Hacking

Hacking. I have always been fascinated by it. Intrigued. Possessed, even. For it is so amazing to think and feel like a hacker, that there was a time in my life when I wished I could give anything to be known as a hacker.

The first impression of a hacker I formed in my mind, was that of a cunning individual sitting in a dark room tapping away on his workstation. I certainly imagined that person to be evil - a notorious individual who broke into computer systems and stole important data. And I knew even then that it was a crime. And I knew that these kind of people went to prison often.

The idea of prison was not very fascinating to me, but the urge to possess that power - the power to create and to destroy -  was so overwhelming, that I began browsing the internet about hacking and how to go about it. As of today, I consider the majority of what I found and learned as useless. Yes I learned how to change windows passwords and how to format hard drives, but I had no idea how these happened. I was able to do a lot of things, but I couldn't do anything.

But it was all before an article that I read changed my mind. It didn't just change my mind - it altered my idea of hacking, and that of a hacker, forever. I believe that it is the best place to start if you are planning on learning hacking. This wonderful piece is by ESR (Eric S. Raymond). His homepage is here and the article titled "How To Become A Hacker" lives here. As a total novice, and at a loss as to where to start, this article got me started.

I also joined a couple of sites, and a forum at a later point of time. Searching on Google for "learn to hack" will pop up some interesting options. I joined HackThisSite.org. They are a legal training ground, and they had various missions to get me started. It was while attempting to solve those missions that I came to know how far behind I was in my expertise. Expertise? Well, I was not even close.

The forum I joined was HackForums.net. And on retrospect, I would advice you not to join it. The forum is great, and there might even be some pretty useful stuff there, but the people! Most of the users on HF (short for HackForums) are kids looking for a way to vent out their frustration on the world. Too often in the threads, you can see them whining for people to take down a particular site. And I wasn't surprised to find many questions like "How to hack this guy's facebook password?" and the like.

And the icing on the cake is that this forum has a section called "Requests for Hacking". I mean, come on! You miss the whole spirit and essence of hacking if you are asking other people to do it for you, in the first place.

I might get a little philosophical here, but here goes: Hacking is like life. It is the journey, and not the destination that matters here. You live life for the sake of living it, an not because you are going to get somewhere after your life is over. It is the same for hacking. You hack because you love it, because you can learn something from it, because it fascinates you - not because you take a thrill out of harming people and defacing their sites!

I have always wanted to write open-source software and be a known member of the hacker community. But I have not yet acquired the skills. All I know now are the basics. I guess I'm more of a Jack-of-all-trades rather than the master of one. I have frequently heard people advice others to take it one at a time. But I have never been able to have the focus required to do so. I keep jumping from pillar to post when I see something that arouses my interest. For example, if I found a post somewhere about how to make a low-cost line-following robot, I would probably drop whatever I was doing and go for it. And if I were working on a site exercise that I had given myself in PHP, and I see a new way to program an android app with HTML5 and Javascript, I would certainly drop the site and go after the app. I have tried in the past to correct this habit of mine, but in vain. I guess that is something that I'll have to learn to live with.

If you have read the hacker-howto, you would now know about the glider. I hope that some day, I will consider myself worthy enough to use it.

EDIT
(10 Aug 2013)
I posted a thread on HF, explaining what I wanted from the site and what I was getting instead. I asked the people if it was best for me to leave, or to stay and wait a little longer. I have got a total of 22 replies when writing this, and I am convinced that I should stay a while, and explore the 'Coding' sections. I would advice that you try HF, but ignore the things that do not interest you. If you are someone like me, you would like the 'Coding' section a lot :)