Don't know anything about the illegal side of it, because I think that's immature. But if you'd like to learn about the legimate practice of being a 'security analyst'...
If you have to come here to ask for links you probably better look for something else to do :D There is plenty of other illegal stuff that is quite fun to do.
i think curtie-poo should go watch "hackers", you know, that movie with that guy and that chick. that should explain lots to you about hiding stuff from "the feds" and why "the man" is trying to keep you out of "his computer".
Tip: Don't ask stupid questions. Don't ask how to hack. You make yourself sound like a fool. Ask how to do specific things after you have tried atleast to look up on it.
Since when do u tell the world you want to do something like that. Anyway, you must be an idiot if you can't find anyone/anything about hacking on the internet..
Oh please, please please do not ever link anyone to hackers.com
*sigh*
It makes me sad to see the state of that site today. Ugh...commercialized.
Hackers.com was the home of the famous Hackers' Haven BBS of the 1980's. I was close with the founder and admin, Ed Wilkinson (hackingwiz) I was even closer with the #2 man Tyler Bye (HyperViper), even joining the staff shortly before Ed's death in 1999.
The site, which should have passed to HV after Ed's death ended up passing on to some of Ed's family and then sold.
The current state of that site is a disgrace, and I often wonder how much money I would have to raise to buy the domain and at least return some dignity to it.
Sounds like you mean "dumbass" or "cracker", not hacker.
hacker (courtesy of everything2):
A person who tries to understand the inner workings of computers, and other electronics. Hacking is more of an idea and a way of life than one specific action.
Someone who learns (especially computer-related topics) through hands-on experimentation. A hacker would prefer using whatever information they could find on the internet to reading a book or taking a class. Topics of particular interest for hackers:
Linux C, C++ scripting languages, especially Perl Not to be confused with cracker.
See also geek.
A word that when used by the news media, means cracker. It gets more attention and ratings to say "hacker", regardless of whether it is the correct term or not.
The hacker sits comfortably on an office chair facing a terminal table, or perhaps it's just a pile of old listings as tall as a terminal table. He is typing madly, using just two fingers, but achieves speeds that typists using all ten fingers only dream of. He is apparently debugging a large assembly language program, as the screen of his terminal looks like a spray of completely random characters. The hacker is dressed in blue jeans, an old work shirt, and what might once have been running shoes. Hanging from his belt is an enormous ring of keys. He is in need of a bath. (From Lurking Horror, an Infocom game)
I immediately recognized myself from the picture - except that I don't carry a big keyring and I use a way much more advanced version of two-finger system (sometimes even utilizing six or even eight fingers at time). Also, the random jumble of letters on the screen would obviously be Perl, not assembly. Then again, I'm not exactly competent enough to be a hacker - I suck at LISP =)
Hackers are children at heart. They can't forget the beauty of playing with things, the joy of creation, of making their ideas real. They are mappers (in the sense from The Programmer's Stone), they hate conformism and rules, and exhibit highly logical thinking. Many like science, and admire the way great scientists think. (Richard Feynman's memories, "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" is one of my favorite books) They are overly confident in themselves; as Yoda put it, "Try not. Do or do not. There is no try." They learn by doing, and any other way of learning seems artificial. You don't first learn and then apply your knowledge; you learn by sinking yourself in the deep shit and then getting out. Quite often, they are regarded by friends (if they have them...) as either outcasts or geniuses.
I'm not familiar with "Ranger" but I assume that he's the guy who ended up with our domain.
As far as Tyler is concerned, I really don't know. He and I lost touch after his funding bailed on him for a project he was working on to create a "new" hacker's haven. Once the funding dropped, I lost contact with both HV & ST. *shrug*
I'm sure they've gone on to contribute more to the community in other forms. I'm just the only one stupid enough to run around still using my same handle from 6 years ago (though it's true most people call me, and I prefer, "ds" now instead of darksheer like back in the day, but still).
