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In Hacker Highschool, Students Learn To Redesign the Future
caseyb89 writes "Hacker Highschool is an after school program that teaches students the best practices of responsible hacking. The program is open source, and high schools across the country have begun offering the free program to students. Hacker Highschool recognized that teens are constantly taught that hacking is bad, and they realized that teens' amateur understanding of hacking was the cause of the biggest issues. The program aims to reverse this negative stereotype of hacking by encouraging teens to embrace ethical, responsible hacking."
In Soviet Russia, high school hacks you.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Actually, the word is "amateur", not "amature" - unkless you mean "not mature"....
The bad people just got the title 'Hacker' assigned by stupid, lazy people in the media -- you know, the kind who are utterly mistified as to why anyone would want to surf a web.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
All defined by who you hack.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I thought it said "redesign the furniture".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This may be just what the great security-bureaucracy of the US finally needs to take over the internet; pestilent waves of freshly hatched script-kiddies defacing the front-pages of their overlords!
Or will it conversely be the knowledge that the masses so vitally need to see clearly through the hysterical rhetoric of the cyber-paranoid?
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
"Hacker" is a loaded term. It might not be fair, but that is the fact of the matter. As such "Hacker Highschool" is doomed to attract everything from raised eyebrows to terminology-holy-wars. (Speaking of holy-wars, try having a rational discussion over the meaning of "jihad"). Maybe that is the point -- to attract attention. Whatever the case, concept of "hacking" is ill-served by the term.
People should be curious, and free to pursue that curiosity in a responsible matter. That isn't something to learn, it is something to avoid un-learning. Once you have had it stamped out of your soul, I really wonder if you can pick it up again.
I refer you to the words of The Mentor, who can describe it better than I ever could:
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three- piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world... Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert. This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is 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. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
+++The Mentor+++
[May the members of the phreak community never forget his words -JR]
Source: http://www.angelfire.com/freak2/r4v3n_phr34k/lastwords.html
its funny how you assume yourself to be one of the good guys
Now, my math may be a bit off, but I read through their "Lesson 12 - Passwords" and found this sentence:
With a 2 letter password, and 26 letters in the alphabet, plus 10 numbers (ignoring symbols),
there are 236 possible combinations (687,000,000 possibilities).
And I can't for the life of me get those numbers. (26+10)^2 = 1296, right? Or if we count uppercase (26+26+10)^2 = 3844
The square root (only two characters) of 687,000,000 is ~26,210. Last time I checked, there are not 26210 writable characters in our alphabet. Or in UTF-8 for that matter.
Increase the password length to
8 characters, and there are 836 combinations (324,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
possibilities).
836 combinations? Now im just confused. That's even less than 4 two letter passwords! (4*236 = 944)
And where does that 323*10^30 possibilities come from?
I can't be THIS bad at math, can I ?
I don't recall this being an issue when I was in highschool (a mere 6-10 years ago). There weren't too many resources to encourage learning and advancement in computer science outside of your really basic CS courses and AP programs that taught Java (3 or 4?), and how uninspired they were. I think that was the main issue. Lack of resources. I ended up buying K&R, Stroustrup, Irvine, and some other college-level texts and reading myself to learn. If I had much more resources available to me, I would've been years ahead of that even. By the time I was in my first year of college, I already knew more than the 4 years at university would have taught me (sans a few algorithms, but that was later corrected with Intro to Algorithms, which was far better than anything on our curriculum). This prompted me to change my major because outside of a top-5 CS school, there wasn't the available resources and people to really push me. Math, however, was suitable, and far more difficult, I found. I had to spend a lot of my own free time finding resources to fuel my desire to learn. I think this was the main problem, between 5-10 years ago in terms of educating young hackers. Finding the odd RCE paper, agner's papers, some defcon/blackhat stuff, leading to more research papers from people at MIT/Stanford/etc was the real source of insight for me, outside of some classic CS texts. To this day, those fields still have a very high barrier to entry, and not for any good reason I can tell.
