the Hacker

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Nothing is more disagreeable to the hacker than duplication of effort. ~ Anonymous,

2:if the hacker is a creator, we have to take inspiration into account. ~ Paul Graham,

3:in keeping with the Hacker Ethic, no artificial boundaries were maintained. ~ Steven Levy,

4:The hacker mindset doesn't actually see what happens on the other side, to the victim. ~ Kevin Mitnick,

5:the Hacker Ethic, which instructs you to keep working until your hack tops previous efforts. ~ Steven Levy,

6:The Yankees' Facebook page was hacked. The hacker was immediately purchased and signed to a 5 year contract with the Yankees. ~ Stephen Colbert,

7:The key to social engineering is influencing a person to do something that allows the hacker to gain access to information or your network. ~ Kevin Mitnick,

8:The Hacker Ethic: Access to computers--and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works--should be unlimited and total. ~ Steven Levy,

9:central tenets of the Hacker Ethic: the free flow of information, particularly information that helped fellow hackers understand, explore, and build systems. ~ Steven Levy,

10:The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. ~ Mark Zuckerberg,

11:fragile. So that to be able to defy a culture which states that ‘Thou shalt not touch this,’ and to defy that with one’s own creative powers is . . . the essence.” The essence, of course, of the Hacker Ethic. ~ Steven Levy,

12:The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge. ~ Steven Johnson,

13:Years of working in the free-flow world of electronics had infused Marsh with the Hacker Ethic, and he saw school as an inefficient, repressive system. Even when he worked at a radical school with an open classroom, he thought it was a sham, still a jail. ~ Steven Levy,

14:It always seemed to me that the hacker occupied the same niche as the American cowboy in your Wild West. Gunslingers at the edge of known civilization. Black hats, white hats. Some drawn into thievery, others taking the law into their own hands—justice both corporeal and social. ~ Chuck Wendig,

15:When an attacker fails with one person, they often go to another person. The key is to report the attack to other departments. Workers should know to act like they are going along with what the hacker wants and take copious notes so the company will know what the hacker is trying to find. ~ Kevin Mitnick,

16:The Email Phishing Hack: Phishing refers to a social engineering method used by hackers to gain what should be confidential information from unwitting victims. Phishing works in this way: the hacker sends an official-looking email to the target, purporting to be from the a legitimate institution that ~ Mike Mason,

17:A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness—not necessarily with computers. The programmers in the old MIT free software community of the 60s and 70s referred to themselves as hackers. Around 1980, journalists who discovered the hacker community mistakenly took the term to mean “security breaker.” ~ Richard Stallman,

18:The fifth member of the team preferred to work at home. Ahmed was the hacker, the forger, the creator of all illusions, but he didn’t have the nerve to carry guns and such. He worked from his basement in Buffalo and had never been caught or arrested. He left no trails. His 5 percent would come off the top. The other four would take the rest in equal ~ John Grisham,

19:Nothing is more disagreeable to the hacker than duplication of effort. The first and most important mental habit that people develop when they learn how to write computer programs is to generalize, generalize, generalize. To make their code as modular and flexible as possible, breaking large problems down into small subroutines that can be used over and over again in different contexts. ~ Neal Stephenson,

20:Seeking evidence of the hacker spirit in antiquity, we must look no further than the mythic archetype of Prometheus. Zeus, father of the Gods, has forbidden to mankind the use of fire. Covertly entering Mt. Olympus, Prometheus liberates fire from the god’s abode and delivers it to man. Consequently, man nearly destroys himself with this powerful new technology and, in the process, dooms Prometheus to punishment for his actions. ~ Anonymous,

21:Now he was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that violated many of the principles of the hacker’s code: It was overpriced; it would have no slots, which meant that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion cards or jack into the motherboard to add their own new functions; and it took special tools just to open the plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker. ~ Walter Isaacson,