Anyway...I'm sure he's wanting millions for it, and he's probably justified to some extent wanting it. The truth is, with that domain, you can build anything and have it be an instant success (case-in-point, the slip-shod piece of SHIT that resides on that domain now). On the other hand, it's not really a domain name you can build a business around, so charging millions for it is a little out of range for anyone with reasonable aspirations for the domain. Simply put: it will never be a domain that could be used to start generating profit so to ask for so much is just absurd. Eh well.
I remember when us skinners were not just hackers, but on the fringe no less. If you had told me seven or eight years ago that someday we'd actually be informed by a software company where the bitmaps were at in a program and how to edit them, I would have laughed and said "Sure, and they'll even put our bitmaps on their website, right?". Then I would have gone back to playing Final Fantasy III.
I'm still not clear on how skins entered the digital mainstream, or when we all became 'designers' instead of hackers, or why the hell any of us thought it'd be a good idea to congregate. Like... together.
And I think the kid was kidding. Kids kid.
: I paid $14 for a T-shirt and all I got was this stupid T-shirt :
Truth be told, we owe it all to Napster. I know what you're thinking, I'm crazy...but hear me out.
Winamp was the first "mainstream" application to have a skinnable interface. But winamp wouldn't have become mainstream without the huge exposion in popularity of the mp3 file format. And we all know that the mainstream popularity of mp3s was made possible by a little program called napster.
Once people had their mp3's, they wanted to play them. Winamp was basically the only game in town at the time; at least, it was the only one people paid any attention to. And from there, the other apps started surfacing which supported "customizable interfaces" (skins).
Napster really was a revolution, in a lot more ways than people often give it credit for.
So ds, you being the resident l33tmaster... do you think all the scripting and custom code going in to skins these days is going to push us towards being a more hacker-driven community at large? I've been pondering this for a while now, and I'd dig your two cents.
: I paid $14 for a T-shirt and all I got was this stupid T-shirt :
Start with learning a programming language with ability to user OS native commands(API:s) and it also help if their is a library or macro in the compiler that can use assembler. Then learn how to hack..
I think a lot of the skinning community evolved out of the same childhoods that 15 years ago would have evolved into the state that we've come to know as "hackerdom." Skinning gave a lot of these kids who were interested in their computers an outlet which didn't involve quite such complexities. This was fortunate and unfortunate at the same time. On the bright side, it let people in on a computer-based subculture that 15-years ago, might have been left out on the basis of intelligence (contrary to what a lot of people seem to believe, it requires a certain level of intelligence to be able to learn the complex mathematics involved in truly intriguing programming).
What's surprising to me, and to be honest, I didn't really expect this, was how the skinning community has responded. No longer are we content to just change the look of the application, we want to alter functionality to suit our own needs. Sites like WinT's are all too indicative of this growing trend; so yes, I do see the community leaning towards a more "hacker-based" appraoch.
This is something the open source community has addressed for years; and unfortunately, their OS offering has come up short in a few areas thusfar. Take a look at what we're doing now; hexediting code to bend it to our own will. Wouldn't the community find it easier if they had access to not just a hexidecimal representation of the compiled code, but also the source itself? Forget looking for obscure values, get into the source and change it yourself the RIGHT way. This is what the real goal and great advantage of open source is; and yet, people in this community continue to struggle to make it work their way with these primitive tools.
Two factors are fundamental to the problem. The first is the shortcomings of the Open Source OS; it just simply does not function as well as Windows does out of the box and just doesn't support the same broad base of software that the windows platform caters to. This is a huge problem, and as time goes on, it will continue to get worse.
Secondly, and perhaps even more related to our topic here; is the hacker spirit. Evolving towards a hacker community; indeed we are! The first time a winamp skinner pulled out a hexeditor and said to himself, "I wanna get rid of the ads in AIM" the skinning community moved towards a more "hacker-like" culture. Moreover, companies seem to be forcing this upon us more and more; kazaa with it's gobs of spyware, advertisements all over AIM. The goal of the skinner was to take charge of his computer screen; and with skins, he could. But now, he struggles to take it back from the advertisements that grow more and more cumbersome and more and more prevelant. Ads on a web site are the least concern now.
