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CNet's "Top 10 Hacks"
tdrury writes "CNET has a story describing the "top 10 hacks" (sic) of all time. Good bathroom material - if you can surf from your bathroom. " Mentions the Morris worm and a few other clever ones. And several quite unclever ones (like the Jurassic Park/Pond PR stunt).
[...] Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the `login' command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.
Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler -- so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognize when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled `login' the code to allow Thompson entry -- and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources. [...]
A detailed description of the hack by Ken Thompson himself can be found here.
Orson Wells. War of the Worlds.
Remember, hacking isn't just with computers. Probably the best piece of hacking/social engineering EVER was Orson Wells with the war of the worlds. Who else can claim that their hack affected MILLIONS of people all over the country?
Oh sure, I hear the naysayers saying that he probably didn't even mean to do it. But to me, that's immaterial. The hack of turning a regular radio show into a national panic is quite a hack, IMHO. It may not have been cool or good, but I would consider it a hack.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
did anyone else notice that 80% of these were not true hacks but just web site modifications. (except two : the movie [which wasn't a real hack] and morris [i remember a story from back then where the guys at MIT reverse engineering the worm came to the conclusion that the perpetrator just plain wasn't that good a programmer : the worm could have been a MUCH better hack.) why not real hacks? why not _better_ imagined ones (E911 anybody?) the WWW is NOT the net. there's a lot more to hacking then a URL. [sigh]
Allright we've seen the CNET article and though it is amusing it is no where near to being a list of most 'subversive hacks'. I have allready seen some good hacks being cited here.
Instead of complaining, maybe we could show CNET what a good hack is supposed to look like. What I propose is that we compile a list, that is actually a list of best hacks. Together with some help from Slashdot editors this list could be build and through voting I think we could come up with a list that is a more accurate definition of the word hack.
I vote for Charles Babbage to be on this list. Doing all, that he did, mechanically was and is a great hack.
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