The other side of the moon

Act I, Scene I - The News

I was sitting at La Luna Cafe in Cambridge sipping on Apple Cider, hacking random stuff and waiting for S to be done with work so we could head to the airport. That's when Atul pinged me and asked if it was okay to change the time slot of my talk. I said, yeah, no problem, just let me know the new time. He says, "6pm, keynote slot". I wasn't sure how to react. I told him that I'd never given a keynote before, and in parallel, my brain was telling me that this was true at some point for every keynote speaker ever.

I wasn't sure what to do apart from panicking. Did I have to approach the talk differently, did I have to put more into it? Did I need to speak for more than the 30 minutes that I'd already planned on? Did I need more than 5 slides? I write this now as a reminder and in the hope that it helps someone else.

Act II, Scene I - Bangalore

I got into Bangalore early on the morning of December 2nd and checked into the hotel. I'd slept well on the plane, so a few hours more in the hotel left me ready for the conference. My first task was to get myself a local phone number and then find the conference venue. About an hour later I was standing in NIMHAN's hospital wondering where the convention centre was. A security guard pointed me in the right direction where I saw familiar faces at the door. Tejas handed me my speaker badge as I got in.

Act II, Scene II - Interviewing

At this point, I still had the structure of the talk I'd planned to do before Atul gave me the news. Part of it involved speaking to hackers at FOSS.IN about their experiences, so I got started with that as soon as I got in. I spoke to Pradeepto, Tarique, Tejas, Kartik, James Morris, Siddhesh, Vinayak, Anant and many others about their experiences with hacking. I was a little relieved to know that their ideas always matched mine. At this point I was starting to lose some of the doubt I had.

I spent some time attending talks and checking out the workouts in the hacker area. This was the same old conference I knew.

Act II, Scene III - The first Keynote

Harald did the first keynote I attended, and the few things that struck me were that he'd used the LaTeX (beamer with the Warsaw theme), he had a lot of content on his slides, and he really knew what he was talking about. I sat up in the balcony to take notes. It only served to scare me.

Act III, Scene I - Panic

I'll jump now to the next keynote by Milosch Meriac. Milosch is a hardware hacker, and like in the last keynote, a few things struck me. He used LaTeX with the Warsaw theme for beamer, he had a lot of content on his slides, and he really really knew his stuff. His talk awed the audience and left them wanting more, which resulted in a follow-up workout on hardware hacking. It was turning out to be impossible to match the quality of the keynotes already delivered, and I had less than 24 hours left to get my act together.

Act IV, Scene I - There is no spoon

I was in early on the 4th. I sat through several talks. All of which were excellent. I thought back on the talks that I'd attended on the previous two days and it hit me that any one of these people could have done the same talk at 6pm and would have been great keynote speakers. Many of them also used LaTeX. I sort of joked on twitter that maybe if I used LaTeX, then I'd have a good talk as well. Then @artagnon replied saying that what I said was more important than my slides. He also helped out with some LaTeX formatting. I'd decided to use LaTeX for my presentation, not because the other presenters did, but because I didn't know LaTeX, and this conference seemed like a good excuse to learn it.

Act IV, Scene II - The photography BoF

At 5pm, Kalyan Varma and James Morris had a photography BoF in the largely unused speaker area. The space was mostly dark for best effect of the photos they were showing off. I sat in on it, and threw out everything I'd planned on talking about. Taking a cue from all the speakers, I decided to talk about what I knew best. My slides were unimportant. I had a few points that I wanted to cover, and made a note of those lest I forget (which I often did) and I had a lot of code that I wanted to show off, some of which I hadn't tried before, but I had a few hundred hackers in the room to help me with. As mentioned in the talk abstract, this talk was meant to be a hack, and that's the attitude I decided to go in with.

Act IV, Scene III - Shining lights

As I stood on the stage and tried to plug the VGA cable into my laptop, my hands were shaking. Not sure if anyone in the audience noticed though. I was nervous. Should I wear my hat and shield my eyes from the light or take off the hat and let my forehead shine? I went without the hat. It didn't matter. The talk had its ups and downs. I missed a few points that I thought I should cover. I lost track of where I was in the little list of points I'd made, and I stopped blank a few times. I also forgot to give away the tshirts that I had. Where it went the smoothest though, was when I was doing what I like best - hacking. Whenever there was code to demo, I was excited and I had real time feedback from everyone in the audience.

Act V, Endgame

I didn't get a chance to read the comments on twitter until late that night. They were mostly good, and the few that were critical were justified. The next day many people came up to me and told me that they enjoyed the talk hack. If they all end up hackers, that's what will be the real win.

Now it may seem from what I've said that the talk was largely spontaneous. The fact is that I wrote down a script a few times and threw it away. I rehearsed by recording myself speak and was aghast with the playback. I was forcing myself to change my talk simply because it had a new label. That was the only time I faltered, and it led me down the wrong path. A lot of people helped me get back on track, so in honesty, I only presented the keynote. It was hacked up by many many people at FOSS.IN.

