How to become a hacker

Today I had to write a review of Eric Raymond's open letter "How to become a hacker."

All is probably true i thinck. I'm not a hacker to know it in exact. It is very interesting and accurately formed the experience of the development of intelligence by analogy with the development of physical culture of those who like to train physical strength.

But who am I to argue, or on the contrary, to agree with a man of this level. And it's not interesting. Just copy-paste his work, I will not. To whom it is interesting - can see it ... yes even in the task it can be seen.

Instead, I suggest that you learn about who this person is. And get acquainted with the terminology used by hackers. So.

Eric Raymond - open source soft evangelist!

Eric is one of the most important whales on which the open source movement was built and is worth. This was mainly due to his publication on the methods of software development, based on the analysis of the process of developing the Linux kernel and the personal experience of managing the open project fetchmail - "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".

Some biographies:

Eric Steven Raymond; Genus. December 4, 1957, Boston, Massachusetts, USA - American hacker, author of the trilogy "Cathedral and Bazaar", "Populating the Noosphere" and "Magic Kettle", describing the ecology and etology of software development, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative.

Raymond is an active libertarian, has a black belt in taekwondo, he is a neo-pagan, a political anarchist and stands for the right to wear and use firearms.

Has become an active Internet user since 1970. In general, it was a little forced hobby, because in childhood he suffered from an easy form of cerebral palsy.

Raymond says that he began his career with programming writing his own software, between 1980 and 1985.

As a programmer Eric worked on fetchmail, a number of libraries used in GNU \ Linux, the legendary Emacs and other software products.

Eric Raymond finally formulated the "Law of Linus", which states that with enough eyes, all errors lie on the surface. A deep mistake is one that is difficult to find, but if enough people are looking for errors, then they all become superficial. Eric Raymond's views on open source differ slightly from the views of Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman, they all share the open source ideology, but if you briefly outline their positions, then the following is true: Linus and Eric disagree about what is more important - openness of code or "freedom "Distribution programs (a supporter of" freedom "is Raymond), well, Stallman, in general (imho) completely against proprietary software. Eric received 150,000 shares of VA Linux, which was valued at $ 32 million on the day of the first public sale of company shares (IPO), although exactly in a year their value decreased by about 17 times = ($ 1.88 million).

In more detail, you can find out all the above in the documentary "Revolutionary OS", which gives a qualitative and very clear material: what is GNU, GNU / Linux, GPL, and what were the motivations for the movement of Free Software and Open Source.

Also a lot of attention is paid to how you can and should make money on a business model using Open Source.

To play on the nerves in Microsoft, Eric Raymond was especially good!

February 3, 1976

Open letter to fans of the Open Source community:

For me, the most critical moment in the amateur market at the moment is the lack of good software courses, books, and the software itself. Without a good software and its owner who understands programming, an amateur computer is useless. But will quality software be written for the amateur market?

The feedback we received from hundreds of people who claimed to have used BASIC was all positive. However, two surprising things were evident: 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners bought BASIC), and 2) The size of the royalties we received from the sale in the amateur market made the cost of time , Which we spent on Altair BASIC, less than $ 2 per hour.

Why would it? Like most lovers should be aware, most of you steal your software. You have to pay for hardware, but you can share the software. Who cares if the people who worked on it will get it?

Is it honest? Of course, when you steal software, you do not contact MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) with problems that you may encounter. But anyway, MITS does not profit from the sale of software. Royalties paid to us, manuals, tapes (carriers), and overheads made it for us a non-profit operation. One of the consequences of your actions is that they do not write a good software. Who can afford professional work for free? What amateur can spend three man-years on programming, searching for bugs, documentation of his product and distribution for free? For information, no one except us has invested tons of money in amateur software. We wrote 6800 BASIC, and write 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but we have no reason to make this software available to amateurs. To put it bluntly, what you are doing is stealing.

And what about those who resell Altair BASIC, they make a profit on the sale of amateur software? Yes, but those about whom we will be informed can eventually lose. These are the ones who spoil the name of amateurs, and who must be driven from any meeting of the club, if they appear.

