Some Ethicals of Being A Hacker

#0×0001 A hacker is a person that loves to study all things in depth, especially the more apparently meaningless details, to discover hidden peculiarities, new features and weakness in them. For example, it is possible to hack a book, by using it to equalize the legs of a table, or to use the sharp edge of one of its pages to cut something. The main point being that it is used for more than it’s conventional function of being read. But more than this, a hacker soon learns that the same techniques used for exploiting computer systems can be used to manipulate people. This is the so-called social hacking. With a little skilled psychology, the masters of “social hacking” can convince other people to do what they want (within limits of course, and depending on the abilities of the “social hacker”), in order to obtain the information they require. This may sound like an unusual and unatural practise, but once you take into account that this is performed quite regularly, in everyday life, by girlfriends, friends and teachers etc. to obtain what they want from others, it’s not that strange, even if hackers do use a little more skill and technique.

#0×0010 A hacker is certainly a programming maniac, once a technique has been discovered, it is necessary to write a program that exploits it. Hackers often spend many day’s and night’s in front of a computer, programming or experimenting with new techniques. After spending so many hours in front of a computer, a hacker gains a remarkable ability to analyze large amounts of data very quickly. The ability to program quickly, can be a characteristic of a hacker, but is not always necessarily so. As far as a hacker is concerned, it is faster to type on a keyboard, than it is to write things down, many hackers spend quite a lot of time reflecting over, or analyzing previously written code, while they are programming.

#0×0011 The true hacker doesn’t have morals, and he would never censor information or ideas of any kind. Besides, hackers are tolerant by nature, and rarely get angry, but they are irritated by people and tasks perceived to be wasting their time. There are however, some things that hackers can be intolerant of. One of these is when lies are told, to, or about them, you can say that hackers are imbeciles (it’s an opinion, after all), but you can not say that they steal chickens. And yet, it would still be unusual that hackers would hack a site to remove the lies propogated about them. It would be more typical that they would create another site, refuting the lies against them.

#0×0100 The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible.

#0×0101 The belief that system-cracking for fun and exploration is ethically OK as long as the cracker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.