For those who are interested, my slides are up on slideshare, but if you've been paying attention, you don't really need them.

Short URL: http://tr.im/fossdotinkeynote

First written: 30-June-2000
Updated: 6-Nov-2000

My name is Philip Tellis and I love playing with computers. I have written this small primer on hackers and hacking meant to inform people of the correct terminology to be used. Much more information is available at the references mentioned in this article.

The Internet in India is growing rapidly and with it, several new business models, entertainment avenues and educational opportunities. The Internet has also exposed us to security risks that come with connecting to a large network.

The media has always latched on to stories of so-called `hackers' breaking into computer systems and wreaking havoc. This article is a sincere attempt to set the record straight as far as the terminology and process of `hacking' is concerned.

The hacker culture as it is known, actually started way back in the 1950's when computers were huge and bulky, and programming them meant connecting wires to electrodes. Although they didn't call themselves hackers then, that pretty much explains what a hacker is.

The new hacker's dictionary defines a hacker as:

hacker n.

1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
3. A person capable of appreciating hack value.
4. A person who is good at programming quickly.
5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in `a Unix hacker'. (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)
6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.

This term seems to have been first adopted as a badge in the 1960s by the hacker culture surrounding the `Tech Model Railroad Club' (TMRC) and the MIT AI Lab. It was probably used in a sense close to this by teenage radio hams and electronics tinkerers in the mid-1950s.

All computer systems that we use today are based on research done by early hackers. Much of this research was done out of love for the subject, with no personal gain other than fame amongst the community. Hackers built the internet. Hackers built and maintain usenet. All internet related
business today owes its origin to hackers.

The hacker community is a 'meritocracy based in ability'. Membership must be earned. One does not call oneself a hacker until other hackers recognise one as such. There is a certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as a hacker.

Some of the more famous hackers of lore are Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak - the founders of Apple Computer, Bill Gates - more of a hacker during his teens than later, Linus Torvalds - the guy behind linux, Richard Stallman - founder of GNU, Larry Wall - author of Perl, Bill Joy and James Gosling from Sun Microsystems, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson from AT&T, Bjarne Stroustroup - author of C++. Many of these hackers have reached demigod status in the community and are still active hacks.

Around 1980 or so, a new breed of computer fed kids came up. With easy access to the internet in the US and Europe, they soon realised that they could easily break into other people's systems and do what they wanted. They called themselves hackers too. This was really unfortunate, because the name kind'a stuck.

Real hackers do not consider such security breakers to be hackers. The term preferred for such persons is cracker:

cracker n.

One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker (q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish `worm' in this sense around 1981-82 on Usenet was largely a failure.

While it is true that many hackers posess the skills for cracking, anyone past larval stage is expected to have outgrown the desire to do so except for immediate, benign, practical reasons.

Contrary to popular belief (amongst non hackers), there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom. Very often it has been thought that there is a very thin line between being a hacker and being a cracker. Several debates have been initiated on usenet and in geek media.

The basic difference between hackers and crackers is this:

hackers build things, crackers break them.

As a hacker, I build software programs for others to use. There is nothing illegal or shameful about the hacking I do. Most of my software is given away with the freedom to modify, reuse and redistribute with the only restriction being that these freedoms are always included. My hacks are meant to help other people, not hurt them.

With the introduction of the IT Bill, it is important that these facts be made public so that the culture of hackers in India do not have to be ashamed to admit who they are. It is also important to ensure that they are not seen as criminals in the eyes of the law. The law must clearly define what a `cybercrime' is and state clearly that hacking is not one of them. Cracking is. Make hacking a crime and one will have to charge every single proficient and competent computer programmer in this country.

This article seeks only to introduce the proper terminology. There is far more information available on the Internet, and I urge you to read through it. For starters run through Eric Raymond's essay on `How to become a hacker' Read through the jargon file and `A Brief History of Hackerdom' also at the same site. Then, browse down to GNU and read the philosophy of free software. You may also want to get hold of a copy of `The New Hacker's Dictionary' and `Open Sources' from O'Reilley.

Hackers have a bad name primarily because of the way the media spreads reports of `hacking'.

In April 1988, ZDnet was conducting a survey. They use the word `hacker' to mean `cracker', but their readers don't. Greg Lehey reports that he found approximately 80% of the responders agreed that a hacker is as defined above and not the same as a cracker. I wonder how much that has changed in the last 12 years.

We request that you try to make things right. From now on, when you say hack, make sure you mean hack and not crack. You owe hackers an apology for spoiling their name, but most of all, you owe them respect.

Parts of this article have been taken from sources mentioned here, most notably, the jargon file and the hacker-howto by Eric S. Raymond. Please do read the originals.

Check out Greg Lehey's The term ``hacker'' as well.

The jargon file can be found at: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/Introduction.html

The hacker howto can be found at: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html