Swords of Light & Fire in the Heart

[jarandhel]

First of all, I'd just like to say that tlttlotd is an evil, evil man. :) You, sir, have *single-handedly* increased my music library by about six GIGS in the past few days (or you will have when the three bittorrents I'm currently downloading complete, anyway.) How, you ask? *points to the current music line on the entry* I read your memory logs. Yeah, you hooked me on game remixes. (Not that I'm really complaining. *grins*)

Now onto the substantive portion of this entry. I've been reading the book "The Hacker Diaries: Confessions of Teenage Hackers" by Dan Verton that rhiannasilel got me for Christmas. Finding it very interesting so far. I'm in the middle of the second chapter, currently, and already I've been struck by something. One of the most common questions the hacker community seems to get is "how do I learn how to hack?" I know I've asked it many times myself, though usually silently to myself or through carefully crafted web searches rather than outright asking others. And I'm noticing that so far, none of these kids seems to have learned the same way. Some of them found the BBS scene first, others had computers at home with no modems and started cutting their teeth on that. Some started from the software end, others from the hardware. Some started with computers and moved onto phreaking, others went the other way. One of them even started by taking apart his parents VCR. With so many avenues into hacking, and indeed so many different things that can be considered hacking in the first place, the question of how one learns to hack really becomes meaningless. The question might as well be simply "how do I learn?", and obviously the answer is going to be as individual as you are. And if you don't know how you learn, chances are nobody else does either.

It's also analogous to the question "How do I write?". Nobody can answer that, fully. Sure, they can point you to basics about plotting and grammar, characterization and style, conflict and tension and atmosphere and a hundred other TOOLS for writing. But they can't really teach you how to use those tools to actually write. The reason for that is that only you can decide what you will write, when it comes down to it. Your writing is your own, unique and individual. Unless copied, no two books or stories will ever be just the same. And writing isn't about copying. It's about making something new, something that comes from inside yourself.

In another sense, being a hacker is like being Otherkin. It's something you are, not something you learn or become. You can learn skills along the way to make yourself better in walking your path, you can gain experience to understand your path better, but deep down at the core of it all hacking is all about a certain attitude, a certain mindset or quality that you either have or you don't. A certain curiosity, perhaps, though I'm not quite sure that's the right word. I'm not even sure there is a word to describe the burning hunger that is felt when confronted with certain concepts, certain ideas. The things that keep us awake, late into the night, trying to figure out just how something worked or how to fix a certain bug or solve a problem. The thing that drives us not just to solve one problem, but to seek out the next one, and the next beyond that. Always learning.

I don't know if there were hackers before computers, but I suspect there were. If you look for them, you can probably find them. Thomas Edison, perhaps? Leonardo da Vinci, almost certainly. Those men and women who approach life with the attitude that there is much to be learned, and then do so. Those willing to transcend the limits of a single discipline and allow the different arts and sciences they have mastered to intermingle symbiotically and make something altogether new to this world. WE saw it with Da Vinci's merging of art and science, and we see it now in the tools of the hackers: Hardware, software, networking, programming, security, encryption, stealth, strategy, social engineering. Magic. And more...

I think this attitude has been called many things. There was a series recently on television that called such a man a "Pretender". And Da Vinci himself was called a "Renaissance Man". And there's the more colloquial "jack of all trades", of course, which downplays the significance of such men. But I think the one I like the best is the oldest one I know: Samildinach. Roughly, it means the same as Jack of All Trades, but rather than implying "Master of None" as the former phrase does, it instead implies Mastery of them all. It's also a rather appropriate reference to use in discussing hacking, as well, since it was the title of the celtic god Lugh. And who better than a Sun God to represent a Craft whose most explicit function is throwing light on the hidden places in the world inside our machines?

Comments

[teriel.livejournal.com]

I think really a person has all the skills they need to have..it's just a question of whether that person is aware of it.

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

The Socratic view of learning? I've heard this theory before, but honestly I don't subscribe to it. No matter what, a person who has never heard or seen German before is not going to start speaking German unless he has past-life memories where he has heard or seen German. Likewise, Socrates himself never started writing out design specs for circuit boards, or doing object oriented programming, since he'd never seen or worked with computers before.

[teriel.livejournal.com]

Well i'm not exactly saying that. I am saying however that a person, if s/he applies him/herself with genuine interest and enthusiasm can learn skills and has the reosurces to learn those skills, but has to be fully engaged to do it...

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

Eh, I'd list Nikola Tesla more as a protohacker than Edison (Edison largely stole his ideas--quite literally the ONLY invention that Edison ever did that was *not* invented either without contest or independently by another person beforehand was the phonograph, and what he invented was largely a prototype :3).

Okay, actually, there is one other thing Edison legitimately invented--the electric chair (originally to demonstrate how "dangerous" Nikola Tesla's AC current system was; Westinghouse still preferred Tesla's AC system).

Besides Nicky Tesla actually inventing modern electricity (and being Edison's major competitor, in fact, for electrifying the country), the lightbulb was independently invented by a British person, Joseph Swan (Edison legitimately did improve on the invention, but by no means did he invent the light bulb!); reportedly Edison did not even understand the principle by which light bulbs worked.

