Who is a hacker? Explain what is meant by “the hacker ethic” with the help of a contemporary example.

Abstract:

This Post deals with defining a Hacker and the meaning of “Hacker Ethic” by taking into example of the -the face behind the facebook – MARK ZUCKERBERG

Introduction:

Are Hackers good or hacker’s are bad? Why do any one hack? The answer swiftly comes saying to “learn more about the system”, to know how the system really works, or sometimes to find out the loop holes in the system or to steal something. Each hacker wants to have recognition.Are the ethics which they follow,does they go on with the normal world ?

Who is a Hacker?

Hacker is a term that has been used to mean a variety of different things in computing. A community of enthusiast computer programmers and system designers, originated in the 1960s around the MIT's.The world wide web and the internet itself are also hacker artifacts. A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.” The hobbyist home computing community, focusing on hardware in the late 1970s and on software games in the 1980s/1990s. The community included Steve Jobs,Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates and created the personal computing industry.People committed to circumvention of computer security. This primarily concerns unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication networks such as the Internet (Black hats), but also includes those who debug or fix security problems(White hats), and the morally ambiguous Grey hats Hacker (computer security)

Hacker’s Ethic:

The Hacker Ethic The hacker's obsession with computing leads to impatience and intolerance with anything that stands in the way.I want to express about “Hacker’s Ethics” by taking the example of “The face behind the facebook ”  MARK ZUCKERBERG

As the film tells it, during the winter of 2004, Zuckerberg, a curmudgeonly(bad tempered), craven genius, bristling against authority and embittered by the culture of wealth and privilege that excludes him, creates a social network to impress vapid women and the callow preppies of Harvard’s exclusive, all-male final clubs. He took a certain amount of enjoyment out of not necessarily breaking rules, but just pointing out that people who have responsibility for things are kind of stupid. Mark never looked like a person who created a website which can impress many people.

                                                                                                                                                

Mark gained campus notoriety in November 2003, when he created Facemash. The idea behind Facemash was simple: a website on which you could compare the attractiveness of two Harvard students, voting with the click of a mouse. The site, which was open to the world and which used official Harvard headshots, went viral over email lists, nabbing 22,000 votes from over 450 people. Clicking through Facemash filled one with that particular kind of Internet-induced sickness, combining the titillation of an anonymous chat room with the meanness of an old-fashioned slam book. It was callow, it was distasteful, and it was a lot of fun. Facemash managed to offend a lot of people, including Harvard University, seeing as Facemash violated all sorts of usage, privacy, and property codes. Mark was hauled before the Ad Board, Harvard College’s administrative board. While asking a question why and how Facebook is different from other social networking website Mark himself shrugged off his own site. “[Thefacebook.com] is basically the same thing on a different scale. It’s not very novel.” Zuckerberg exhibited a typically cavalier, insurgent attitude—and recklessness with words: “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the university a couple of years to get around to [building a facebook],” he said. “I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.” This shows his recklessness and insurgent attitude.

This gives an appropriate measure of a millionaire hacker. Who hacked to find the loop holes,for fun, to remove his ex-girlfriend from his mind came with an extra-ordinary social networking site “FACEBOOK”. As any other hacker he does not believe in human relationships and have a better bondage between him and computer. He has a bad attitude against others,which was one reason for the creation of the “Facebook”

Most of the inputs from the movie “The Social Network”

References:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-08/mark-zuckerberg-at-harvard-the-truth-behind-the-social-network/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

B.Vamshi

EE09B104