As far as "hacking is bad", in 8th grade I pointed out that I could access my teacher's drive containing grade books from our lab, circumventing the group policy that prevented me from opening a 'Run' box or 'My Computer' or navigating there in explorer. I just opened up anything with a Save As, knowing that dialog wasn't at the time tied to policies and navigated over to network places and could see everything, and everything was on public shares (WTF upon WTF). I got kicked out of the lab for a day for pointing that out, and I don't know if they ever fixed it, but that was the extent of punishment there for "hacking." I also nearly got fired from my first job in college for attempting to implement a roaming trojan on our CS lab's computers (they had this annoying habit of restarting after 15 minutes of inactivity when logged off with DeepFreeze). Since we had administrative access via our logins, the idea was to write a simple tool that would bounce from computer to computer like a fire, keeping it alive even though DeepFreeze was installed on the lab (the only way to extinguish it would be to reboot the entire lab at once). The reason? Our files for projects were stored on network drives in a heavily firewalled lab-accessible only location. And that's also where we were to submit homework. So instead of being able to submit homework from another lab on campus (there were quite a few more), or from wireless, we had to go over to the CS lab during lab hours, log-in (took 15 minutes sometimes), and somehow manage to move our files to the lab machine (USB or e-mail, fun times) and then finally copy them into the homework directory. My goal was to have that trojan running in the lab and have it connect out on port 80 to a server of mine so I could submit my homework at any time from anywhere (hallelujah!). Nevertheless, while trying to break some things, I inadvertently e-mailed myself some toolage to my university e-mail address instead of gmail, which got flagged by the antivirus, and which got my boss asking "why are you sending yourself this tool" which then led to them noticing I sent it from one of the CS lab computers, which meant I had the actual files on a lab computer.. ouch. Simple mistakes, yeah?
It's never been about the malice. It's always because a roadblock is in the way: how do I get around it, or an incredibly difficult question being posed: how do I make this do what I want? And that way of thinking about everything is why I have the skills I have today, and why I was interested in CS. I think
I rejected Oxford after 1) finding out the number of people there from private school, suggesting that potential was being mismeasured; 2) finding out the number there who went on to make a lot of money or gain a lot of power without contributing to the advancement of humanity.
Ten years later, I wonder whether I made the right decision. Is Oxbridge really that easy that someone not 100% dedicated to their field can still get in and succeed? If not, how come people who aren't 100% dedicated to their field get in?
wicktionary defines hack as (intransitive) To cough noisily. [from the 19th c.] I was taught to cough quietly!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
If I was a young geek I'd much rather be hacking Arduino or Lego Mindstorms...
(Satire)
We all know that Hackers are terrorists, right? The EULA-Abiding masses should never be clicking anywhere outside the nice little boxes on the page.
So we can power the state of Montana with the clash between National Security and Think of the Children, right?
"Let's train our children to be terrorists!"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
spell "HIGH SCHOOL" correctly.
Moron editorz.
Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout, C.T.O.
drumroll please for the very first reply........
Can you timestamp your cock for us OP?
:) 4chan
like extra-judicial DDoS attacks on Demonoid and WikiLeaks. Real ethical.
NSA recruiting indeed
Now we are going to have a bunch of dumbasses who would have just been script kiddies THINKING they were doing something, to vengeful little twats who are going to cause mischief.
What happened to the days of, "if you want to be a hacker, figure it out?"
Zero respect for the use of someone else's equipment on their terms. Your trojan is the most egregious example. The computers are not yours, yet you think you are entitled to make them operate to your liking at the detriment of their security. RMS would be proud.
You want the benefits of the education system (the paper) that are conferred by playing by the rules without actually playing by the rules.
You're right about killing enthusiasm & creativity. but this is not how you fix it. You just get people unreasonably pissed off at you because you can't respect personal property. Sure, it's fun and creative to subvert stupid access controls, but don't delude yourself into thinking you're in the right.
How did people fix stupid crap at my university? "Hack" the social structure to put yourself in charge of the labs and policy via undergrad research or simply volunteering. Write your own super secure homework submission tool as a "favor" to a professor you're in good with.
But I guess doing that doesn't get you street cred with your gangstas. Just gets you labeled as a brownoser.
...everyone gets F's. If they can't figure out how to break in and change it to a better grade, they don't deserve to pass.
Does it teach them the difference between hacking vs. cracking? Seems to me they should start there.
The hacker ethos is 'put your brain-cells to work in clever ways'. Now 90% of the people in the world are either not clever or don't want to be so we rule them out. That gives us '10% -ish of high school students' to enthuse with 'there it is - that's the world - get on with it!' Most /.ers were there once whether it was hacking punched cards or Minecraft.[I'm guessing here. (>55)]
The crunch of the matter is that there is a lot to learn by pushing the boundaries. If you get good at it you are likely to _have developed_ an aptitude for efficient programming and fixing the stupidities of 'older and wiser and better paid' others.
Just some security bullshit... too bad a hacker highschool could have been really cool.
See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution
It's okay to to this or do that but you have to use best practices and follow safety protocols.
http://www.hackerhighschool.org/lessons/HHS_en7_Attack_Analysis.pdf
It was hard enought to find a course that would teach you the basics ethereal... awesome!
Gag me with a bar of soap.
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