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Ask Slashdot: What Inspired You To Start Hacking?
An anonymous reader writes "What got you into hacking? This is a question that Jennifer Steffen, IOActive CEO, often asks hackers she meets on conferences around the world. More often than not, the answer is movies: War Games, Hackers, The Matrix, and so on. But today, it is the real life hacking that is inspiring the movies of tomorrow. 'Hackers are doing epic stuff,' she says, and they are now inspiring movies and comics. So, what got you started? And what makes a good hacker today?"
will anyone actually admit to getting into hacking unless they're white hats employed to do just that on a legal basis?
Q: "Why do you hack into computers?"
A: "Because that's where the data is."
Table-ized A.I.
When I was a kid I burned my right hand at age 5. I couldn't write, and I had recently gotten a rubiks cube. I wondered how to solve it and worked it out in my head. When my bandages came off I solved it in one day. Because I couldn't open it up or play with it I had to think about it, it made me hungry to play with and understand everything. Something I still feel to this day.
It was 1983, and we had had our first home computer, a TI-99/4A, for about a week.
I got up early and found Dad typing in a lot of numbers and letters. "Whatcha doing, Dad?"
"It's called 'programming'. I'm telling the computer what I want it to do."
Then he ran his program, which changed the background color and drew a block figure of a man in the center.
It was a magical moment. The computer did what Dad told it to do. I had to learn to do that myself.
The rest is history.
I saw my dad use his 286 to dial into our local library's BBS and see if a book was checked out. My brain melted and I had to know more and more and more-- up until that point, I had only used the 286 to play Ninja Turtles. 21 years later, here I am. :P
I could have been luckier by a few years, I guess, but having been born in 1969, I was the right age to have home computers mature pretty much when I did.
The first PC we had in our house was a TRS-80; and I looked forward to receiving TRS-80 magazine, with a nice shiny new fresh cassette tape to load up :)
The rest of the story pretty much tells itself.
Before the media hijacked the term "hacking" as "destructive intrusion" it meant "curious intrusion." Hackers are curious people who just want to know how a system works.
Technically the definition is
1. 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.
2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
3. A person capable of appreciating {hack value}.
4. A person who is good at programming quickly.
5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a UNIX hacker'. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)
6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence `password hacker', `network hacker'. The correct term is {cracker}.
I started hacking because:
a) I wanted to crack copy protected games, which involved learning 6502 assembly, and
b) I wanted to figure out how the games worked -- how was the map represented, were were the sprites, how did the AI work, how did the collision detection work, where was the music stored. By learning how to cheat at them I didn't have to waste my time trying to master them; I would have more time to tear apart more games. Often times it was more fun to reverse engineer the game then play the game itself.
War Games was a documentary of stuff that was already going on, not a source of inspiration
I find counter-hacking is much more difficult and fulfilling than hacking. I like playing a fair video game and cheaters hacked up Starcraft. So I became engaged in the fun and quite secretive realm of counter hacking. You see games like League of Legends running tribunals. If you can out the hackers and ban them or restrict them before the community hacks "because everyone else is hacking", you can keep your game fair without cheaters.
The past few years, I've been trying to figure out how to make multiple P2P servers that act like normal servers, but one hacker on one server wouldn't ruin the game play. Its tough thinking up the concept of redundant servers, since they can offset sometimes. I think it is doable though.
God spoke to me
I thought that with 10 seconds of hacking, you could do anything whether it be looting government files, shutting down security, or changing all the traffic lights to green. I demand that the makers of those movies refund me for all that time I spent learning!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I started hacking well before I had access to a computer. I took apart almost all of my toys and anything else that I was allowed to. Hacking has nothing to do with computers. It's all about the desire to understand and possibly improve on systems. Fortunately computers became accessible and affordable at the right time in history for me. Today I program and play with microcontrollers for fun and profit.
Read TLDP's Coffee HOWTO ( http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Coff... ), messed around with some simple hardware. Now I use Google Voice to control my lights via SMS -- a hack in the traditional sense, I suppose.
DigiComp I was a plastic, hand-cranked, 3-bit state machine, with some restrictions on the allowed state transitions.
You programmed it by pushing little plastic tubes on to little plastic tabs.
I had one when I was 9 or 10 years old.
I've been a hacker ever since.
After my first cigarette. Really?
I used to play a game called Masters of Orion II. I became so obsessed with this game and with manipulating some of the elements, like which of the game's characters became captains in my fleet, that I devoted an unhealthy amount of time to figure out how to cheat the game. I used a hex compare utility to start hacking away at where the save files stored this data, and eventually I was able to map the hex code and location for every character, and every technology in the game. The thrill of this minor achievement in my teens is what sparked the continued interest.
When I was in middle school, I got a TI81. On those things, the only way to transfer a program was to manually copy it. After copying a few, I got an idea about the language/syntax and starting coding my own. Friends wanted me to copy my programs to their calculators and by the time the "cabled" calculators came out, I was a being asked for games I had written by strangers in HS. While it's not Lisp/Java/C, TI Basic gave me a love of programming (creating things!) that got me through university with a CS degree and I'm typing this from a senior level engineering position in silicon valley a couple decades later.
But without that calculator? Who knows. Coding while in algebra through differential equations classes in grade school/high school was also a great way to look like I was "paying attention";)
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
More often than not, the answer is movies: War Games, Hackers, The Matrix, and so on.
More often than not, she was talking to someone who thinks a hacker is what you see in movies, and not actual hackers then... Clearly she can't tell the difference. I've never actually been to one of those hacker conferences (too poor, many hackers are), but I'd presume a good number of them are professionals that deal with auxiliary industries related to hacking and hacking defense, as well as others trying to make a quick buck in that arena, and not very many actual hackers.
captcha: fanout
Tracy Kidder's "The soul of a new machine"
In the early 80s, my high got a few microcomputers (Ohio Scientific, if you're interested). They had a 6502 CPU, 48K of memory, and two 8" floppy drives, with a total of about 540K of storage. They came with the old BASIC Star Trek game - the one that used numbers for commands, rather than the one that used three-letter abbreviations. I loved the game, but when I heard we could actually make modifications, or even write our own games, I was hooked. I wasted so much time in the computer room over the next couple of years, they had to ban me from it, a few times.
