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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
"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.
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
(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
...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.