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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?"
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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
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.
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.
What got me started? - 1965, first year of primary school, some random kid demonstrated how to a flashlight worked with a battery a wire and a torch bulb. It was in a busy corridor at recess and everyone was taller than me. I was absolutely fascinated by it, I spent a small fortune in pocket money over the next few months on batteries, torch bulbs, and sticky tape.
Thirty years later my (ex) wife came home from work one day, she was not dumb by any stretch of the imagination, she says to me with a tinge of excitement - "Do you know what comes out of a battery?" Note sure what she was angling at I said "Electricity?". She express disappointment because her trivia question failed to stump me. I then asked her what she had thought came out of batteries. "I dunno, just Ommphhh!" she says, it soon became apparent that hysterical laughter was not the response she had been looking for.
NGOML or I will be forced to tell you the story about how we used to tie an onion to our belt....
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.