Motion pictures, too, were *not* invented by Edison but, much like the light bulb, built on the work of someone else's invention. Specifically, most evidence now points to Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge being the inventors of the motion picture; in fact, Edison may well have stolen the idea from Muybridge himself, only applying the process to film; even then, he was beaten by the brothers Lumière who are now widely recognised as being the true inventors of the modern (silent) motion picture process, having invented a portable motion picture camera and processing lab in 1895.

If anything, Edison was a very good social engineer. One might compare him to Bill Gates nowadays (with his labmates being the Paul Allens, and the lot of them stealing the code to Digital Engineering's CP/M to write MS-DOS!).

Tesla actually did some amazing things, including being the person with the best legitimate claim to being the inventor of radio (Tesla actually sued Marconi, and in the 1940's it was finally ruled that Marconi actually violated Tesla's patents), inventor of some of the first apparatus for high-frequency radio transmission (the reason we have FM radio now is thanks to Tesla), the modern apparatus of electricity production (Tesla invented AC current), etc.

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

Good point, to be honest my own research into Samildanach has largely focused around Da Vinci to the point that I was having trouble thinking of any others. I've never really looked into Edison myself, I was thinking of the popular portrayal of him in modern history as the Wizard of Menlo Park and researching in such divergent directions as a sufficiently long-lasting lightbulb filament and the phonograph. I have heard of Tesla's work before, though more in the context of sustainable development and alternative technologies, particularly his bladeless turbine. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin would have been a better example for me to use, since I know a bit more about him and his accomplishments.

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

Eh, don't sweat it too much. Tesla is really only now starting to get the respect he honestly deserves. (I myself found out about Tesla, ironically, from the *rock band* Tesla--they named the band for Nikola Tesla, and actually have a song called "Man Out Of Time (Edison's Medicine)" which is based on the biography of Nikola Tesla by the same name. (And yes, if you want to learn more about Tesla I highly recommend the book.)

Part of why Tesla is less well known is, well, he was not that much of a people person, to be honest :3 (Edison and Marconi were much better promoters) I even specifically brought up the Gates/Allen thing to note that--Tesla was a geek, but not so much a people-geek.

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

Other persons I'd legitimately list as "early hackers" are Leonardo da Vinci (as noted before), the early scientist Andreas Vesalius (one of the first persons to do autopsies post-Dark Ages, he wrote one of the first modern and accurate books on human anatomy and actually set in motion the use of the modern scientific method in medicine), Philo Farnsworth (who is the earliest person who can legitimately be stated to have invented modern television, and was such a "tinkerer" that he invented an electric washing machine for his family at the age of twelve), Alexander Graham Bell (who not only was an early co-inventor of the telephone with Elisha Gray, but invented the groundwork for fibre optics, helped make many improvements in early airplanes, and even stubmed upon fractals in the invention of a type of kite (known to this day as a Bell tetrahedral kite) that is essentially a type of 3-dimensional fractal known as a tetrix or Sierpinski sponge (which is a 3-d version of a Sierpinski gasket or Sierpinski sieve)--and is powerful enough to pick up people in the larger iterations thereof).

For that matter, Benjamin Franklin can legitimately be considered an early hacker of sorts. :3

(And yes, I've had an unhealthy interest for some time with Bell tetrahedral kites. As I've noted, they're basically Sierpinski sponges and have a ton of lift; schools even have students construct small Bell kites (out of tissue paper and straws) to teach the principle of fractals and how fractal shapes can technically have infinite volume. (We know know Bell tetrahedrals have so much lift because they ARE fractal kites, and one of the classic fractals at that.) Seeing as a 64-cell Bell tetrahedron has launched people into the air... :3

(Most people, being sane, only build 16-cell varieties, as this is seen as the limit of managability or safety. There are people who've been insane enough to do the 64-cell versions a la Bell, though, usually as part of school class projects; some examples are here.)

[jarandhel.livejournal.com]

Bro, you are SO the physical incarnation of a search engine. :)

Very nice links, thank you. I especially like the quote by Bell:
"There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things."

[dogemperor.livejournal.com]

Bell is actually one of those people whom I deeply, deeply respect and I actually consider a bit of a hero of mine. :3 (Among other things, Bell also did a lot of stuff for the deaf and hard of hearing--he had deaf relatives, among other things, and it's a little known fact that the telephone is actually an outgrowth of his attempts to create an electronic hearing aid.)

[tlttlotd.livejournal.com]

<laughter>

I'm glad you like it.. there's a lot of good music coming out of the chiptune cover scene these days.

Hacking is more of a state of mind than a skill. There are many ways to reach that state of mind and put it to use, just as there are many things that the state of mind of hacking can be applied to. A lot of hacking is learning how something works on your own, without the benefit of training or (much) documentation, and that implicitly requires being able to teach yourself things. The key to that, as Frank Herbert wrote, is in believing that you can learn things on your own.

I think that there were hackers before there were computers. There were ciphers dating back thousands of years that had to be broken before the information could be understand. Quabbalists and alchemists used such codes in their research to protect their notes. da Vinci wrote in cursive backwards to protect some of his notes, also. There were people inventing languages and figuring out how to make clockwork mechanisms for the sheer challenge of it. Tesla, Marconi, and Edison hacked, to be sure, and created wonderful things from their efforts.