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Canadian University to Begin Training Hackers

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the learning-from-the-other-side dept.

torok writes "According to an article at The Edmonton Journal, The University of Calgary is going to start teaching select computer science students to write software viruses in a special new disconnected lab. Will Canada be accused of training the world's next generation of cyber-terrorists... or peacekeepers?"

5 of 350 comments (clear)

  1. Crackers by ramzak2k · · Score: 5, Informative

    Crackers, not hackers.
    I understand this is a losing battle but lets not get it wrong on slashdot.

    --

    Siggy Say, Siggy Do
    1. Re:Crackers by ramzak2k · · Score: 4, Informative

      here you go, a nice explanation of the meaning :

      http://www.grinberg.net/vitaliy/hacker.html

      in short ,
      hackers: just enthusiasts
      crackers: evildoers

      --

      Siggy Say, Siggy Do
    2. Re:Crackers by PM4RK5 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that "hacking" is the (lost?) art of taking apart, fiddling, and generally reverse engineering. The purpose of "hacking" was (is?) to educate oneself on the inner workings of a device. A common misconception would be that "hacking" was limited to computers. It is generally used in reference to technology, but it may be any digital (or analog for that matter) device. One could also stretch the meaning of "hacker" and apply it to fields such as automobiles - taking apart and "modding" your car could be considered "hacking."

      Crackers (and cracking), on the other hand, are those who maliciously exploit hardware and software that is not their own, for personal gain, and sometimes just for the sake of having done it.

      Did that help clarify the difference? Hackers are reverse-engineers who seek to educate themselves, without inflicting damage. The objective of a cracker, however, is damaging a system (in whatever way), and being able to claim responsibility for it, because they (and their clique) may consider it "cool" or "macho," or in some cases, because they can fraudulently benefit from it (usually economically...)

      I hope that helps. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.

      P.S. The "cool" and "macho" part was added by me, but I can see no other motivation to do it.

  2. Re:Hacking ethics by boredMDer · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those of you blindly following that link and getting 404's or similar, here's both the corrected version (Berkeley is spelled w/ 3 e's) and in link form -
    http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hackers.html

  3. Re:U of "C" doesn't teach "C" by dghcasp · · Score: 4, Informative
    Disclaimer: I'm a U of C grad, but I graduated in 1993.

    At the time, U of C didn't teach C either. Students were expected to be able to learn "C" on their own by third year, since they'd already been exposed to three or four different programming languages from different spheres. Once you were in third year, you could, for the most part, do your projects in whatever language you wanted, as long as the TA knew the language. Most students did their projects in C.

    As well, the first year courses almost always used languages that students were unlikely to have encountered ever before. This helped level the field between the people who were "xc3113nt C h4x0rz" and everyone else. Everyone started from first principles in functional programming.

    By the time I'd hit third year, I'd had courses where the language of choice were Pascal and Modula/2 from the "Von Newman" sphere, ML from the functional sphere, and PDP-11 assembly (was being replaced with SPARC assembly at the time) from the low level sphere.)

    By the time I'd graduated, I'd added courses that required languages based on category theory (Charity) and one based on primitive recursion (it only had zero(), succ() and recurse(x,y) functions and you had to define the whole rest of the language yourself based on those.) If I'd taken different courses, I would have been exposed to Lisp, Prolog, SQL, etc.

    The theory behind all this was they wanted to teach you different ways to think about problems, not just how to pound in a solution in C. People who just wanted to learn to code in C, be able to say they were a "programmer" and go on to a career went to SAIT or DeVry.

    Pick any academic program and you'll find people who think something is "missing" or can be "better." That's why they evolve over time. The main flaw I found with the U of C program (IMHO) was that the only course that really required you to deal with a large project (CPSC 510, full year, write a compiler from scratch) wasn't a mandatory course.

    But I'm glad I got my degree from U of C. And I'm not crippled in my ability to work in C/C++ because I never took a half-year course in it.