I hope I've summed up my thoughts on this pretty well. Hrmm...thinking about all this stuff makes me think I should give some kind of speech on it. LOL
*wipes a tear away after reading darksheer's post*
beautiful man...simple.....beautiful..
: Nothing's better than takin a dump and checkin out some uber hardware...well...hacking into microsoft while dropping off the Cosby's might be better :
Gah, we've gotta get a future of skinning thread going. :)
I think right now we're going to see skinning kind of split in to two communities. The first is going to be the more 'above ground' community, which I expect will be represented by DeviantART and it's ilk. The focus will be more on softcore modification, like Winamp skins, themes, wallpapers, etc.. In this community, I see the future being a 'hack-in-a-box' executable which skins your entire desktop. The kids aren't patient enough to install seventeen different skins, icons, a new shell, so on. This, of course, is going to be fed by us, the serious skinners.
In the other (our) community, I think we'll see the more hardcore customizers start really tearing it up. Windows evolved a hell of a lot faster than we did, things like alpha desktops, webviews, and freeform true skinning kind of fell in our lap before we were really ready. We have a rough idea of what we can do now, but the tools to do it aren't quite there. A lot of our cool stuff like LiteStep works the exact same way it did under Win95. And look at the mess Winamp is in. Our software of choice was built for a MHz world. Now we measure in GHz, and nothing out there lets us take advantage of that.
I think a lot of people are kind of twiddling their thumbs waiting for more pieces to fall in to place. MSStyles as a format isn't finished, we don't have the polished next-gen multimedia player Winamp and Sonique have been promised, and nobody is willing to get their hands dirty hacking active desktop.
I think this time next year things'll be heating up.
: I paid $14 for a T-shirt and all I got was this stupid T-shirt :
You bring up a very important point at the end of your post:
How it looks is not nearly as important as how it works: this is a theory being proven by the hard-core crowd right now; and the truth is, the rest of the world wants it that way, they just don't have the time or inclination to change it.
The skinning community has always looked for freedom; they prove this more and more by putting together some of the most bleeding-ugly hacks imaginable to get their skins to do just what they want them to do. As with all hack jobs, eventually, it will fail and need to be reworked. This is why open source software, if embraced, could really start good things happening.
It is fundamentally wrong to attempt to fix shortcomings of a skinning system at the skin level. It is an issue that should be dealt with at the program level, where the code to handle the skin resides. But with proprietary software, we are limited. We don't have the code, we can't contribute a patch that makes the change. With open source, the same people that spend their times manipulating pixel values to hack together their skin could develop patches which increase the intrinsic value of the skinning system; not just their skin.
I'm not trying to preach open source software here, at least, not in its current state. What I am saying is that the bindings of proprietary software are growing stronger around the reach of the skinning community and eventually, the path to further freedom for how you interface with your computer will only lie in one path: open source.
Another thing you point out is that our paradigms are old. Sifting through litestep menus doesn't really sound like a good time to me to access my programs. In fact, I think you'd find that the majority of computer users just have a pile of icons on their desktops. We look at them as primitive at times; but it took you 8 seconds to navigate your litestep menus to get to what you wanted, it took them 2 seconds to double-click the big icon on their desktop. The idea of parading through menus dates back to much more primitive computing paradigms than a simple double-click on an icon.
Always remember: How it looks is not as important as how it works.
Curtis all the "hacking" people like you can do is with a axe and a piece of wood. Hacker. Whereas people like me, find "hacking" my way into packets of salted-peanuts and M&M's more fun. I swear those "rip-here" marks were stuck on the packets just for customize.org members.
Quack like a chicken and Moo like a horse ~ .: qwertz.tk :.
