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MIT President Tells Grads To 'Hack the World'
theodp writes "On Friday, MIT President L. Rafael Reif exhorted grads to 'hack the world until you make the world a little more like MIT'. A rather ironic choice of words, since 'hack the world' is precisely what others said Aaron Swartz was trying to do in his fateful run-in with MIT. President Reif presumably received an 'Incomplete' this semester for the promised time-is-of-the-essence review of MIT's involvement in the events that preceded Swartz's suicide last January. By the way, it wasn't so long ago that 2013 commencement speaker Drew Houston and Aaron Swartz were both welcome speakers at MIT."
...Line from "Hackers", repeated several times:
"Hack the planet!"
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I want to get off!
to today's youth, please always look critically at what the "adults" are doing, they've often quite wrong
Go ahead and hack the world. If you get caught, I never said that and we've never heard of you.
Can we get submissions without thedp's snide, inane and uninsightful comments thrown in? He is the worst with slipping in his own commentary as well as a million useless and irrelevant links in the story.
Ban theodp and fire timothy, I say.
So can this guy share some blame when the law comes knocking?
Cuz "hack the world" didn't work out so well for Aaron Swartz...
For our materials that are paid for by US tax dollars and put behind systems to deliberately make you get at it through our multiple gates and measures or any other thing we make money on.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Hack the world, but not the World of Warcraft. Video game hackers make it so making video games is more challenging(some cool games are impossible to make because they'll be ruined by hackers), and it costs more to hire game masters to ban cheaters. When the game is competitive, cheaters detract from the fun of the game.
... I would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those pesky kids!
I think you misunderstood "more like MIT". The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a deeply traditional institution, not some revolutionary place. People go there to change the odds in their favor, not to make the world a better place.
At MIT, the word "hack" means something very specific, and not criminal or unethical. It is a impressive, creative, and clever achievement. From http://hacks.mit.edu/ The word hack at MIT usually refers to a clever, benign, and "ethical" prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community (and sometimes even the rest of the world!). Note that this has nothing to do with computer (or phone) hacking (which we call "cracking").
I still think that the best advice I've ever heard/read at any commencement advice is.... to wear sunscreen...
Baz Luhrmann - Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTJ7AzBIJoI
Used to be, people would circlejerk over hacking vs. cracking. Based on the responses to this article, it seems like most people here don't even know the difference anymore.
...and get thrown in a cage for the rest of your life.
Prior to the incident with Aaron Schwartz and how it was handled by MIT, I associated nothing negative with MIT. MIT was all about higher technology learning and legendary hacks. I am saddened that MIT now conjures strong negative as well as strong positive thoughts with regards to some of the core activities that one associates with a computing career choice and lifestyle.
This summary is idiotic. At MIT, hacking doesn't mean computer hacking - it means doing something cool. Also, MIT is the one place where everyone (except certain parts of the admin) supports Aaron Swartz and *wouldn't* want him to be punished
cause if he did, he might see what Swartz did as therft that works to the detriment of hundreds, if not thousands of people, many of them penurious academics in foreign countries for whom Jstore royalty checks were a life line
but to heck with those poor retired writers, poets and professors - surely , as they eat dogfood, they can appreciate the grandeur of a dot com millionair liberating their work ?
swartz was a spoiled rich kid who didn' think thru, in any real sense, the implications of what he was doing
that people see him as a hero is just wierd
There is a difference between not living up to ones own standards and not having standards. Setting a good goal for yourself and telling others that this goal is good doesn't always preclude one from being weak and failing to live up to ones own expectations.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Aaron Schwarz would roll over in his grave.
'hack the world until you make the world a little more like MIT'.
You mean an environment that is shielded from market forces? That has been tried and it has been failing with apocalyptic consequences. You know, SOCIALISM. Don't try to say that it was never properly implemented because human nature won't allow it to work. You can murder significant fractions of the population to cower the rest to cooperate, but it stilll won't work. The ambitious will either flee or join the bureaucracy.
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Another fine opinion from The Fucking Psychopath® .
'hack the world until you make the world a little more like MIT'
I fail to see how pocket protector wearing nerds make the world better.
an ill wind that blows no good
And plagiarist.
He's now on every singe watchlist there is.
Signature intentionally left blank.
How quickly can we connect the Aaron Schwarz case as quickly as possible without sign of reflection to a random factoid?
While i certainly dont appreciate the possible punishment for copying files, what he did was *not* hacking. Hacking is ti exploit unexpected, new paths. Attaching a computer to a netwerk and copying files for releasing them, unrelated to demonstrating a new way of exploiting something is *not* hacking
I'm nearly forty and I'll say this: don't trust anyone or anything including ideals and ideas. Nothing will ever live up to your trust.
Trust is as empty a word as love. You might at best think you know when you trust or love someone else (and possibly be wrong) but nothing else. They are one-directional and therefore mostly meaningless words that people subconsciously or consciously cling to to avoid reality.
That said it might well be a good decision to avoid reality, otherwise you'll become like me.
Why do you post anything on /. then? If you believed as you say you wouldn't bother posting, try Plato.
More like, take a famous and highly illustrative case of someone "hacking the world" who then gets murdered by society, a society that sees fit to encourage its own "golden bunch" to enjoy liberties not available to the rest of us.
I'm sure you'll see this as hyperbole and say he killed himself. In a moment of clarity, he perhaps realized exactly the nature of reality. That a society that sees fit to excessively punish someone with good intentions, no real damage done, and an opportunity to punish him at appropriate level would instead go way overboard just because it can... Well I wish he had realized that he could make it through this and he and society could come out better...
And he was hacking the the original sense, which doesn't mean doing whatever you feel like regardless of the ethical implications, but exploring and expanding perhaps especially because of the ethical implications
lol, captcha is "flagrant"
now 500 kids went and bought machettes...they were last seen hacking up everything in ther epath cause they cant quite make anything look like MIT.
kludge = foreign temporary worker definition of english NON foreign temporary worker word cause the foreign temporary worker is bent over taking it from a min wage cooperate job
Harvard dropouts started MicroSoft and Facebook. Stanford/grads dropouts started CISCO, Yahoo, Google, HP ... I dont see MIT with an "elephant" for all its bravado.
MIT doesn't have a trademark on the term
I must be old. "Hack" has never meant to break into or "crack" if you will. Hacking is to modify something to make it do something it was never intended to do. Usually something pretty neat or innovative.