Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Hacking is cool. Well, gaining access to someone else's data and systems is not. Learning a system you own so thoroughly that you can find ways to make it misbehave to benefit you is. Picking your neighbor's door lock is uncool. Picking your own is cool. Manipulating a remote computer to give yourself access you shouldn't have is uncool. Manipulating your own to let you do things you're not suppose to be able to is cool.

That exploration of the edges of possibility is what make moves the world ahead. I doubt there's ever been a successful human society that praised staying inside the box.

View on HN

We can say that committing crimes is uncool but there’s definitely something appealing about knowing how to do subversive things like pick a lock, hotwire a car, create weapons, or run John the Ripper.

It effectively turns you into a kind of wizard, unconstrained by the rules everyone else believes are there.

Well put. There’s something inherently cool in knowledge you’re not suppose to have.

You have to know how to subvert existing security in order to build better secure systems. You _are_ supposed to know this stuff.

Some people think we shouldn’t because “what if criminals also learn it?” Uh, they already know the best techniques. You’re right: you and I need to know those things, too, so we can defend against them.

And sometimes, knowing that information is useful for legit scenarios.

When my grandma was moving across the country to move in with my mom, she got one of those portable on-demand storage things, but she put the key in a box that got loaded inside and didn't realize it until the POD got delivered to my mom's place.

I came over with my lock picks and had it open in a couple minutes.

> We can say that committing crimes is uncool

Disagree in general. Laws != morals. Often enough laws are unjust and ignoring them is the cool thing to do.

Manipulating a remote computer to give yourself access you shouldn't have can be cool if that computer was used in phone scam centers, holding the private data of countless elderly victims. Using that access to disrupt said scam business could be incredibly cool (and funny).

It could be technically illegal, and would fall under vigilante justice. But we're not talking about legality here, we're talking about "cool": vigilantes are usually seen as "cool" especially when done from a sense of personal justice. Again, not talking about legal or societal justice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com