I would be glad of letters from those who decide to pay for the software they use, or has suggestions and comments. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, # 114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than the opportunity to hire ten programmers and flood the amateur market with a good software.

Bill Gates

General Partner, Micro-Soft

For Bill Gates, Open Source looked like partisans, and Eric Raymond himself looked like Darth Vader!

In 1998, he received and published a Microsoft document expressing concern about the quality of an opponent with open source.

In 2000-2002, Raymond wrote a series of FAQs still included in the Linux documentation project. His personal archive also lists a number of non-technical, Linux frequently asked questions.

Raymond is the current editor and custodian of Jargon File, a network encyclopedic dictionary dedicated to hacker slang and hacker culture. In addition, it was Raymond who in 2003 proposed the use of one of the figures of the game "Life" as an emblem of hackers.

Raymond had a number of public disputes with other figures in the Free Software movement such as Richard Stallman and he resigned as president of Open Source on his initiative in February 2005.

Raymond is currently the administrator of the GPSD project (GPSD is a daemon that receives data from a GPS receiver, and provides data back to several applications such as Kismet or GPS navigation software), a demon that makes GPS data from the receiver available in the Format JSON. In addition, some versions of NetHack include its manual. It also contributes to the code and content of the Battle for Wesnoth (turn-based strategy games, the battle for Wesnoth is an open-source game and is available under the GPL license in the form of source code and for various operating systems).

Founded in June 2009 with the help of Raymond, the group hacktivist group of the NedaNet site aims to influence the internal opposition to the Iranian government in the case of 2009. Iranian elections protests. Named after Ned Soltan, a young woman died in unrest after the elections in Iran, he plans to offer help with proxy servers and anonymizers.

Here such here the person. In addition to the image, you can add that he owns a black belt in taekwon-do.

Now a little about the terminology that people like Eric use.

Hackers and Jargon File.

The word "hacker" is habitually associated with the image of a cybercriminal - an intellectual thief who breaks into licensing programs and bank accounts, or vice versa, a sort of Robin-Hood, a fighter exposing the malicious intentions of corporations. But it was not always so. Hackers in the original sense of the word are idealists of cyberspace, whose core values ​​are disinterested curiosity, creativity and freedom of information. It's hackers who stand at the source of free software. The most famous documents about the origin and development of the hacker movement: Stephen Levy's book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Age" and the famous Jargon File. About the latter, and there will be a speech.

Jargon File - a network dictionary of hacker slang, containing more than 2300 articles, on the terminology and culture of hackers. The original version of this document was created by Rafael Finkel at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) in 1975. Then it was called AIWORD.RFUP or AIWORD.RFDOC, the current name was given a year later, after it went outside its own laboratory and began to be replenished and edited by Mark Crispin and Guy Steele at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Rafael Finkel - creator of Jargon File.

In 1983, the file was published in a printed version (before that there was a small magazine publication in 1981), and for a while "freezes". Changes in it did not make for a whole seven years. In 1990, a new version appears, which is replenished with the lexicon of new hacker communities. The last of the existing editions of the dictionary refers to 2003. Currently, editing is in the hands of Eric Raymond with the participation of Guy Steele.

Ethics of hackers.

1. The belief that sharing information is a force capable of doing good, and that the ethical duty of hackers is to share their achievements by creating free (free) programs and providing access to information and computing resources as far as possible. (Erick is the believer of that).

2. The belief that hacking of systems for pleasure and research is ethically acceptable, as well as the fact that hacking can not be qualified as stealing, vandalism or breach of confidentiality. (Erick tell that theese people are cruckers).

Both of these ethical principles are widely (but not universally) accepted among hackers. Most hackers understand hacker ethics in the first sense, and many act in harmony with it, creating and distributing free software. Some go further and believe that ALL information should be free and ANY access control is evil, such a philosophy stands behind the GNU project.

