In Hacker Highschool, Students Learn To Redesign the Future 85
caseyb89 writes "Hacker Highschool is an after school program that teaches students the best practices of responsible hacking. The program is open source, and high schools across the country have begun offering the free program to students. Hacker Highschool recognized that teens are constantly taught that hacking is bad, and they realized that teens' amateur understanding of hacking was the cause of the biggest issues. The program aims to reverse this negative stereotype of hacking by encouraging teens to embrace ethical, responsible hacking."
On golden wand. (Score:3, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, high school hacks you.
Re:On golden wand. (Score:5, Funny)
I just awoke from a 30 year long coma, and I find this joke to be fresh and original!
Spelling Check (Score:3)
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Re:Spelling Check (Score:5, Funny)
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Or instead it might be used to refer to those individuals who, possessing the wisdom of experience, decide that the cultural demarcations of "maturity" are non-productive, even counter-productive, and cast them off in preference of a more childlike irreverence for propriety. I believe the traditional Taoist philosopher filled such a niche, and reportedly delighted in tweaking the nose of their rigidly proper Confucian contemporaries (In a playfully benevolent manner, of course. It's been said that neither
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Postmaturity... I like it.
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Or instead it might be used to refer to those individuals who, possessing the wisdom of experience, decide that the cultural demarcations of "maturity" are non-productive, even counter-productive, and cast them off in preference of a more childlike irreverence for propriety. I believe the traditional Taoist philosopher filled such a niche, and reportedly delighted in tweaking the nose of their rigidly proper Confucian contemporaries (In a playfully benevolent manner, of course. It's been said that neither philosophy can be fully understood except in it's relation to the other)
And suddenly the Hurd was enlightened.
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Did anyone else hear that "whooooosssshhhhhhhhhh"?
Do you mean like someone blowing on a microphone? I'll keep my ears pealed for it.
Hacking was always good. (Score:5, Funny)
The bad people just got the title 'Hacker' assigned by stupid, lazy people in the media -- you know, the kind who are utterly mistified as to why anyone would want to surf a web.
Re:"we" (Score:2)
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Its the ultimate in recycling..
To do this right, it requires enough intelligence to understand how the thing you have works, what you want it to do, and how to arrange things to get what you have to do what you want it to do,
What's not respectable in that?
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You want to understand how a gadget works? That's against the DMCA, you terrorist hacker criminal scum. Be a good consumer and drop that screwdriver right now or I'll be forced to put you down.
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For me, the word "hacking" is a term used to denote taking something intended for one purpose and using it for another purpose.
Its the ultimate in recycling..
Sort of Object Oriented theft?
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Sort of Object Oriented theft?
How is my doing anything I want to any piece of equipment I own in any way "theft"? When I was a teen in the '60s, guitar fuzzboxes cost well over a hundred dollars, I'd make them out of a ten dollar transistor radio and two dollars worth of parts.
I guess I was a theif, then. I was always hacking hardware. I guess I'm still a thief, because I'm in the process of turning an old computer into a DVR.
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Sort of Object Oriented theft?
How is my doing anything I want to any piece of equipment I own in any way "theft"? When I was a teen in the '60s, guitar fuzzboxes cost well over a hundred dollars, I'd make them out of a ten dollar transistor radio and two dollars worth of parts.
I guess I was a theif, then. I was always hacking hardware. I guess I'm still a thief, because I'm in the process of turning an old computer into a DVR.
Nothing you describe is theft. Sorry if you thought otherwise.
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Just give up on the term already.
Pick a new word to describe hacking. They don't know what it was called before, they won't notice. Then 'hackers' can be the bad guys everyone wants them to be, but we aren't 'hackers' anymore, so we don't care. Everyone is happy.
I always liked "Macguyvered" although that seems to be used for improvised
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ethical, responsible hacking (Score:1)
All defined by who you hack.
Disappointed... (Score:2)
I thought it said "redesign the furniture".
Hold on a minute! (Score:1)
Or will it conversely be the knowledge that the masses so vitally need to see clearly through the hysterical rhetoric of the cyber-paranoid?
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They won't give written tests at the Hacker High School; when you enroll you are given an automatic "F."
It's up to you to hack in and change it to an "A."
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...come to think of it - might as well make it "PASS - FAIL."
No one would hack in to give themselves a 'C!'
Loaded term. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Hacker" is a loaded term. It might not be fair, but that is the fact of the matter. As such "Hacker Highschool" is doomed to attract everything from raised eyebrows to terminology-holy-wars. (Speaking of holy-wars, try having a rational discussion over the meaning of "jihad"). Maybe that is the point -- to attract attention. Whatever the case, concept of "hacking" is ill-served by the term.
People should be curious, and free to pursue that curiosity in a responsible matter. That isn't something to learn, it is something to avoid un-learning. Once you have had it stamped out of your soul, I really wonder if you can pick it up again.
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As such "Hacker Highschool" is doomed to attract everything from raised eyebrows to terminology-holy-wars.