I remember one of the math teachers proudly saying that, if we upgraded to double-sided floppy drives, we could get more than full megabyte of storage online.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
Like it or not, people born in the 80s saw those press releases on how this guy programmed his way to success, and thought, "that is the racket I should be in" but along the way, we enjoyed it and stayed in this industry.
their rigid grammar...
I pirated copies of X-Wing and Tie Fighter back when they were on floppy disks. After finding out they had an anti-piracy feature, I had this hunch to edit the .exe and remove or change the words they wanted me to enter.
I grew up on video games. My first system was an Atari 2600, then a NES, then an SNES. I also had a 386 DX 16 with PC Geos on it. Wolfenstein 3d on a PC without a sound-card was the first PC game I ever played. I didn't find it very entertaining, the SNES, I thought, was superior.
I had recently made friends with some kids down the street. There were 6 of them living in one house, most of them older than me, but the younger ones about the same age. Anyway, they were also gamers, but they were PC gamers. They hada 486 DX2 66mhz with 4mb ram and a sound card. They showed me a game called Doom. HOLY SHIT I was blown away. Doom was leaps and bounds ahead of anything else I had ever played, I begged my mom to buy me a PC.
This was all before the Internet "happened". My first PC was a Pentium 75 with 5 gigs of ram, soundblaster, and 1gb hard drive. Around the time Windows 95 came out I signed up with a local dial-up ISP. I discovered the the World Wide Web. There was a cli app that would let you change the graphics and sound data in Doom's WAD files. I had recently bought a computer scanner, and I spent about a month taking pictures of my family, working on bloody death animations, and calling them into my room to voice various sounds that I would edit and use in my version of the game, "Family Doom".
I guess that was my first go at "hacking." Later I got a job at that same ISP that I had origially signed up with. There I learned the basics of TCP/IP networking, Linux, and the Internet. It was amazing having access to a T1 back in the days before broadband. I guess I wasn't a hacker, but I had a solid "script kiddie" status.I was also earning a little bit of money, being 15 and not having any bills, I used the money to start building my own rig from parts. Overclocking became a hobby of mine, I got my A+ certification a couple years later.
I didn't start coding until my late teen/early 20s. I had tons of experience editing config files, or working on the command line, but I hadn't a clue about programming. I knew Doom and Quake were written in a language called C, so I downloaded Visual Studio Express 2003 and looked up the tutorials on cprogramming.com . After going through those tutorials I decided to enroll in my local college under the Computer Science program.
The most surprising non-academic thing I learned was that most of my professors were clueless when it came to computer literacy. They could write C or Java code in their sleep, but they were oblivious to basic computing. One professor couldn't even navigate a FAT/NTFS filesytem, a C drive? What's that? That's when I knew that the kind of education I had was different. I'm not some book-learned CS grad, although I do appreciate academics, I was and am a hacker first.
My first experience with computers was some data entry I did for a small company for some ice-cream money. The software was not very flexible and I ended up accidentally erasing my work.
It left a bad taste in my mouth (as did no ice-cream).
Later my friend talked me into taking a programming class after school in my senior high-school year, on TRS-80's. I was hesitant, but when I learned programming allowed me direct control over the computer I realized that one could make data entry far easier than that crap-ware I used before. I was the master and the computer was my loyal slave! It was better than bossing my little brother around because the computer didn't yap back.
I also made a simplified Space-Invaders-like game in the class, which really felt cool, although it was spaghetti-code galore in hindsight. My friend got ticked at me for hogging the computer.
Table-ized A.I.
I had a Z80, and then a Vic20 and then a plus4 and then I got a modem and then I explored. Games required a floppy and I didn't want that. Games had cheats and I wanted to create an anti-cheat, and then I invented more cheats so I could learn more about writing anti-cheats. The more I learned the more I explored and the more I shared and the better we all became...
And then you buzzkills destroyed all that by making it a federal offence or an act of terrorism.
.
"We are the priests of the temples of Syrinx - our great computers, fill the hallowed halls - all the gifts of life, are here within our walls..."
APK
P.S.=> "we've taken care of everything: the words you hear, the songs you sing, the pictures that give pleasure to your eye... in spite of all, #1, we work together common sons (never need to wonder how, or why)"
... apk
I would never call myself a hacker, as that would do sever discredit the real ones out there. When I was young games would stop working in DOS/Windows 3.5. There was no one around who could fix them for me, so I had to figure it out myself. As I grew up, I always maintained the idea that systems were like onions, and if you wanted to/needed to, you could access the different layers. Early ages of internet were like the wild west and had some fun times.
At about 23, I stopped doing any real hacking as the risk is greater than reward. I obtained my current position by finding some security flaws and bringing them to the attention of the process owner. yay me
What if?
About 28 years ago, we had a family computer, and I taught myself BASIC using a book my dad had. I copied examples from the book, then messed with them to learn how they worked. I don't really remember it all, but I think I also had an interest in computers because my parents would tell me it was a good field to get into for employment stability and money potential. I also remember building robots with my dad and just always had a curiosity that inspires me to try and figure things out.
I was in Detention in 7th grade.
My teacher had a book "101 Basic Computer Games" on her desk. I was bored. I opened the book. I read the BASIC source code, and I thought "I can do that."
That was in 1975 or 1976. The rest is history.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
I spent more time at school twiddling my pen trying to be like Boris than learning anything. Also the movie hackers and the hacking challenges that used to be hosted on the cyberarmy website.