The second meaning is not so unambiguous: some consider the act of breaking in itself as unethical. But this principle at least affects the behavior of people who imagine themselves to be "benign" crackers. From this point of view, this is the highest form of hacker politeness: (a) hacking the system and then (b) explaining the sysop, preferably by e-mail on behalf of the superuser, how exactly it was done, and how to close this hole better; While they are free (and without extortion).

A more accurate expression of both versions of hacker ethics is that almost all hackers are driven by the will to share technical tricks, programs and (if possible) computing resources with other hackers. Gigantic cooperative networks such as Yuznet, Fidonet and the Internet can function without central control because of the following stroke: they are strengthened and rely on a sense of community, which, perhaps among the hackers, is the most valuable intangible asset.

Some definitions.

Hacker - the initial meaning is a person who makes furniture with the help of an ax (at least, so it is written in Jargon File).

1. A person who loves the study of details (details) of programmable systems, studying the issue of improving their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to limit themselves to learning the minimum required. RFC 1392 reinforces this definition as follows: "A person enjoying a thorough understanding of the internal actions of systems, computers and computer networks in particular."

2. Somebody programming with enthusiasm (even obsessively), or loving programming, and not just theorizing about programming.

3. A person who can appreciate and understand hacker values.

4. A person who is strong in fast programming.

5. An expert in relation to a particular computer program, or a person who often works with it; Example: "Unix hacker". (Definitions from the first to the fifth are interrelated, so one person can fall under several of them.)

6. Expert or enthusiast of any kind. Someone can be considered a "hacker of astronomy", for example.

7. Anyone who loves intellectual tests, consisting in creative overcoming or circumvention of restrictions.

8. (Not recommended) An attacker who exploits system vulnerabilities. The correct term for its designation is cracker.

9. Also the word "hacker" denotes belonging to the global community in the network.

Cracker - by definition, Jargon File, cracker - "Someone who hacks the security of the system. The term was created by hackers in 1985 specifically to protect against the misuse of the word "hacker" by journalists. " Also, crackers are called "dark side hackers", a hacker who legally engaged in burglary, for example, being involved in the investigation, is called a samurai.

In the attachment to Jargon File "Help in spreading hacker culture" we read:

"If you are a writer or a journalist, do not say or write {hacker} when you mean the word {cracker}. If you work with writers or journalists, then teach them this and encourage them to act correctly. If you catch a newspaper or magazine on the wrong use of the word "hacker", write to them and point out their mistake (this application includes a sample letter) "

Lamer:

1. A synonym for looser (a loser), not used by most hackers and distributed mainly in crackers and phreakers. A person who loads a lot (download) from the network, but does not upload anything to it (upload). A synonym - leacher (leacher), falls into the jargon of users of peer-to-peer networks and now.

2. A man who is trying to hack into a BBS conference.

3.Tot who bothers the system operator of the BBS conference and other users with stupid replicas, uploads files infected with viruses to the network and so on. A modern synonym for this value, not mentioned in the Jargon File, will most likely be a "troll".

Portrait of J. Random Haker

Incomplete translation of one of the applications to the dictionary. The names of the application in the original are A Portrait of J. Random Hacker, a pun that should be understood as "Portrait of a random hacker".

Clothing.

The general style is everyday, posthippies. Hacker's are: jeans, a T-shirt (often with an ingenious intellectual inscription), sports shoes and sandals, and completely barefoot hackers come across. At the same time appeared in the mid-nineties T-shirts with inscriptions and computer images did not meet with hackers of great popularity because of too direct interpretation. By that time, they already had their own folklore and a system of signs. However, it also indicates that at present this rate has changed and a modern hacker can often be found in a T-shirt with a Linux penguin or BSD demon.

Faced with the variety of symbols used by hackers from different communities, Eric Raymond proposed in 2003 to use the glider as a single symbol that unites hackers of all stripes. The source for the symbol was the game, or rather the "cellular automaton" "Life".

For less warm conditions suits soft suede jackets, tourist boots. A common sign of hackers were also long hair, a mustache, a beard.

