Ethical hacking 101: number 2: hackers

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and if you will "life hackers", and "spiritual hackers". The basic cultural definitions and differences. I'm just skimming the surface with all this stuff. Thus leaving room for you to do your own study. Okay first if you wish to be a hacker you must, in my opinion, be aware of hacker attitude, and then create your own hacker way of being. I say to start by being aware of the general hacker attitude because there is a lot to gain from learning about it. Then I say to create your own because hackers are innovators. Why not reap the benefits of "hacking" your own code to live by! Remember hacking is a way of life not just about computers. General Hacker attitude (all more or less negotiable): This stuff is from: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#believe1 1. "The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved." This is my favorite one. Hacking is a lot of fun but requires a lot of effort. That effort should also be fun though. Hacking isn't about the destination as much as it is the journey. When a hacker moves through life he keeps an eye out for those things he doesn't know. Never assuming he knows everything. Always looking to learn something. Hackers experience a certain delight and thrill with every problem they solve. This pushes them to want to solve more problems. If you are not this way already you will have to become this way to be a true hacker or something similar. This is because hacking requires a lot of energy and you don't want to loss that energy on all the distractions that are out there. When a hacker is faced with a chance to partake in social drama or to observe it and learn something from it, this first code motivates him to learn from it. Evaluate your current way and ask yourself what things are more interesting to you than learning. If watching t.v. mindlessly is something you do more often than you learn from watching t.v. then you need to change that to be a hacker. 2. "No problem should ever have to be solved twice."This is perhaps were the open source movement and the internet and what I am doing right now come into play the most. Hackers tend to believe that you should not have to re-invent the wheel. Perhaps you improve upon the wheel but not go through the process of recreating it from scratch. THIS is why hackers engage in open sharing of information. It is considered almost a moral duty for the hacker to solve problems and then share that information as freely as possible. This is why for many hackers Microsoft IS BAD. For that matter any corporation that uses more copyright than copy left could perhaps from a certain perspective be seen as bad. (In my own opinion some information can be sold for a modest fee from time to time. After all we have to pay our bills somehow. But, a company like Microsoft has massive amounts of knowledge that they do not share freely enough. Simply keeping their source code private slows down the learning process and is thus considered wrong.) 3. Boredom and drudgery are evil Hackers should never be bored or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work, because when this happens it means they aren't doing what they do best - solve new problems. This wastefulness hurts everybody. Therefore boredom and drudgery are not just unpleasant but actually evil. To behave like a hacker, you have to believe this enough to want to automate away the boring bits as much as possible, not just for yourself but for everybody else (especially other hackers). (I have always had a bit of a problem with this. I would argue that this aspect of the hacker ethic should be that forced boredom is evil, but that being bored is something we agree to be. In other words we may be forced into a boring situation but we can choose to turn that situation in to something interesting even if that is something as small as shifting our perception of it. Our perception determines our experience. Still in many cases it is unproductive to have a skilled hacker waisting time doing something that would normally be defined boring. This aspect is often stretched to mean that no one who can think should ever be forced into a situation that bores them. This brings it to another flaw in logic which is that a hacker MUST learn to hack his own life and reality. Hacking life and reality is creating your own life and from it you learn that you can never be entirely forced into a situation against your will except in sever cases. And, then if for some reason you are forced into a situation there is always a way out or a way to make the most of it.) 4. Freedom is good Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian (myself I'm a Panarchist/Anarchist). Anyone who can give you orders can slow down or stop you from solving what ever problem you are fascinated by. And, knowing the way many authoritarian minds work they will find some stupid reason to try to stop you. There is difference though between the surrender of some freedom that is agreed upon consciously and the kind of authoritarian control that others try to force upon us. I.e. children need to be guided and criminals need to be restrained. Authoritarians and those who profit from perceived control thrive on censorship and secrecy and run from voluntary cooperation and information sharing. I.e. they only like cooperation that they control. Of course there are exceptions to every rule and good in every bad, and the hacker should be smart enough to see this. 5. Attitude is no substitute for competence. To become a hacker you have to develop certain attitudes and moods but copping an attitude WILL NOT make you a hacker! Becoming a hacker will require intelligence, dedication/motivation, hard work, and lots of study and practice. For a hacker all forms of competence are worshiped. A hacker prays to the Spirits of competence and everything related. Hackers learn to distrust attitude and respect and revere competence of every kind. An old person may be old but that does not by default make them wise! I have known very young children who are wiser than very old people. If you revere competence you will enjoy developing it in yourself in every aspect of your life. And hard work will turn into a fun challenge. Life hacking, mind hacking, and spiritual hacking (Spiritual hacking: my own innovation, though someone else may have come up with it too) are fairly modern innovations but have always been apart of the hackers life. So I don't have to type to much more you can do your own research and thinking on the last part of this. SO happy hacking. And, remember hacking is not cracking luser.