What do you mean hacking?
I was the kid who took apart telephones, figured out how to make them do strange things, "borrowed" spare parts from the alarm company dumpster and made things with them... I learned to pick locks, listen in a room with an inductive pickup on phone wires (on old POTS phones, this was possible)
my first 'hack' was to short out connections on a video pong machine and make it do weird things.
my second and probably best hack was to make a working apple ][ out of spare parts in the apple store I worked at on weekends. Integer basic forever!
Ultimately I hack because of incurable curiosity and a desire to improve and eliminate inefficiencies. I am a producer, not a consumer.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
In the lifestyle sense, my father had tools and fixed things instead of blowing his hard earned savings on paying others to do what anyone could.
In the computer sense, magazines provided basic programs you could manually type in.
In the practical sense, I had a need, I wanted to read late at night but mom would catch me with a flashlight. I used a 12-volt toy train transformer, a 12-volt taillight bulb from a car, wires running to two thumbtacks in the doorframe of my bedroom door to act as a switch, so when mom opened the door the light went off and all I had to do was close to hide the book and pretend to be asleep--was successful for years.
When I becme older, there were free PD programs. Nowadays that there are no magazines, and kids grow up with tablets and expensive apps, I have no clue. (Heck, people were getting in car accidents from heavy key-chains turning off their ignitions instead of simply doing rolling restarts.)
Anybody here ever play that game? It was one of the first computer games I got seriously into, it was an RTS, and it had an incredible feature: all the units and buildings had their attributes stored in plaintext files. It was awesome, because I could just open up a random file, search for a unit (the sniper, for instance), and figure out where and how the damage was calculated. It actually had an impressively complex damage system, so the sniper was excellent against humanoid targets but bad against armor. It incorporated a critical hit chance as well... so I redesigned the sniper with the ability to get massive crit damage against armored targets.
The best part was that the snipers in that game could disguise themselves as any piece of terrain, so you could build up your army of super snipers and then overrun the enemy with a horde of trees and bushes.
Don't underestimate things like simple computer games and map editors to introduce programming concepts to young minds. That got me started, and only much later did I realize that I had been learning about variables, objects, attributes, and general programming principles without even meaning to.
rant against computers and technology made me want to learn more. After all, if their kind hates something, then that thing must be good. I knew what their kind stood for, and I know it is wrong. That showed the way that technology is great. Their kind tries to make everything about technology, and that gets tiresome. They try to ruin everything.
I'm not much of a hacker--if I could ever be called one--but I do have the one story...
We had Zork on a Prime minicomputer. Well, I wanted to play it but my "boss" at the time wouldn't give me an account on the box. He jokingly told his fellow managers that he had "assigned" me to hack it.
So I grabbed some of the documentation and discovered two accounts--SPOOLQ and BATCHQ--which had no passwords. As you can guess, SPOOLQ ran the printing system and BATCHQ the batch processing system. So I tried to login as those accounts and was immediately logged out. However, if I logged in and immediate hit the "Break" key, it wouldn't log me out and I could do what I wanted--play Zork.
Of course, I log in as SPOOLQ and nobody's print jobs run...
I was born in 1946. My father had been an Air Corps radio operator during WWII. He died when I was very young, but left behind a Hallicrafters receiver and a few boxes of electronic "stuff" that my mom did not throw away. My grandfather was not in the military, but was interested in radio during the 20's, 30's and 40's. He repaired radios and built some of his own from parts. He died, also when I was very young and, like my dad, left behind boxes of intriguing "stuff". When I was 9 or 10, I commandeered the Hallicrafters S-38 and started listening to Shortwave.
In our little town, the library had very few books about electronics and what they had were very old. I read them all. I wanted to check out the 1944 ARRL handbook, but it wasn't there. Somebody else had it. The librarian said she knew who had it and that it was over-due so she called the person that had it and they bicycled down to the library to return it. It was one of the high school kids a few years older than me, but the son of one of my mom's best friends. We struck up a friendship that endures to this day. He became a ham, too.
The librarian said that her brother, in the next town, was a ham radio operator and would I like to talk to him. I got my mom to take me over to meet him and decided that I was going to be a ham, too. My mom helped me study for the FCC test and learned the code along with me so I could pass the code test. At age 11, I passed the test and was a ham radio operator. I built my own Heathkit DX-40 transmitter, strung up an antenna and was on my way. My mom got her license, too, but didn't upgrade it when it expired. The entry level novice license was not renewable.
I discovered that I liked to build my own equipment. I salvaged parts from TV repair shops and surplus stores. In high school, I built a 1,000 Watt amplifier and had my own surplus model 15 Teletype machine, operating digital modes in the early 1960s, way ahead of the Internet. All my gear then used tubes, of course.
When I was in college, I studied Electrical Engineering. I wrote my first computer program in Fortran IV in the Fall of 1964. I had my first computer at home around 1976 which was a Mostek F8 development board interfaced to a surplus TI Silent 700 printing terminal.
Throughout my Engineering career, I was mostly a hardware designer, but software eventually played an important part, too, as a designer of elevator control systems, Elevator in the vertical transportation sense, not grain elevators, although I also designed grain temperature monitoring systems for the grain type.
I'm in my late 60's now, still working part-time in engineering and teaching electronics at the college level. I still enjoy being a ham radio operator, too. It's been a good ride and it's not over yet.
73
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
How did I start?
Age 6 - taking apart any old electronics. old radios, walkie talkies, whatever .....computers ever since along with car repairs, etc
Age 11 - Commodore 64 and IBM PC XT comes to the house
Age 12 - learn how to solder, mostly unsoldering components from old electronics
Age 14 - Introduced to Borland C
Age 16 - CB and dabbled in HAM
Age 18 - College for Comp Engineering, only to fail out after spending every hour in computer lab instead of class (uudecode anyone?)
