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How to Become a Hacker

There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmersand networkingwizards that traces

its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet

experiments. The members of this culture originated the term hacker.

There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people

who get a kick out of breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call

these people crackers and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers object that being able to

break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an

automotive engineer.

There are people who apply the true hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music but

in the rest of this article we will focus the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions

of the shared culture that originated the term hacker.'

ThinkingLike a Hacker

Adopt the mindset of a hacker. Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe infreedom and voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as a hacker, you must behave as thoughyou have this kind of attitude yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude, youhave to really believe the attitude. So, if you want to be a hacker, repeat the following thingsuntil you believe them:

Steps

No thanksGostaria de aprender Como SerUm Hacker? Leia sobre o assunto em portugus!

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The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. Successful athletes get theirmotivation from a kind of physical delight in making their bodies perform, in pushingthemselves past their own physical limits. Similarly, you have to get a basic thrill fromsolving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence.

No problem should ever have to be solved twice. The thinking time of other hackers isprecious so much so that it's almost a moral duty for you to share information, solveproblems and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problemsinstead of having to perpetually re-address old ones.

Boredom and drudgery are evil. When hackers are bored or have to drudge at stupidrepetitive work, they aren't doing what only they can do solve new problems. To behavelike a hacker, you have to want to automate away the boring bits as much as possible.

Freedom is good. The authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest itsmother you and other hackers. Not all authority figures are authoritarian. However,authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy, and they distrust voluntary cooperationand information-sharing.

Attitude is no substitute for competence. Hackers won't let posers waste their time, but they

recognize competence especially competence at hacking, but competence at anythingis valued. Competence at demanding skills that few can master is especially good, andcompetence at demanding skills that involve mental acuteness, craft, and concentration isbest.

Earn respect as a hacker. Like most cultures without a monetary economy, hackerdom runson reputation. You're trying to solve interesting problems, but how interesting they are, andwhether your solutions are really good, is something that only your technical peers or superiorsare normally equipped to judge. This is why you aren't really a hacker until other hackersconsistently call you one. Specifically, hackerdom is what anthropologists call a "gift culture."

You gain status and reputation in it not by dominating other people, nor by being beautiful, norby having things other people want, but rather by giving things away: your time, your creativity,and the results of your skill.

Write open-source software. Write programs that other hackers think are fun or useful, and

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give the program sources away to the whole hacker culture to use. Hackerdom's mostrevered demigods are people who have written large, capable programs that met awidespread need and given them away, so that now everyone uses them.

Help test and debug open-source software. Any open-source author who's thinking will tellyou that good beta-testers (who know how to describe symptoms clearly, localize problemswell, can tolerate bugs in a quickie release, and are willing to apply a few simple diagnosticroutines) are worth their weight in rubies. Try to find a program under development that

you're interested in and be a good beta-tester. There's a natural progression from helpingtest programs to helping debug them to helping modify them. You'll learn a lot this way, andgenerate good karmawith people who will help you later on.

Publish useful information. Another good thing is to collect and filter useful and interestinginformation into web pages or documents like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) lists, andmake those generally available. Maintainers of major technical FAQs get almost as muchrespect as open-source authors.

Help keep the infrastructure working. The hacker culture (and the engineering developmentof the Internet, for that matter) is run by volunteers. There's a lot of necessary butunglamorous work that needs done to keep it going administering mailing lists,

moderating newsgroups, maintaining large software archive sites, developing RFCs andother technical standards. People who do this sort of thing well get a lot of respect,because everybody knows these jobs are huge time sinks and not as much fun as playingwith code. Doing them shows dedication.

Serve the hacker culture itself. This is not something you'll be positioned to do until you'vebeen around for a while and become well-known for one of the four previous items. Thehacker culture doesn't have leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and tribalelders and historians and spokespeople. When you've been in the trenches long enough,you may grow into one of these. Beware: hackers distrust blatant ego in their tribal elders,so visibly reaching for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than striving for it, you have to

sort of position yourself so it drops in your lap, and then be modestand graciousaboutyour status.

Learning Programming

Learn how to program. The best way to learn is to read some stuff written by masters of theform, write some things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read a lot more, writesome more, and repeat until your writing begins to develop the kind of strength and economyyou see in your models. To be a real hacker, however, you need to get to the point where you

can learn a new language in days by relating what's in the manual to what you already know.This means you should learn several very different languages. Besides being the mostimportant hacking languages, the following represent very different approaches toprogramming, and each will educate you in valuable ways:

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There are other operating systems in the world besides Unix. But they're distributed inbinary you can't read the code, and you can't modify it. Trying to learn to hack on a

Microsoft Windows machine or under any other closed-source system is like trying to learnto dance while wearing a body cast. Under Mac OS X it's possible, but only part of thesystem is open source you're likely to hit a lot of walls, and you have to be careful not todevelop the bad habit of depending on Apple's proprietary code.

Download Linux online or (better idea) find a local Linux user group to help you withinstallation.

While other distros have their own areas of strength, Ubuntuis far and away the mostaccessible to Linux newbies.

A good way to dip your toes in the water is to boot up what Linux fans call a live CD, adistribution that runs entirely off a CD without having to modify your hard disk. This is a wayto get a look at the possibilities without having to do anything drastic.

