Weekly Topics - Week 12: The Historical Hackerdom

source: Pixabay


This week’s topic is about the history of Hackers and the hacker-culture. I’m writing a short opinion piece about the practical applicability of the ideals of Hackers in the modern world.

One thing up front: I don’t know much about hacker culture and therefore I don’t really feel in the position to really critique it. I will just throw in some thoughts.

Over the time there has been some different hacker work ethics. Especially the hacker ethic of the nineties stuck out to me. Eric S. Raymond wrote a “How to become a Hacker” article. There are some good and basic recommendations in it, like learning a programming language and learn speak English fluently. But his “points for style” (basically how to become an even better hacker) seem weird to me. He suggests aspiring hackers to go to science fiction conventions and read science fiction. That makes it look like he wants his community to separate themselves from the “outer world” and join this very specific circle. He also suggests aspiring hackers to learn some material-arts, learn to play an instrument well (or sing) and to appreciate puns and wordplay (at least I can tick off the last one). For me, this list seems like an invitation to a cult. It seems a bit too much. If you follow all the recommendations, there will be no more free time to see your family and friends or -dare I say it- other hobbies. I know these suggestions were only “points for style”, but still: they were listed. I see these tips as more of a deterrent. If I were an aspiring hacker, this flood of to-do stuff would scare me off.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weekly Topics - Week 15: IT and Ethics

Image
  source: pixabay This week’s topic is about ethical theories. I’m picking the cultural relativism theory and apply an IT-related example to that. The cultural relativism theory sees that there is no right and wrong in the different cultures. “ Cultural relativism refers to the idea that the values, knowledge, and behavior of people must be understood within their own cultural context.” [1] When someone judges another cultures food it is an example for ethnocentrism. It means, that this person is using their own culture as the center of the world and evaluate other cultures based on that [2]. I found it hard to research a good example for its IT-related application, since most examples about cultural differences are about the different cuisines (eating bugs, eating pigs, etc.) and about their clothing style. The only, at least sort of, IT-related example I could think of is the cash-culture in Germany. Germans often pay for services and purchases with cash, which can annoy foreig
Read more

Weekly Topics - Week 8: Professionalism

Image
source: pixabay This week’s topic is about Professionalism. I'm going to write a short depiction about the IT sector in my home country. I’ll describe how it changed during the last 20 years. My home country is Germany, so we’ll have a look on the IT sector there. 20 years ago, the society for the German language chose the word “multimedia” as the word for the year [1]. A big change in the IT sector is, that nowadays the customers have all the IT equipment at home. The customers turned into users. That caused IT systems so to be more efficient, but also easier to use and cheaper. Sensitivity to data protection has declined significantly over the past 20 years. While Germans are still concerned about their personal data (especially in an EU comparison), they are now much more open with their data. The vice president of the society of informatics Andreas Oberweis said, that “Today, there is more of a serenity about data protection issues that almost borders on carelessness." The
Read more

Weekly Topics - Week 1: IT solutions in history

Image
This week I am going to talk about interesting IT inventions in history. Of course there are many, many interesting inventions. The three I picked interested me the most. The sources for my information are listed down below.  Let’s start with the first IT Invention:  The Black Box (1953) David Warren and his Black Box Prototype [3]  (imagesource: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dave_Warren_with_BlackBox_Prototype.jpg) Did you know, that the Black Box did a huge contribution to the international airline safety? The Black Box is a Flight Recorder, invented in 1953 by David Warren [1]. Warren was a aeronautical research scientist and invented this device, because a lot of high-profile airplane crashes went unsolved. Interesting fact: Contrary to popular belief, the black box is mostly bright orange , not black (like the name suggests). The Black Box Flight Recorder is able to record flight data, cockpit sounds and instruments during a flight. The recorder can storage speech data
Read more