Age 20 - US Navy working on 60s era computers
Age 24 - First Net admin job migrating from Novell to WinNT + First home PC of my own!
Today - job in cybersecurity doing all kinds of different stuff, with side projects in the Internet of Things related to security
What makes a good hacker today?
Same thing as always, the desire to not just have technology, but the desire to know how it works!
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
If my story is interesting, what do I get?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
I have been fiddling with computers since I was a kid. Always pushing the envelope one step further. My first 'hack' was networking DOS over a serial cable in '93. I was so excited to pipe files through and not to have to use them floppies anymore. Years down the road, I was probing ports on 'major servers'. Lead a hacking group and I can say we had a good run before we moved on from the "sport". Some returned, and some are wanting to drag me back into it. Well no need to talk of methods, these days all you need is a VM and a few guides to get you started. What's really surprising is that security, on the defense hasn't really caught up given how accessible hacking knowledge is now days... and how easy it actually is to test and develop through VMs. Breaking out of VMs is also another fun thing to do, maybe I should get into that when... (wheeen?) there is more free time. In any case, hacking is a time-intensive sport ;)
When I took a class on Visual Basic 6.0 I realized i could write a program to crack passwords stored in the schools unprotected registry. It was quite fun.. i got the admin and vnc passwords.. of course later I found out VB6 was really not the best medium for such use, but I guess taking this class is what inspired me.
Music. I love to play music, and I wanted to explore writing it on computer where I could listen to how multiple instruments sounded. This was in Apple II days (I found the Commodore PET a little too boring an the Vic-20 was handy but not as interesting as it could have been had I been able to afford storage)
... well, these were not low-skill entry points.
Playing multi-voice music on an Apple II required learning hex-code "assembler" (much later on I wrote an assembler to make my life easier). Going to IBM PC resulted in better CPU and performance, but harder to make music play.
Also, I really do love communicating with people and for anyone else who saw the internet before WWW, as well as the old Fido days
Our junior high school math office had a teletype, which was so cool because it could type things automatically. All uppercase, but still. Back in 1972.
I hacked my work computer to add telnet (All computers should have telnet or SSH) simply to play nethack.alt.org
Worth it.
demo scene and ansis's and their associated bbs's.. i went by the names Surak Khoteth & Nitron and made some pretty epic ANSI art that is mostly lost now. the early general availability of the internet led to a healthy obsession with linux/unix and networking.
and my wife was nagging a lot that day so I thought hey, there's plenty of space in the yard to bury her, so why not?
When my father was in grad school mid in the 1980's, he got a pc clone to work on. An Epson Equity, if I remember right. 8088 cpu, two 5 1/4 floppy drives, later upgraded with a 20mb(!) hdd, a full 640k of ram, and a Hercules video card. The machine, and all the beeps it made were fascinating as a young child, but what really got things going for me was the discovery of the reference manuals (made from trees!) for the computer's hardware, msdos, and *gasp*:
GW-BASIC.
By wielding the fearsome power of GOTO, I could now make the computer beep indefinitely, much to the dismay of my parents and older siblings.
The internet, and the concept of messing around with remote systems (non-destructively) came via dumb terminals at the local library. The WWW hadn't arrived yet, but there were lots of things that seemingly had something to do with Archie comics available. More usefully, there were usenet, ftp, gopher and telnet.
"What is this telnet thing, and what can I do with it? Oh, apparently I can connect to lots of other computers around the world."
15 minutes later...
"I guess I'm connected to a computer at NOAA now."
I felt very clever for a moment. Then I realized I had no idea what to do next, and felt less clever.
"What do I do now?"
"Well, what *can* I do?" ... and so it begins
"Inspiration" that leads to hacking seems to be what leads you to make LEDs blink with Arduinos, and put on art shows... (Did you know Arduinos use the Harvard architecture?)
For me it is necessity that still leads me to hack. I hack to survive, not from day to day but from decade to decade. Early on I couldn't figure out why society acted in such an alarmingly insane manner when I first became aware of such a thing as 'society', back in 1989. In the country next door there was a guy with an early laser sight who went around and shot immigrants. Countries went to war which cost them much more than the sp(oils) they got out of it. The telephone companies had the resources to let you dial in all day, but instead they sold bandwidth by the trickle while everybody agreed that the InterNet could save the world. - Weren't we supposed to agree on how to run this planet? Wasn't it democracy that we agreed to kill and die for? ...Are we all just trying to be the last one standing?
Computers were widely reported not to be so shockingly inconsistent, contradictory as people. Having already taken apart a bunch of home appliances, successfully putting them back together again, many without my parents ever becoming aware of my secret learning, I opened a computer and saw that the interesting parts were hidden beneath layers of epoxy. This was as far as my childhood mind was able to get, permission to learn or not. So I gave up my childish ways.
As far as my parents and teachers were supposed to know, CPUs and software had a user's manual and price tag and that was final. Fortunately I had been getting pirated games since I was 7 years old, so I knew that there was a way. There was always a way, so I searched for it. I went to libraries, book stores, and of course the internet whenever I could. It didn't take long before I dismissed BASIC and started looking at Assembler as way to see inside the mind of this machine that now has come to dominate our society. With Assembler I was able see how the programmer builds up an illusion from 1s and 0s, data composed and re-composed turning into information in the mind of the user, and how this then becomes reality.
By now friends and family saw me as their future cash-cow. Surely I'd be some rich internet millionaire. Money, and how it commands people, disgusts me. Depression almost killed me. Perhaps in a way it did. Snowden proved to everyone that I wasn't a lunatic. I think he is a saint.
I'm not a burned out-husk. When morning comes in just a few hours I'm out to scavenge high-voltage electronics and CRTs. I'm going to space motherfuckers.
All rites reversed 2010
... apart to see how they worked then try to put them back together.