22:The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date of birth: It happens to be a power of 2—216 power to be exact—and even the exponent 16 is equal to 24, and 4 is equal to 22. Along with 256; 32,768; and 2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the foundation stones of the hacker universe, in which 2 is the only really important number because that's how many digits a computer can recognize. ~ Neal Stephenson,

23:Spacewar highlighted three aspects of the hacker culture that became themes of the digital age. First, it was created collaboratively. “We were able to build it together, working as a team, which is how we liked to do things,” Russell said. Second, it was free and open-source software. “People asked for copies of the source code, and of course we gave them out.” Of course—that was in a time and place when software yearned to be free. Third, it was based on the belief that computers should be personal and interactive. “It allowed us to get our hands on a computer and make it respond to us in real time,” said Russell.10 ~ Walter Isaacson,

24:Weizenbaum did not acknowledge the beauty of the hacker devotion itself...orthe very idealism of the Hacker Ethic. He had not seen, as Ed Fredkin had, Stew Nelson composing code on the TECO editor while Greenblatt and Gosper watched: without any of the three saying a word, Nelson was entertaining the others, encoding assembly-language tricks which to them, with their absolute mastery of that PDP-6 “language,” had the same effect as hilariously incisive jokes. And after every few instructions there would be another punch line in this sublime form of communication . . . The scene was a demonstration of sharing which Fredkin never forgot. ~ Anonymous,

25:Gosper had disdained NASA’s human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab’s more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the real world, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future — yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And ~ Steven Levy,

26:Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics. ~ Neal Stephenson,

27:An NSA unit known as the Transgression Branch specializes in this kind of track-the-hacker work and takes things one step further. The branch watches a hacker break into another country’s computer system, then follows him inside. In a 2010 operation called Ironavenger, the Transgression Branch saw e-mails containing malware being sent to a government office in a hostile country—one that the NSA wanted to know more about. Upon further inspection, the branch discovered that the malware was coming from a US ally, whose own intelligence service was trying to break in. The Americans let their allies do the hard work and watched silently as they scooped up passwords and sensitive documents from the adversary’s system. The Americans saw everything the allies saw and got some inside knowledge about how they spied. ~ Shane Harris,

28:Even back then I thought that his uncompromising judgments and unprompted opinions, which he would simply spit out undiplomatically, would put him at odds with a lot of people. There was so much to plan and discuss. I didn’t ask myself back then whether his behavior was normal or not. I didn’t ask myself whether I could trust Julian or whether he might get me in trouble. On the contrary, I was somewhat flattered that he was interested in working with me. For me, Julian Assange was not only the founder of WL but also the hacker known as Mendax, a member of the International Subversives, one of the greatest hackers in the world, and the coauthor/researcher (with Suelette Dreyfus) of Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier—a highly respected book among connoisseurs. We hit it off right from the start. He ~ Daniel Domscheit Berg,

29:If patterns of ones and zeros were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least—an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being’s name—its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune, And the only thing we’re good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God. ~ Thomas Pynchon,

30:While the Texas prison officials remained in the dark about what was going on, they were fortunate that William and Danny had benign motives. Imagine what havoc the two might have caused; it would have been child's play for these guys to develop a scheme for obtaining money or property from unsuspecting victims. The Internet had become their university and playground. Learning how to run scams against individuals or break in to corporate sites would have been a cinch; teenagers and preteens learn these methods every day from the hacker sites and elsewhere on the Web. And as prisoners, Danny and William had all the time in the world.

Maybe there's a lesson here: Two convicted murderers, but that didn't mean they were scum, rotten to the core. They were cheaters who hacked their way onto the Internet illegally, but that didn't mean they were willing to victimize innocent people or naively insecure companies. ~ Kevin D Mitnick,

31:It would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level, at least -- an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name -- its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to sort of a standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God. ~ Thomas Pynchon,