Perfect. Sounds like a gimme for easy publicity. Not only that but one of their main goals is to "reverse this negative stereotype of hacking by encouraging teens to embrace ethical, responsible hacking". So if they are doing good work that fits the original definition of hacking and part of their mission is to change the perception of the word hacking then what better way to do that than to associate good deeds with "Hacker Highschool".
Re:terminology-holy-wars (Score:3)
(Satire)
We all know that Hackers are terrorists, right? The EULA-Abiding masses should never be clicking anywhere outside the nice little boxes on the page.
So we can power the state of Montana with the clash between National Security and Think of the Children, right?
"Let's train our children to be terrorists!"
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1990s or 1980s phhht. Kids. Lawn.
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The meaning of the term hacker hasn't changed and isn't the problem. Hackers have always been perceived as intruders, as trouble. They've always seen themselves as students and masters of techology, driven by curiosity more than anything else.
Just look up "hack" in the dictionary (e.g. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Hack [reference.com]). Calling yourself a "hacker" is pretty much asking to be viewed in a pejorative light.
Which is probably not a coincidence. "Tinkerer" sounds lame. "Hacker" is edgy.
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Hmmm... until now, I respected that dictionary, but its definition of "hack" is sorely lacking. As a noun, "hack" can also mean a cab driver or a magazine writer, and those weren't included.
They do better with "hacker" though --
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"Hacker" is a loaded term. It might not be fair, but that is the fact of the matter. As such "Hacker Highschool" is doomed to attract everything from raised eyebrows to terminology-holy-wars.
The term is not all that bad, so they're bound to have more than a few parents interested in it.
Plus, it's a term that will get the high school a fair share of free publicity for it. Branding-wise, I think they made the right call. A "computer programming high school" or a "computer science high school" simply would never attract the same level of attention.
Hacking isnt bad (Score:1)
I refer you to the words of The Mentor, who can describe it better than I ever could:
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three- piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world... Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert. This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
+++The Mentor+++
[May the members of the phreak community never forget his words -JR]
Source: http://www.angelfire.com/freak2/r4v3n_phr34k/lastwords.html [angelfire.com]
I hope they don't try to teach math... (Score:3, Informative)
Now, my math may be a bit off, but I read through their "Lesson 12 - Passwords" and found this sentence:
With a 2 letter password, and 26 letters in the alphabet, plus 10 numbers (ignoring symbols),
there are 236 possible combinations (687,000,000 possibilities).
And I can't for the life of me get those numbers. (26+10)^2 = 1296, right? Or if we count uppercase (26+26+10)^2 = 3844
The square root (only two characters) of 687,000,000 is ~26,210. Last time I checked, there are not 26210 writable characters in our alphabet. Or in UTF-8 for that matter.
Increase the password length to
8 characters, and there are 836 combinations (324,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
possibilities).
836 combinations? Now im just confused. That's even less than 4 two letter passwords! (4*236 = 944)
And where does that 323*10^30 possibilities come from?
I can't be THIS bad at math, can I ?
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ps. i couldn't figure out how they get 687 million possibilities for a 2 character password with only alphanumeric characters either, and i'm supposed to be an engineer (though i'll admit to anyone that i need a calculator to add numbers together). actually i'm not even sure of what is meant by combinations and possibilities. i haven't done combinatorics for a long time, but i thought combinations=possibilities (think of cracking a safe combi
Re:I hope they don't try to teach math... (Score:4, Insightful)
They mistakenly did 2^36 instead of 36^2.
I'll always remember the words of my HS maths teacher "A combination lock should be called a permutation lock".
With a safe or a password, "possibilities" means "permutations". 123 is distinct from 132 in that case. If we're talking "combinations", those are the same.
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I think it's a typographic mistake and 236 is meant to be 2^36 (superscript got lost somewhere). That's 68,719,476,736 (so their calculator isn't working either). This also explains the "836 combinations", which they mean to be 8^36 (3.24E32). Of course all of these numbers are horribly wrong. The same text with the same typographic mistake and the same wrong math appears several times on the Internet, but the lesson is dated 2004, so it may well be the source of those copies.
There used to be "bomb building
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Glad to see you made good out of a really crappy experience. Cheers!
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Though I do still have some weak spots in my education, particularly in english as I'm more of a math geek and have never taken the time to educate myself on the proper use of language.. So be gentle on my mistakes here ;)
As far as I can tell, you write as well as most of the other students I knew from classes as an English major at Berkeley, so it doesn't appear to have been a major setback... I recently started teaching myself 'proper' writing and grammar, as my schools didn't bother beyond the basics in elementary school -- if you're curious about it in the future, I've found 3 books that make the task more entertaining and are pretty good references:
The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the [amazon.com]
Buy these kids an Arduino dev kit. (Score:2)
If I was a young geek I'd much rather be hacking Arduino or Lego Mindstorms...
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ps. mindstorms is awesome
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You deserve to have your testicles ripped off and fed to your mother.
P.S. => maybe you should take his testicles out of your mouth before you do that
At Hacker Highschool... (Score:4, Funny)
...everyone gets F's. If they can't figure out how to break in and change it to a better grade, they don't deserve to pass.
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Redesign the future? (Score:2)
Gag me with a bar of soap.