They question should be: Why doesn't every curious kid grow up to be a hacker (in the good sense of the word)?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Computers are something I can control. Not only that, they are capable of amazing feats of calculation, at an ever expanding rate. Tron didn't inspire, but was itself inspired by the ethos of the age. A brand new world. An enormous world of endless possibilities. All within the reach - although rarely the grasp - of an ordinary human.
And instead we got .NET
So sad.
Working with Wordstar was tricky, but I needed a spell checker. Found one but needed to swap disks in the middle. Very un-cool. Wait, I could erase the Help files on my wordstar floppy and have space for the spellchecker. But Wordstar could not call it up. It wanted me to buy Spellstar. So I renamed my other spell checker Spellstar and it worked like a charm. From then it went downhill as I started changing the machine's text responses from games so they would be friendly or funny. Next it was putting tape over the write-protect slots and editing purchased programs. Then swapped out the 10 MHz 8080 for a Z-20 (or something close to that) to goose my machine up to 12.5 Mhz. Thank goodness I had the 8-bit machine with the big 64K of RAM and duel floppy drives. Man, CP/M rocked.
I took apart the mechanism one of my Dad's antique mantel clocks. My Mom saw me at the dining room table with brass gears and plates and screws scattered in front of me. "Your Dad is going to kill you when he gets home from work!" I put that sucker back together and it worked as well as before (not well).
I'm a little later than some of the other posters. We've had a computer at home for most of my life, starting with an IBM PCJr. I grew up playing games on that or Apple II's at school. When I was about 8 or 9, we had a 486-based machine that dad put together. My interest started with wanting to learn the command line to launch my games. It continued when I started to wonder how programs got onto the floppy disks we bought, in the first place. I asked around, and someone had an old book of BASIC programs. It was just full of program listings, and not terribly useful for learning the language from scratch (especially without outside guidance). I figured out enough to do some basic math, to use goto and print, but not much else. I forgot about programming for years (but I knew more about how the computer worked than my father by the time I was about 11).
Fast forward to 10th grade. I had the option for QBasic and Visual Basic programming, followed by C++ in the second semester. I took it. Getting back into programming (Okay, really, getting into it for the first time), felt *right*. Those classes kind of sucked; not much structure, and they treated C++ like "C with iostream", but it was enough to get me looking on my own and teaching myself more.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Can't sleep nights.
The sex.
i don't feel like breaking into other people's computers, networks or other electronic devices. I want to be a law-abiding citizen.
I guess a good hacker is someone who is able to guess a password or break through a hardware firewall by installing a trojan that an antivirus program cannot decect.
This article asks for a rant, so here you go:
I got into this by luck. Otherwise I might have been just the run of the mill awkward person :) My mom found an ad in the paper. A school was looking for students to start 5th year on a computer programming curriculum, and entry was test-based. You had to pass a maths and a literature test on subjects that a 4th grader should be knowing.
I hadn't seen a computer until I started school in September, but there was a book that was recommended, and I got that during the summer holiday. With no computer, just with pen and paper, I went through the book, and it just went in. I had a void in my brain that gladly sucked it all in. The I about forgot it all when I sat in front of a Spectrum clone and didn't realise I had a power button to press on the monitor to turn it on.
Ever since, I've been attracted to the field. I was 11 when I started. Being awkward helped a bit. I was never competitive, so I rarely played any games that others could play, so if it was a game, it had to be a text-based adventure. Nobody would play those, and I'd get my ass kicked in any others, so I avoided those. The guys kicking my ass in games weren't really that good at programming the computers, so hey, while you guys are busy playing games, I'll try this little algorithm I saw in a book and see what it does and try to understand it. I spent my PE classes in the computer lab instead. Things moved on, we got PCs, we moved from BASIC to Turbo Pascal, and it was still great. I dabbled with assembly language, but never got experienced with it. I picked it up a few times, but never got past flinging a few registers and some data on the stack. I don't regret it though. I learned other cool things.
I'm glad I didn't jump straight into C, as in Pascal you have a real string type that you don't care about, but in C you have a... convention... And if anything, when you start to learn programming numbers and strings are what you play with first. These days people are started in C, which I think is plain mad. Back then Python wasn't on the horizon. Nowadays, if you don't start newbies on Python as their first ever language you need to be shot. Python is the new BASIC in my view. What I like about Python is that "batteries included" thing. Want to have a taste with something? import thing_that_does_what_you_want_to_play_with. You'll study what that does later. Play time is now. Some purists may consider this to be ass backwards, but come on: to get interest, you have to play with it first, then study the boring bits. And study the boring bits in locally ordered random sequence. Sequential order can only put you off and make you hate the thing. And by FSM don't start people in Java or C#! You can put that in a follow up class, after your students know WTF to do with a computer in terms of programming.
Nowadays I'm abusing the hell out of Bash, but only because I got really good at it, hated Perl, didn't actually get properly acquainted with Python until recently, and I have serious aversion of using PHP to write console tools.
Of course, as you might imagine for a Slashdot reader, my social life is absolutely devoid of content :) I don't like it that way anymore, but if I let go I have no idea what to do next. It's like you either do this full-life, or you don't. If I cut down, I just feel that I'd write OpenSSL-style code instead, and I'm not at ease with the idea at all. The fact that I work in a very tiny company that relies on me probably doesn't help. This paragraph is probably good material for an "Ask Slashdot" article: "How do you cut down and get a life?". I know it's a viable proposition for an article after reading the comments on the "Parenting rewires male brains" article. Either everyone there was masterfully trolling, or I've been doing everything wrong in my life so far. I'm yet to see what I can do to fix that, but I have to, as I'm 31 now, and I don't want to become Larry Laffer (he is 40 in the game).
Oh, and I think I'll be getting my first downmods ever. But do as you like. /RANT
Question for religious people: where do unrepentant masochists go when they die?
The built a Heath Kit 27 inch console TV on the Kitchen table. If you can tell what made me do that you will have your answer.