Learning HTML

Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML. Most of the things the hackerculture has built do their work out of sight, helping run factories and offices and universitieswithout any obvious impact on how non-hackers live. The Web is the one big exception, thehuge shiny hacker toy that even politicians admit has changed the world. For this reason alone(and a lot of other good ones as well) you need to learn how to work the Web. This doesn't just

mean learning how to drive a browser (anyone can do that), but learning how to write HTML,the Web's markup language. If you don't know how to program, writing HTML will teach yousome mental habits that will help you learn. So build a home page. Try to stick to XHTML,which is a cleaner language than classic HTML.

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The author of the original source of this page discusses accomplishments of hackers and the merits

of the open source movement in an interview.

You don't have to believe that you're obligated to give all your creative product away, thoughthe hackers that do are the ones that get most respect from other hackers. It's consistent withhacker values to sell enough of it to keep you in food and rent and computers. It's fine to useyour hacking skills to support a family or even get rich, as long as you don't forget your loyaltyto your art and your fellow hackers while doing it.

On games like WoozWorld, you see hackers, and they do these tricks, illusions, get banned fora few days, and become famous in a bad way. They can do all of that just by doing cheat

engine. You have to download cheat engine to be able to use it. But like account hacking, youneed to use a lot of usernames or emails or passwords or codes. Other ways in account

Video

Tips

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hacking is tricking people to give you their account and sometimes you can fail and other timesthey fall for the trick. Hope this helped!

Stick to one thing at a time. Do not try to learn everything at once. A lot of wannabe hackersmake this mistake. By learning a category, then moving to another one, you'll be more efficient.

Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be a nerd to be a hacker. It does help, however,and many hackers are in fact nerds. Being something of a social outcasthelps you stayconcentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking. If you can manage toconcentrate enough on hacking to be good at it and still have a life, that's fine. Mainstreamculture is much friendlier to techno-nerds now.

If you don't speak English, it might be a good idea to learn it. English is the working language ofthe hacker culture and the Internet, and you might need to know it to function in the hackercommunity. Translations of technical books written in English are often unsatisfactory (whenthey get done at all). Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you havelanguage skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate,ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers will tend to ignore you.

Read older pieces, such as the Jargon File or Hacker Manifesto by The Mentor. They may beout of date, but the attitude and spirit come through very clearly.

Work as intensely as you play, and play as intensely as you work. For true hackers, theboundaries between "play," "work," "science," and "art" all tend to disappear, or to merge into ahigh-level creative playfulness.

Don't be content with a narrow range of skills. Though most hackers describe themselves asprogrammers, they are very likely to be more than competent in several related skills systemadministration, Web design, and PC hardware troubleshooting are common ones. Hackersdon't do things by halves; if they invest in a skill at all, they tend to get very good at it.

To be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset, and there are some things you can dowhen you're not at a computer that seem to help. They're not substitutes for hacking (nothing is)but many hackers do them, and feel that they connect in some basic way with the essence ofhacking (hackers need to be able to both reason logically and step outside the apparent logic ofa problem at a moment's notice).

Write your native language well. Though it's a common stereotype that programmers can'twrite, a surprising number of hackers are very able writers.

Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good way to meet hackers andproto-hackers).

Train in a martial art. The kind of mental discipline required for martial arts seems to besimilar in important ways to what hackers do. The most hacker-ly martial arts are thosewhich emphasize mental discipline, relaxed awareness, and control, rather than rawstrength, athleticism, or physical toughness. Tai Chi is a good martial art for hackers.

Study an actual meditationdiscipline. The perennial favorite among hackers is Zen(importantly, it is possible to benefit from Zen without acquiring a religion or discarding oneyou already have).

Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to appreciate peculiar kinds of music, and toplay some musical instrumentwell, or how to sing.

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Develop your appreciation for punsand wordplay.

Master creative thinking. The hacker mentality is driven by creatively solving problems.This creativity gives you the ability to solve problems others see as unsolvable.

Don't use your hacking skills to do bad things. You might get used to it and get caught, endingup punished.

Cracking is an illegal activity which can result in major penalties. It is a major offense and ispunishable under the law.

Doing any of the following will earn you a bad reputation in the hacker community. Hackershave long memories it could take you years to live your early blunders down enough to beaccepted. And also, what's on the Internet stays on the Internet. Don't think nobody will stumbleacross what you did three years ago.

Don't use a silly, grandiose user ID or screen name.

Don't get in flame wars on Usenet (or anywhere else).

Don't call yourself a cyberpunk, and don't waste your time on anybody who does.

Don't post or email writing that's full of spelling errorsand poor grammar.

Don't blindly believe the advice given here or anywhere online is true and the only path toembracing the mindset of a hacker.

How to Hack

How to Become a Free Software Hacker

How to Become a Qualified and Professional Ethical HackerHow to Become a Programmer

How to Do Ethical Hacking

How to Learn the Basics of Roblox

How to Become a Hacker - Original source. Condensed version shared with permission.Additional resources and FAQs can be found in the original.

1. !http://www.crosstalkonline.org/storage/issue-archives/2008/200801/200801-Dewar.pdf

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2. !http://www.linux.org/