BadBit

Just wondering what your views are on hacking.

I personally think hackers are good people, programmers are hackers, they hack away on a key board. The media have given hackers a bad name as they refer to crackers as hackers. This is because they use a hackers skill set, such as programming, bug finding and debuging.
Hacking in it's simpilist form is hacking away at a keyboard.

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The GNU documentation says that this bit is set when the stream is "unusable". Presumably the intent is that once this bit becomes set, all bets are off on that stream forever.

Lightninghawk

Hacking itself is an art. One that not many people have the skills to learn even. I've been studying, I've taken courses, I have books, I have friends, and I have programs. But nothing really opens up with doors unless you understand much more than most people want to even think about. There is so much out there that is different yet the same. Take phpbb forums security. You're looking at a database of MySQL. SQL injection is the key, but you won't just find a lot of injection scripts for that. You have to learn these things by attempting them, to attempt them you must learn to understand it. Trust me no one is just going to hand you the line of code that took them months of studying to find. No matter how much they like you.

I think much of the problem today is. There are too many programs out there that kids can get their disrespectful hands on. In turn these "skiddies" terrorize the Internet and claim "I shut off your chat room I'm a Hacker". Those stupid kids are only doing two things. Pissing off a real hacker, and giving hackers a bad name.

I help test some security programs but I do everything the legal way and mostly on my own system. Which rocks. But I don't claim to be a Hacker. Sure I can do a lot of things on the Internet and even re-configure hardware to reset some things, like passwords and such. But not via my own program or even a program just by changing some settings.

I can program small batch files to do things like this but it takes a little while.

So in a sense We all just need to get together. Take all the programs away from the skiddies, have a newscast and get a good rep back for the hackers, and the ones that respect them.

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BadBit

Just because you have the skill set to be able to break into other systems, dose not meen you should. I think it's inportent to know these skills so you can protect your self against such attacks.
As to skidiots, they don't know what is really going on behind the program. To call them hackers is quite frankly is an insult to us. The people who program.

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The GNU documentation says that this bit is set when the stream is "unusable". Presumably the intent is that once this bit becomes set, all bets are off on that stream forever.

pal

hacker who cracks software/programs -> cracker, perhaps wasn't a hacker from the beginning.
hacker who makes malicious software/programs, cracker or more to a malicous programmer, perhaps wasn't a hacker from the beginning.
hacker who makes software/programs(or use his/her potential skills) to support hacker community, and to support society not for self-benefit but for benefits of community, is perhaps the "hacker"?
don't you think?

DaWei

A true hacker, in the original sense, is a person who knows the machine inside and out. Often that even includes thorough knowledge of the hardware design. Some of them have designed the system in terms of both its hardware and its software.

If you have written every kind of code that ever goes into a machine, you obviously have some knowledge about how things work that people who only ever approach the machine through layers of abstraction just do not have. Even if you didn't write the OS yourself, you KNOW the kinds of things that are going on, where the trouble areas and vulnerabilities are. You can often intuit things that you may not know in detail. You know that input is input and that ultimately you can tap in and insert it at many points.

In most complex systems there are debug aids. I know precisely how to walk up to a particular CFS system and kick it into a special mode that the operators know nothing about, and that isn't documented. It's an intentional "back door" and its purpose is benevolent. Since it could be exploited, it isn't documented. Maximum security would dictate that, once the system has been fully proven, such facilities would be removed.

In addition to intentional, but concealed, points of access, one who is thoroughly familiar with the way languages deal with the machine at a low level has a leg up on knowing how to break or penetrate them. The dreaded "buffer overflow" is, of course, a well-known one. Even your Aunt Gertrude has heard of it. Even so, a huge number of programmers, particularly novices, have no idea what it truly is. They ask you why their use of "gets" or poor use of "scanf" is drawing heated critiques from you. Many "segmentation faults" are just unintentional "penetrations" that didn't hopscotch in the right squares.

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Abstraction doesn't make it impossible to write bad code; it makes it possible to write superior code.
Contributor's Corner: Grumpy on C++ Exceptions DaWei on Pointers

pal

mm very interesting, a "true" hacker. I'm guessing even though they never meant to be one, it could have been gradual process, suddenly one day realizing that they were one, wonder how it would feel.

DaWei

It feels good when you get your paycheck. Otherwise, you don't give a rats. If you do, you're an egoist, not a hacker.

__________________
Abstraction doesn't make it impossible to write bad code; it makes it possible to write superior code.
Contributor's Corner: Grumpy on C++ Exceptions DaWei on Pointers

pal

Oh, I guess many things just comes down to business

BadBit

If your doing it for money rather than for the joy, excitment and learning experience then are you really a hacker?

__________________
The GNU documentation says that this bit is set when the stream is "unusable". Presumably the intent is that once this bit becomes set, all bets are off on that stream forever.

pal

I think there should be balance in this. Obviously yeah!
Balance, meaning that you have to do it for the business and for the joy, then it might work out alright. <-- if not, that person might be loosing the reality part.

EDIT:
too idealistic?