...with an Apple Lisa my Dad bought from a Heathkit dealer in Kansas. That was my first computer in the late 80's. Can remember upgrading that thing through several generations of Macs as it morphed into the Mac XL and you could put in new hard drives, upgrade RAM. (Crazy that my iPhone has more CPU, storage, and display resolution than that first battle tank of a "personal" computer.)
Reading Stephen Levy's Hackers book when I was 14 sucked me in to the hacking mentality:
http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/729/pg729.txt
Since then I've worked on pen testing teams at Cisco, done source code review for Fortify and Cigital, protected the Federal Reserve Bank, CitiBank, from attacks, audited at Fortune1, and organized a push one of the world's largest ever PKI update.
Information security is in many ways an insane field to go into and I wouldn't recommend it to my children, but it's done me well.
What counts more than anything is an unbridled sense of curiosity.
i called what i did "customizing" and never considered it hacking back when win98 was supported i would do registry modifications and do things to strip IE & OE and windows media player out and install my own software, same for Win2k & XP, and i like to keep a custom Linux install because i dont really like what comes out of the box on Linux distros,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
1978, aged 8, our school had a commodore pet 3032. i typed in a simple program in BASIC, 10 for i = 1 to 40, 20 print tab(i), i 30 next i, 40 goto 10 and watched the numbers 1 to 40 scroll across the screen. i figured "huh that was obvious, i can do that" and 25 years later i was reverse-engineering NT 4.0 Domains network traffic (often literally one bit at a time) by the same kind of logical inference of observing results and deducing knowledge.
by 2006 i learned that there is something called "Advaita Vedanta" which is crudely known in the west as "espistemology". Advaita Vedanta basically classifies knowledge (there are several types: inference is just one of them), and knowing *that* allows you to have the confidence in your abilities. up until i heard about Advaita Vedanta i was "hacking blind and instinctively", basically. now i know that reverse-engineering is basically an extreme form of knowledge inference. which is kinda cool.
Do you mean that you still can't do it under 10 seconds? NOOB!
Didn't work :p
But seriously...C64...seeing the cracked games...
Impressed by the whole demo scene and intro messages...
hex editors...decompilers....
I had a love of video games in the late '70s right around when the TRS-80 Model I Level I was released and the opportunity to sit with one for hours at the local Radio Shack once a month. To be honest, I was hoping to get into dentistry or pharmacy, but my grades weren't good enough, but they were good enough by half a percent to get me into the University of Saskatchewan's Computer Science program through the College of Arts and Science.
And thus my career was born as much by chance as by intention.
Nowadays I'm on disability, but I still sling code for the fun of it -- I just don't have to put up with bullshit meetings or any body else's artificial schedules, so it's as much fun as it was when I was 14 and just learning to PEEK and POKE Z-80 machine code.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Hacking's definition has become such a mess that it should be retired forever. The nerd community needs to come up with a new term and never tell anyone. And, as a sidenote, this also goes for the terms "geek" and "nerd". When I was growing up, non-techies never wanted to be called these things, they were derisive. The geeks, however, were pretty comfortable with it. Today, anyone with an Atari shirt and/or Android phone is called a geek, but let's face it they're really just modified hipsters. So, if by hacker you mean someone who enjoys coding or customizing technology (the traditional definitions), let's face it the age of the BBS was truly the frontier. Born in an age when technology was cryptic and required a learning curve, these "walled ecosystems" were where the true geek wanted to be. Either playing in it or being a sysop. What an amazing time. Today, web scripting database programming are wonderful fun and something that can be shared easily with others.
Grew up chewing on NES controllers. Born in 87.
Wanted to change the rules of the games, but back then it was pretty much play it or don't, you can't change anything.
Grandparents got me a Vtech Computer with a one-line display 24 characters long, text only.
It had a BASIC mode where you could have it ask you for your name, and print it back. I was hooked.
Made text based RPG games that listed out your HP, their HP, then asked you to input 1 to punch, 2 to kick, etc. I even had a spell list and MP later on. I was like 7 or 8 when I did that.
Knew then and there I wanted to be a Software Developer, now I'm 26 and make 100K/year doing exactly what I planned when I was 9. I always thought everyone flip-flopping their career choices was a bit odd. I've always known 100% this is my destiny.
Dropped out of high school, never enrolled in college, pure self-taught passion. There is an American dream but it requires passion. I'll take passion over schooling any day of the week and my hiring practices reflect that.
But at the end of the day.... It was video games that made me start coding. I did everything people say you shouldn't do yet here I am.
my mom was one of the first programmers... when she went back to school it was to learn a new-fangled language called "Pascal", version 1, on the CDC 6600...
she showed me her homework, 8 queens, it made perfect sense to me (10 years old), the rest is history.
that said, computer programming these days is terrible!!!! not the same thing at all.
The day I got ahold of a couple 74181s was the day I started to build my own machine. No cpus available then. Then the 6800 came home, then the (wonderful!) 6809, then the 68000... won a 68k eval board at a tech show... then the Amiga, SO far ahead of its time... 68020, 68040... then Motorola dropped the ball, Intel took the field.... Windows... sigh.
Eventually, OSX (which I love) and Apple (whom I despise.) linux refused to build a standard UI, locked itself out of the same market Windows and OSX were aiming to own (and which they succeeded in owning), so I never used linux for much more than a (very good) server platform. Always thought that was a wrong turn for everyone. linux being so rabidly anti-commercial, that is. The GPL was the ultimate poison pill for success, "eat me" written in pretty colors all over it. And you did. Oh well.
So I made my way in the world with Windows as much as I had to, the Amiga and later OSX as much as I could get away with, and I have to say, it was a great ride. Much of my financial success, such as it was, came from Windows, true enough, but most of my fun was had elsewhere. My fondest memories are from projects built in assembler, C, Python. Although I did a lot of hardware design career-wise, software was so much more fun. Eventually, I just quit doing hardware. Meh.
