Slashdot Mirror
Hacker High School Starts to Spread
thelordx writes "Hacker High School, an initiative from the non-profit Institute for Security and Open Methodology, pioneers of the OSSTMM have received some media coverage for their Hacker High School Program. It's a license-free open-source program that provides security and privacy-awareness teaching materials to teachers.
Here's the link to the BBC stream and article about the project."
We don't have open campus lunches. We're not even allowed to leave the cafeteria during lunch.
High School is really a lot more like prison than an educational experience, but I suppose going through it does teach you a lot about real life. Paul Graham wrote the best essay I've ever read about what High School is really there for and how you can get through it and actually learn a thing or two: "What You'll Wish You'd Known".
The class itself sounds like a double-edged sword. People who don't have the knowledge to hack are taught everything they need to know to get started. For everyone else who would otherwise get hacked, the technology is over their heads to begin with. I don't think most high school kids want to sit and hear about firewalls and ports--the ones who would care about such a thing already know about security.
The intentions of this course are good, but I question the effectiveness. But I could be wrong; maybe it will help.
"I am a high school student. I know for a fack that not many kids are interested in hacking, ratio wise."
:)
Ahem...
As a high-school student myself, I can safely say that where I go to school about one in every two males have some intrinsic fascination with the hacking scene.
At school I have a good reputation as computer-guy on campus: I'm friends with every technology department teacher, I'm the school webmaster, I skipped the first year of Computer Science and am now in college-level AP Computer Science 2, I participate in Computer Science state-wide competitions and seldom come home without a trophy, I've written various programs for the school to make the life of some administrator easier...
I know this may seem a little arrogant, but people treat me with immense respect. I've had freshmen come up to me during lunch and bombard me with questions like "so how long have you been using computers?" and "how big is your botnet?"
Kids today totally eat up the whole hacker scene. Fight the man! Rebel! Cause damage! It's what kids love to do.
... need to organize a come up with a new name. The media has taken this term, which originally had a positive meaning, bastardized it when viruses became more widespread (since the journalists weren't bright enough to come up with their own term or use the right term; "Well, we heard them say hacker in their computer mumbo jumbo talk that we can't understand, so we'll just use that."), and the misusage of the word has gotten so bad that even Slashdotters and other "computer geeks" use "hacker" when the word "cracker" should be used.
The computing community needs to come up with a new term that means, "a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular." (quote from Jargon File). Perhaps the word "tinkerer" fits this description finely. Or, we can borrow a word from another language. Perhaps we can create a brand new word, I don't know.
The point is, the media has stolen the word "hacker" and made the word defined to mean something completely different than it used to mean, Joe Average is using the media's definition, and older computer "hackers" can't use the term without being looked suspiciously. The word has been destroyed by the media. We need a new term, and the sooner, the better.