Since the mid 90's in the clothing of hackers there are elements of various subcultures - ravers, punks, ready. In general, you can not talk about clothing as an identifying sign. Rather, the appearance of the hacker is determined by the preference for convenience over the impression produced and the desire to give clothes as little attention as possible.

Hobby.

Many of the hacker hobbies are widespread and outside the movement. This is science fiction, music, historical reconstruction, chess, go, backgammon, wargames, in general any intellectual games. For some time, desktop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons have been popular, but they lost most of the adherents in the hacking environment when they turned into the mainstream and finally commercialized. Among the last mass hobby hackers is the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering. Other hobbies do not correlate so much - it can be anything, anything, from linguistics to acting.

Physical activity and sport.

Many hackers, and even most of them, do not go in for sports and even are definitely "antiphysical." Those who do not disdain sports, the audience's interest in it is vanishingly small. Sport - this is what you need to do, but do not look at all.

Hackers like the plague avoid team sports, but a notable exception is volleyball, the authors suggest that in all probability this is due to the lack of physical collisions and a friendly atmosphere. For similar reasons hackers liked and Ultimate Frisbee "Hacker" sports are more a competition with yourself than with someone else. As a rule, they mean concentration, endurance and training skills. These include: martial arts, skydiving, skydiving, skating and skiing, hiking and so on.

A particular mention deserves the hobby of hackers martial arts. Many observers note that over time it is increasing. In the 1970s, hackers delighted with martial arts exclusively from the outside, erecting in the ideal honed skills of fighters, achieved by severe self-discipline and concentration. As the various martial arts began to gain weight in the US and Western countries, hackers began to not only watch, but also do something themselves. Already in 1977, the editor of Jargon File Erik Raymond, at the first Perl conference, discovered that of five unfamiliar people sitting with him at the same table, four actively practicing one of the martial arts. The most interesting thing was that such a high percentage of anyone present did not seem strange.

Now, in 2000, martial arts have firmly established themselves as a favorite kind of physical discipline among hackers. The culture of martial arts, combining elite concentration on skillfulness and at the same time openness to all who want to join, is the closest parallel to the ideology of hackers from all existing.

It's funny that in the slang of hackers there are many parallels, ironically likening the art of programming to kung fu, for example, code-fu or more specific skills: HTML-fu. With even more irony, modern hackers liken the process of integration into the hacker community to Jet Li movies: a single-minded newcomer goes to science to the masters of tradition, exercises deep meditation, performs heroic hacker exploits at their command, and finally becomes a master ready to instruct new "noobs" On the path of a hacker.

Education.

All hackers who have left adolescence have graduated from college or have an equivalent level of self-education. At the same time, self-taught hackers are considered (at least in a hacker's environment) more motivated and thorough and, accordingly, are more respected than their opposite - those who have been trained "officially." In academia, in addition to programmers, electronics professionals and other specialties directly related to computers, physics, mathematics, linguists and philosophers gravitate toward hacking.

What hackers avoid.

All the work of Microsoft. Smurfs, Ewokes, and other such varieties of "offensive cuteness" - obsessive emotion. Bureaucracy. Foolish people. Light music. Television (with rare exceptions for cartoons, movies and good science fiction series, such as Star Trek in its original form or Babylon 5). Business suits. Insincerity. Incompetence. Boredom. Programming languages COBOL and BASIC. Alphabetic menu-interfaces.

Nationality and gender.

The hacker community is still predominantly male, but female hackers still exist, and their percentage is even higher than the percentage of women in the technical and computer professions in general. Mainly female hackers are respected and keep on par with the strong gender.

Nationally among hackers in the United States are representatives of the Caucasian race (not to be confused with the Caucasian nationalities), there is also a stable Jewish minority on the West Coast of the United States and Asian on the East. Jews have a sustained impact on hacker culture, which is expressed in a general bias towards the Jewish national cuisine, as well as borrowing from Yiddish some elements of jargon.