I see everything closing down now. Malware and black hats turned a wonderful computer revolution into a PITA for everyone, and the manufacturers followed suit by locking down a great deal that used to be open to play with. We got the abortion of an operating system that is IOS, and the pay-to-develop garden that "supports" it. Kind of like how a punji stick supports a person who stepped in the wrong pit.
Pretty much retired now, sorry to see you guys get hit with such a lousy legacy. In our defense, I think most of us didn't think it would go this way.
But perhaps the next tech revolution will be as much fun, or more so, than the beginning of this one was. I was reading about open source robots today. Someone makes the hardware, you plug in your own apps. You people have a chance to make that your own. Don't blow it like you did linux. Open should mean open. Not just "open if you do it my way."
In summary, get off my lawn -- and go do something wonderful.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
... really leaves you hacking
The real turning point for me was after I read _The Cuckoo's Egg_, by Clifford Stoll. My main takeaway from that book was that you don't necessarily need to be good, you just need to be persistent. So I took back all of my birthday and Christmas presents that year and acquired a modem. And then I started *doing*.. if it didn't work, I tried another way.
I began exploring by calling BBSes at first, then by war dialing, by scanning NUAs, by doing zone transfers of domain names, running VMBs and VMB cities, scanning for codes on long-distance extenders, hacking the credit bureaus to provide credit cards to phone sex lines on beige boxed alliance teleconferences, and so on. I read everything I could get my hands on. I ran a BBS. I became a free information peddler. I went to surplus equipment warehouses and acquired gear, led clandestine missions to raid dumpsters (getting chased by AT&T more than once), and otherwise poked and prodded the world I lived in to understand how it was wired and how I could access it.
There were plenty of cultural influences and key experiences with computers at an earlier age. And I took apart every toy my parents gave me. But something in Cliff Stoll's book connected the dots for me that not only is this hacking stuff possible, it's not even that hard. It's just *obscure*. That realization also got me raided by the feds when I was a teenager.
Some people mentored me after that (other than the probation officer, I mean) and drove home that I could turn this knack into a career. And I did.
So what makes a good hacker today? Certainly it depends on the definition of the word. What particular subskills are you optimizing for when you use the term? But in general, it's a set of behaviors that lead to esoteric problem solving. The ability to drive towards an overall goal by incrementally chipping away at the problems. Then setting new goals based on what you've learned. And iterating over this again and again, driven nearly to the point of obsession. That's hacking. Some might classify it as a disorder.
My advice: wear a greyish-white hat, hack on something that has commercial value, profit.
There are a million companies that want your obsessive-compulsive curiosity trait. And in the end, you're going to do a deep-dive on something that really fascinates you and start your own companies. You're going to specialize leveraging everything you've ever been exposed to.
So, do something every day. Keep on hacking and keep on learning. If you hit a wall, find another way. The breakthroughs are your high, your reward.
(You also get piles of cash and assets if you're dedicated enough.)
I had a green bar LPT printout of Super Star Trek in mf-ing FORTRAN that ran on a Prime minicomputer. I went to sleep studying that stack of paper.
Later on I got a C=64.
Modular grid based electronic sets, too. The kind where you could make your own radio by plugging in component cubes. I don't know what you'd actually call them so I made up a name.
I guess I am the only person lame enough to admit it. I learned ASM to crack copy protection. A side effect was I developed the knowledge to code virii. I got into phreaking to swap the zero day. I started going to 2600 meetings and Defcon after I read The Hacker Crackdown and thought it would be cool to see Gail Thackery and other assorted miscreants in the flesh. From there it was on to cell phones (Oki 900 anyone?) and all the other goodness that flowed from LA 2600 like being inspired by listening to Aleph One talking about buffer overflows.
These days I am only aware enough of what "hackers" are up to do maintain a slightly above average defensive posture. Being a security guy comes with too much liability and the inevitability that your site is going to get hacked at some point if the data you are protecting is valuable enough. I fell out of the scene after I turned 18 because I did not want to deal with the legal repercussions of what I was up to. And honestly I was not smart enough to discover the exploits myself. When you are hanging out with people who were on the cutting edge of things like like buffer overflows, cell phone hacking and others who were working for the NSA... it tends to make you feel a bit dumb.
But I don't know a single one who would say that they became hackers because of a movie.
Most of them think the movies are a joke and unrealistic. Everyone I know who is a hacker
got into it because they liked to take things apart and figure out how they worked.
I started hacking because things are shit and I have to fix them. Shit cannot become epic, just more bearable.
BTW, I upgraded to LEDs everywhere so just signal me as I have a video recorder pointed at the lights and can dump all the frames for your hello.
NS4: I HUNGER! /.: Ain't dat data mining sweet?
NS4: I HUNGER!
NS4: I HUNGER!
NS4: I came.
Only about 25 years ago. We'd had the family computer (Amstrad CPC6128, a gift from my Grandad) for a year and I was bored of all the games. The manual had a big chapter on BASIC, so I decided to make my own game. It was an absolutely rubbish game, but everyone has to start somewhere.
I started with electronics engineering. My father was teaching me since I was around 6 or 7 years old to work on TVs (CRT), CB radios and a bunch of random electronics he got in for repairs (as a side job). What got me into hacking was one night when he was teaching me about different types of tubes. There was one that when it reached a certain temperature it would audibly hum and get louder as the heat rose. I played with that, figure out how to manipulate pitch and amplitude after burning a few of those tubes out and then assembled a sort of keyboard for it. I was hooked from then on. When I finally got a PC that could run Windows 95 and Red Hat Linux, I dove right into learning C and developing software to interact with the stuff I would build.
The closest I have ever come to anything resembling a normal project would be replacing the analog sticks in my Xbox360 controller with ones out of an old PS2 controller. Even that required a bit of a hack to fix the analog range.
