The readings portray a hacker as someone whose curiosity and desire to understand is ceaseless. The phrase “the curiosity killed the cat” is a bit too applicable to some hackers who just can’t seem to stop themselves. Some well-intended hackers can cross the line when breaking into others’ systems. However, my definition of a hacker is not so much someone who seeks to break into other people’s systems as the general population believes as it is a person who is constantly learning and constantly trying to push the bounds of their own knowledge as well as the collective community’s knowledge. For example, I would certainly classify this man as a “hacker”: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/. While we normally associate self-driving cars with extraordinary complexity, and rightly so, this man single-handedly added self-driving functionality to his own vehicle, albeit limited. Pushing your own abilities beyond either your own or the community’s boundaries is what I believe makes you a hacker.
In many ways, being a “hacker” is important and useful. For example, knowing how to hack into servers and websites prepares you and your company to better combat others with such knowledge who could potentially use their abilities to overtake your systems. If you have never experimented with security and only faintly understand the attacks that may come in from the outside, you are very likely to be vulnerable. I am certainly not justifying people who hack companies’ systems, because there are other, moral ways such as creating a testing environment of your own and trying to hack into your own environment with the same methodologies. This way you can still figure things out for yourself first-hand without putting others at risk. Many of the readings make the hacker community sound very concrete, and that all hackers are actively a part of this community. I think that many hackers gravitate toward this community of like-minded individuals, but I don’t necessarily think all hackers are actively engaged in this community and behave in exactly the same ways. I don’t know that I would fully consider myself a hacker, but I also wouldn’t say with certainty that I am not. However, I do know that I am not an active member of the hacker community. Instead, I enjoy trying out new languages and technologies for myself, although I am certainly not approaching the cutting edge or in danger of any true break-throughs. Overall, I do agree with Paul Grahm in “The Word ‘Hacker’” that the hacker culture is important and that it is becoming threatened. For many companies, it is in their best interest to encourage the hacker culture. I believe many innovations do result from people trying to see if they can expand the realm of “possible”. Additionally, people should not be penalized for learning how things work internally, so long as they are not destroying the property of others. I think it is difficult to pin down the archetype of a hacker. In general, they seek to learn new things, work around blockers, have an insatiable curiosity and a desire to build and create new things. To this end, I believe I am a hacker, even though that was never my primary goal but is instead simply a characterization that describes my interactions with programming and new technologies.
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AuthorSenior computer science major at the University of Notre Dame ArchivesCategories |