The ethnic composition of hackers is determined primarily by the availability of education for representatives of various national groups. Racial prejudice is met with cold contempt among hackers.

When asked about their "blindness" to sex, cultural characteristics and skin color, hackers often respond that these are the advantages of text communication on the network, and this impact is of tremendous power. In addition, the hackers' passion for developments in the field of artificial intelligence and science fiction affected the development of the idea of ​​"inclusive" rather than "exclusive" definitions of personality. If your imagination willingly gives rights equal to human computer programs, robots, dolphins and aliens from space, then the other skin color or sex seems insignificant.

Religious Worldview.

Among the hackers are: atheists, agnostics, secular Jews (non-observant Jewish), neo-pagans, and very often three or more of the worldviews listed can be combined in one person. Hackers professing traditional Christianity is so rare that no one ever heard of them.

Even hackers who have a strong religious affiliation are mildly referring to "hostile" religions, as well as neglecting religious intolerance in general. Some profess "parodic religions", such as Discordianism (in Russian translations there are interpretations of discordinism and discordianism) and the church of SubGenius.

Zen and, to a lesser extent, Taoism, which they easily combine with the "native" religion, had a noticeable influence on the world view of the hackers.

There are certain mystical beliefs even among those hackers who are not involved in any of the listed religions. Hacker folklore pays tribute to "wise men", and stories about reincarnation and demons are too believable psychologically to be just a joke.

Personal characteristics.

The most obvious personal characteristics of a hacker are high intelligence, curiosity and ease in handling intellectual abstractions. Also, most hackers are "neophiles", lovers of novelty (especially intellectual). Most of them are by nature individualists and nonconformists.

Despite the high level of common intelligence among hackers, this is not at all an obligatory quality (sine qua non - lat.) Without which the hacker can not be imagined. Even more important is the ability to absorb, hold in memory and connect among themselves a large number of meaningless details, relying on the fact that in the future, as the experience is gained, their context and meaning will become clear. A person with an average analytical mind, endowed with this quality can become a very effective hacker, but the creative genius, devoid of it, will quickly find out that he lags far behind people who load the contents of thick reference manuals into their own brain. [Eric Raimonds's note. In the process of working on the first printed version of this document, for example, I studied the rather complex language of computer imaging TeX in just four working days, just "swallowing" the Knut manual from 477 pages. My editor was amazed, what surprised me a bit - the years spent in communication with hackers have taught me to think of this as a routine].

Contrary to the established stereotype, hackers are not narrow intellectuals. They are interested in any topic capable of giving food to the thought process and can often conduct a conversation on almost any topic, if you certainly can get them off the case and get them to talk.

It has long been noted (although contrary to expectations) that the better the hacker knows his business, with the greater interest he refers to extraneous things in which less competent.

Hackers are fanatics of control, which has nothing to do with coercion, or other authoritarian interpretations of the word. Just like children enjoy, forcing the toy train to move forward and backward with the click of the switch, hackers adore doing the same with the computer, but at a much more complex level, creating for him a cunning stuffing. But it must be their own stuffing. They do not like monotony, uncertainty, boredom of small, poorly defined tasks that go beyond maintaining their own existence. Therefore, they are usually very careful and orderly in intellectual life and chaotic in everything that goes beyond it. The hacker code will be fine, even if the desktop is buried under three feet of garbage.

Normal rewards and incentives, such as general acceptance and money, motivate little hackers. They are attracted by complex tasks and intellectual toys, and interest in work or other activities is determined by the complexity of the abandoned call and the interest of "toys."

By the Mayer-Briggs typology and in equivalent psychometric systems, hackers are defined as an introvert, intuitive and mental type, as opposed to an extrovert-sensitive dominant culture in the mainstream. The latter also occur among hackers, but are in the minority.

So. I can say that. If you are 30 and you still not hacker - you will never be it!!! Joke. Ofcource you can try!

I will not become a hacker myself. Before writing this blog i thought that this will never happen, not i just know it!!! But it is ok! I will be someone else!!!