I had a girlfriend who lived far away... and at my university I noticed people hacking away on terminals all the time. Eventually I figured out we could email, and then chat in realtime using talk. Thankfully a very nice wiz pointed me to a huge set of the BSD 4.3 man pages, all printed out like a bible. Give a young man a lot of free time, and a chance for some booty and learning will happen.
When I was a very young boy, about 5, my parents had been using an old-fashioned mechanical alarm clock for years, complete with two bells on top of it. As they replaced it, I got it - and felt the irresistible urge to take it apart. Just driven by sheer hunger to see the insides, and understand. Same thing with my father's watch.
It is still the same urge that drives me: using a machine whose workings I don't understand drives me mad.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I started at NTH (currently called NTNU) in Trondheim (Norway) in 1977, so my first-year programming class was in Fortran 2, hand-punched on 80-column cards.
I can still recall my sense of wonder when I realized (during the second lab exercise or so) that "I can make this computer do anything I like!".
My first ever extra-curricular program used modulo 1e10 arithmetic on a 36/72 bit machine in order to calculate pi with as many digits as I could manage within the 60 cpu seconds which was my maximum allotment.
Since then I've done an awful lot of hacking, but almost exclusively in the old meaning of the term.
Currently I'm playing around with hardware/software codesign on the Mill computer architecture, writing fast & efficient fp emulation for machine models without full hw fpu.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
I was young. I loved video games and I couldn't afford most of them.
I downloaded warez and fell in love with the underground scene. #Myth/Class FTW!
Trust me, if could have done something else with my life I would have.
my parents bought a computer when I was 5, and made me learn it.
They also were super paranoid about the outside world, "modern rock music", and pop culture, and because of their rants, raves, paranoia, and emotional abuse I had a hard time fitting in. I was not allowed to leave the house in my early teenage years alternating between being perpetually grounded over small slights, and my mom's irrational fear of pedophiles and predators
my only window to the outside world not controlled by my demeaning, paranoid, controlling parents was the computer. So learned. Its all I had. I found the internet, and online culture, and it warped my fragile little mind.
If could have done something else with my life I would have.
or did the hacking inspire the coughing? Either way...
PlanetVulkan.com
Back in '82 on 64k pcs a very rich business man I knew didn't want to pay for 9 licenses for software his company needed. I was called in to break the encryption. It took about an hour to find that they required an older version of the IBM Basic chip installed in the normally empty second rom socket. I told him to contact the most corrupt IBM systems person he knew and have them acquire the old chips. He paid me my $15 and I was out the door.
And so i started, a bit with batch-scripts, qbasic, VBA, until a friendly neighbor gave me 11 floppies with borland pascal and 10 kg of books. Then the real fun started with sound() and unit graph :).
Specifically, Borland Pascal/Object Pascal for DOS & Win16 - which turned into MY FAVORITE DEVTOOL of all-time for console apps/dos mode/tty + Win16/32/64, Delphi!
* :)
Good choice!
APK
P.S.=> You've also described PRETTY MUCH how I went about it myself also... apk
Watch_Dogs. Eat shit lol.
Started with radios , tvs, tape-recorders, ... appliances. Started real job at a defense company, assembling cables, test-equipment. Saw my 1st computer, hp 1000; Taught myself Basic, and then hired to do software support. ASMB, Fortran, then 'C'. Unix systems, then Microsoft systems, databases, shells. Latest work/project involved MVC5; will be supporting the project. Just always want to be constantly busy and learning new things.
I needed a tool that didn't exist
This is an excellent discussion! I started out with the Commodore Vic-20 and quickly moved to the Commodore 64. I soon learned the power of networking (even over a slow modem) and bought a rather obscure co processor for it (Z80 running CP/M) I learned 6502 assembly and then Z80 assembly (similar). I was off and running. I soon developed a program that did communication between the two cpus. I made my first thousand selling said program on CompuServe. Got introduced to the PDP-11 and Unix version 7 which I may still have the src for. My life as a Unix kernel hacker was in its early days. Ahh the old days JeT
Had one at 15, summer time. By Xmas left BASIC and started coding in assembly. Knew it from the inside out, hardware and software. Wrote the first Windows emulator for it as my thesis.
Easy, my job description and orders from a superior officer!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
As a teenagers in a rural area in 70s, not much access to anything called a computer. Never heard of S100 bus till much later. First attempts were tearing apart anything mechanical to determine how it worked. In high school, built a lathe out of pipe, hardwood, pullies and a washing machine motor. Hey, it worked and did numerous turnings.
As a senior in HS, became enamored with first Atari (2600). Bought and played a few games but interested a machine language monitor cartridge and hex keybads, until found how limited. Then bought a machine on close out (Interact) and later TRS 80 III/IV. All of which were hacked with premade modules or custom built circuit boards.
Got into early PCs by building and have done many over the years. Current hack Linux (customizations, system audits, etc) and Windows (scripts, registry ,etc) professionally, like sysadmin/programmer.
What got you started?
I guess I started at a place called No Such Agency in the early 00's and didn't realize it until the Snowden stuff came out... go figure.
I hack for entertainment (that is the entertainment industry) nowadays...
Funny thing is I sat in the TechLA conference and the main attitude/topic of the organizers was "hacking big data". WTF? Is the term hacking a buzzword now, i.e. the next 'social' or the new 'bubble'?
My dad bought a TI-99/4A when I was about 7 or 8. I did the BASIC tutorial, learned how to load the old scott adams games like 'pirate adventure' from cassette. Then I learned how to modify the source, started doing things like changing my inventory and teleporting from room to room. Then I started writing my own games. All by the time I was about 10.
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
If by hacking you mean programming, then nothing really inspired me. You had to be a programmer to get something useful out of a Commodore 64 besides playing games. So I guess you could say wanting to do something besides play games inspired me to be a programmer.