Hack, Hacker and Hacktivist

Today one of my roommate hacked Gmail account of his friend, the thing which makes me happier is he did this by himself without my help. I realized one thing today that instead of helping other its always better to inspire them to help themselves, people may think you as arrogant or rude for such things but I am damn sure that they’ll learn good things from you.

Why I am saying good to hacking for many reasons. Many of my friends at back home are hackers, some are ethical and many are not :) . The term ‘hacker’ here should be taken into broader sense. Hacker means person who breeches security of any information system and Hack is an act done by hacker to get any processed data from any information computing device. I think this is a very common term these day’s everyone is aware about hacking or ethical hacking. I am not going share those old views of hacking. The term Hacking was basically used in mid 60’s with the advent of computing devices it got popular after 90’s when ARPAnet became INTERnet.

Before sharing anything I would like share some interesting things, which we’ll call hackers. Let’s look at it first

• Original Hacker – Aficionados who born during early phase of computing i.e. 60’s with the intense of constantly checking capabilities of mainframes.
• Hardware Hacker – Innovators in 70’s played key role in bringing personnel computing to the world. They worked to decentralize the computing technology.
• Software Hackers – Basically programmers who used to create elegant means to change or create code which hampers hardware.
• Cracker-Person breaking down to security enters into someone else’s computing device though not always with bad intense, term got popular since 1980
• Microserfs – Term got popular after Douglas Coupland’s novel – Microserfs in 1995, its a marginalized group of hackers who never co-opted with security provided by Microsoft, windows 95 was first victimized OS because of these people.
• OpenSource : An ethical group which creates best possible software led to a broad community devoted to submitting free hacks openly that could then be improved by others.
• Hacktivists: Group merging hacking activity with an overt political or social posture .

Matt A Roberts has different definitions about hackers and types of hackers but I am not here to share his theories, I expect my reader friends to use Google for this :)

I am fortunate enough to study society, but my tech savvy notions always force me to view society from technical point of view, thinking over society as big computing system I was able to find various ‘entities relations’ ‘procedures’ ‘object orientedness’ , ‘polymorphism’ , you name the technical term and no I have ‘social’ definition for that :) If Society is big system, then we can presuppose that economy , politics, religion and education as its subsystems.

In developing countries like India we can clearly observe that all these subsystems electronic for instance, in Economy – banking services, man power management, finance etc Politics – all government sites, census data, and election campaigns, etc. Religion – sites of religious groups and religious leaders, online donations etc. Education – we all know that :)

Person or group of people who breaks down these e-systems of any these social subsystems are hacktivists like Julian Assange who afforded to break systems for political reforms. Such people are very different than those people who are interested in to breaking payment gateways. Right now i can see two basic class(or caste, or race) in virtual world, One is hackers and others are hacktivists , for me ethical hackers follows in group of hackers who with selfish desires of own or their employers, uses their knowledge to find loop holes in security domains. While on other side hacktivists are new social leaders who are taking responsibility to bring social reforms by using same knowledge without any selfish interests.

I urge my friends to be leader and not be follower, why India can’t produce Julian Assange ? Are we lacking in knowledge of hacking ?? Are we lacking in ethics and values? Are we getting selfish enough to make only money ?? do we think that virtual world does have any connection to society or politics? Can’t we bring change in society by using same abused techniques of hacking?