32:values of commons-based sharing and of private enterprise often conflict, most notably over the extent to which innovations should be patent-protected. The commons crowd had its roots in the hacker ethic that emanated from the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club and the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve Wozniak was an exemplar. He went to Homebrew meetings to show off the computer circuit he built, and he handed out freely the schematics so that others could use and improve it. But his neighborhood pal Steve Jobs, who began accompanying him to the meetings, convinced him that they should quit sharing the invention and instead build and sell it. Thus Apple was born, and for the subsequent forty years it has been at the forefront of aggressively patenting and profiting from its innovations. The instincts of both Steves were useful in creating the digital age. Innovation is most vibrant in the realms where open-source systems compete with proprietary ones. Sometimes people advocate one of these modes of production over the others based on ideological sentiments. They prefer a greater government role, or exalt private enterprise, or romanticize peer sharing. In the 2012 election, President Barack Obama stirred up controversy by saying to people who owned businesses, “You didn’t build that.” His critics saw it as a denigration of the role of private enterprise. Obama’s point was that any business benefits from government and peer-based community support: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. ~ Walter Isaacson,

33:The Lockean logic of custom suggests strongly that open-source hackers observe the customs they do in order to defend some kind of expected return from their effort. The return must be more significant than the effort of homesteading projects, the cost of maintaining version histories that document “chain of title”, and the time cost of making public notifications and waiting before taking adverse possession of an orphaned project. Furthermore, the “yield” from open source must be something more than simply the use of the software, something else that would be compromised or diluted by forking. If use were the only issue, there would be no taboo against forking, and open-source ownership would not resemble land tenure at all. In fact, this alternate world (where use is the only yield, and forking is unproblematic) is the one implied by existing open-source licenses. We can eliminate some candidate kinds of yield right away. Because you can’t coerce effectively over a network connection, seeking power is right out. Likewise, the open-source culture doesn’t have anything much resembling money or an internal scarcity economy, so hackers cannot be pursuing anything very closely analogous to material wealth (e.g. the accumulation of scarcity tokens). There is one way that open-source activity can help people become wealthier, however — a way that provides a valuable clue to what actually motivates it. Occasionally, the reputation one gains in the hacker culture can spill over into the real world in economically significant ways. It can get you a better job offer, or a consulting contract, or a book deal. This kind of side effect, however, is at best rare and marginal for most hackers; far too much so to make it convincing as a sole explanation, even if we ignore the repeated protestations by hackers that they’re doing what they do not for money but out of idealism or love. However, the way such economic side effects are mediated is worth examination. ~ Eric S Raymond,

34:It's ironic that Juanita has come into this place in a low-tech, black-and-white
avatar. She was the one who figured out a way to make avatars show something
close to real emotion. That is a fact Hiro has never forgotten, because she did
most of her work when they were together, and whenever an avatar looks surprised
or angry or passionate in the Metaverse, he sees an echo of himself or Juanita -
- the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse. Makes it hard to forget.
Shortly after Juanita and Da5id got divorced, The Black Sun really took off.
And once they got done counting their money, marketing the spinoffs, soaking up
the adulation of others in the hacker community, they all came to the
realization that what made this place a success was not the collision-avoidance
algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other stuff. It was Juanita's
faces. Just ask the businessmen in the Nipponese Quadrant. They come here to
talk turkey with suits from around the world, and they consider it just as good
as a face-to-face. They more or less ignore what is being said -- a lot gets
lost in translation, after all. They pay attention to the facial expressions
and body language of the people they are talking to. And that's how they know
what's going on inside a person's head-by condensing fact from the vapor of
nuance.
Juanita refused to analyze this process, insisted that it was something
ineffable, something you couldn't explain with words. A radical, rosary-toting
Catholic, she has no problem with that kind of thing. But the bitheads didn't
like it. Said it was irrational mysticism. So she quit and took a job with
some Nipponese company. They don't have any problem with irrational mysticism
as long as it makes money.
But Juanita never comes to The Black Sun anymore. Partly, she's pissed at Da5id
and the other hackers who never appreciated her work. But she has also decided
that the whole thing is bogus. That no matter how good it is, the Metaverse is
distorting the way people talk to each other, and she wants no such distortion
in her relationships. ~ Neal Stephenson,

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* WISDOM TROVE *

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