackers’ believe in. That all code, intellectual property should be free to whomever. Maybe you don’t know of open source but I bet you use it and I bet it works a helluva lot better then a lot of the stuff you pay for. Firefox, Linux, BitTorrent…. all open source. You can go in, you can create, you can see how they did it, and you make improvements on it, hell, they want you to. Why do hackers hate Bill Gates/Microsoft so much? The easiest way to explain it, is he stands for everything that they are against. He buys what is sometimes free programs, or more often, very cheap programs, often originally open source. Slaps a Microsoft logo onto it and sells it for hundreds of dollars.
Who here still uses Norton or McAfee as their internet security? I bet almost all of you are using some sort of free anti-virus program, and i can guarantee almost all of them work 10000x better then what you would get if you bought Norton these days.
ECHELON, basically it was NASA’s “supposed to be” secret way of spying on everyone. Guess who found out about it and blew the whistle?
And there are thousands of other examples out there of hackers that are still pushing the limits of technology, breaking what the big companies don’t want them to break, partially just for the hell of it, and partially in order to give you in actuality a ‘fixed’ version of what you thought you should have been buying in the first place.
If it works, a hacker probably had something to do with it.
Kittys = Fluffy 
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