Basic Hacking Skills 1. Learn how to program. 2. Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it. 3. Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML. 4. If you dont have functional English, learn it. The hacker attitude is vital, but skills are even more vital. Attitude is no substitute for competence, and theres a certain basic toolkit of skills which you have to have before any hacker will dream of calling you one. This toolkit changes slowly over time as technology creates new skills and makes old ones obsolete. For example, it used to include programming in machine language, and didnt until recently involve HTML. But right now it pretty clearly includes the following: 1. Learn how to program. This, of course, is the fundamental hacking skill. If you dont know any computer languages, I recommend starting with Python. It is cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects. I have written a more detailed evaluation of Python. Good tutorials are available at the Python web site. I used to recommend Java as a good language to learn early, but this critique has changed my mind (search for “The Pitfalls of Java as a First Programming Language” within it). A hacker cannot, as they devastatingly put it “approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store”; you have to know what the components actually do. Now I think it is probably best to learn C and Lisp first, then Java. There is perhaps a more general point here. If a language does too much for you, it may be simultaneously a good tool for production and a bad one for learning. Its not only languages that have this problem; web application frameworks like RubyOnRails, CakePHP, Django may make it too easy to reach a superficial sort of understanding that will leave you without resources when you have to tackle a hard problem, or even just debug the solution to an easy one. If you get into serious programming, you will have to learn C, the core language of Unix. C++ is very closely related to C; if you know one, learning the other will not be difficult. Neither language is a good one to try learning as your first, however. And, actually, the more you can avoid programming in C the more productive you will be. C is very efficient, and very sparing of your machines resources. Unfortunately, C gets that efficiency by requiring you to do a lot of low-level management of resources (like memory) by hand. All that low-level code is complex and bug-prone, and will soak up huge amounts of your time on debugging. With todays machines as powerful as they are, this is usually a bad tradeoff — its smarter to use a language that uses the machines time less efficiently, but your time much more efficiently. Thus, Python. Other languages of particular importance to hackers include Perl and LISP. Perl is worth learning for practical reasons; its very widely used for active web pages and system administration, so that even if you never write Perl you should learn to read it. Many people use Perl in the way I suggest you should use Python, to avoid C programming on jobs that dont require Cs machine efficiency. You will need to be able to understand their code. LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot. (You can get some beginning experience with LISP fairly easily by writing and modifying editing modes for the Emacs text editor, or Script-Fu plugins for the GIMP.) Its best, actually, to learn all five of Python, C/C++, Java, Perl, and LISP. Besides being the most important hacking languages, they represent very different approaches to programming, and each will educate you in valuable ways. But be aware that you wont reach the skill level of a hacker or even merely a programmer simply by accumulating languages — you need to learn how to think about programming problems in a general way, independent of any one language. To be a real hacker, you need to get to the point where you can learn a new language in days by relating whats in the manual to what you already know. This means you should learn several very different languages. I cant give complete instructions on how to learn to program here — its a complex skill. But I can tell you that books and courses wont do it — many, maybe most of the best hackers are self-taught. You can learn language features — bits of knowledge — from books, but the mind-set that makes that knowledge into living skill can be learned only by practice and apprenticeship. What will do it is (a) reading code and (b) writing code. Peter Norvig, who is one of Googles top hackers and the co-author of the most widely used textbook on AI, has written an excellent essay called Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. His recipe for programming success is worth careful attention. Learning to program is like learning to write good natural language. The best way to do it is to read some stuff written by masters of the form, write some things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read a lot more, write some more ... and repeat until your writing begins to develop the kind of strength and economy you see in your models. Finding good code to read used to be hard, because there were few large programs available in source for fledgeling hackers to read and tinker with. This has changed dramatically; open-source software, programming tools, and operating systems (all built by hackers) are now widely available. Which brings me neatly to our next topic... 2. Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to use and run it. Ill assume you have a personal computer or can get access to one. (Take a moment to appreciate how much that means. The hacker culture originally evolved back when computers were so expensive that individuals could not own them.) The single most important step any newbie can take toward acquiring hacker skills is to get a copy of Linux or one of the BSD-Unixes, install it on a personal machine, and run it. Yes, there are other operating systems in the world besides Unix. But theyre distributed in binary — you cant read the code, and you cant modify it. Trying to learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows machine or under any other closed-source system is like trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast. Under Mac OS X its possible, but only part of the system is open source — youre likely to hit a lot of walls, and you have to be careful not to develop the bad habit of depending on Apples proprietary code. If you concentrate on the Unix under the hood you can learn some useful things. Unix is the operating system of the Internet. While you can learn to use the Internet without knowing Unix, you cant be an Internet hacker without understanding Unix. For this reason, the hacker culture today is pretty strongly Unix-centered. (This wasnt always true, and some old-time hackers still arent happy about it, but the symbiosis between Unix and the Internet has become strong enough that even Microsofts muscle doesnt seem able to seriously dent it.) So, bring up a Unix — I like Linux myself but there are other ways (and yes, you can run both Linux and Microsoft Windows on the same machine). Learn it. Run it. Tinker with it. Talk to the Internet with it. Read the code. Modify the code. Youll get better programming tools (including C, LISP, Python, and Perl) than any Microsoft operating system can dream of hosting, youll have fun, and youll soak up more knowledge than you realize youre learning until you look back on it as a master hacker. For more about learning Unix, see The Loginataka. You might also want to have a look at The Art Of Unix Programming. To get your hands on a Linux, see the Linux Online! site; you can download from there or (better idea) find a local Linux user group to help you with installation. During the first ten years of this HOWTOs life, I reported that from a new users point of view, all Linux distributions are almost equivalent. But in 2006-2007, an actual best choice emerged: Ubuntu. While other distros have their own areas of strength, Ubuntu is far and away the most accessible to Linux newbies. Beware, though, of the hideous and nigh-unusable Unity desktop interface that Ubuntu introduced as a default a few years later; the Xubuntu or Kubuntu variants are better. You can find BSD Unix help and resources at bsd.org. A good way to dip your toes in the water is to boot up what Linux fans call a live CD, a distribution that runs entirely off a CD without having to modify your hard disk. This will be slow, because CDs are slow, but its a way to get a look at the possibilities without having to do anything drastic. I have written a primer on the basics of Unix and the Internet. I used to recommend against installing either Linux or BSD as a solo project if youre a newbie. Nowadays the installers have gotten good enough that doing it entirely on your own is possible, even for a newbie. Nevertheless, I still recommend making contact with your local Linux users group and asking for help. It cant hurt, and may smooth the process. 3. Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write HTML. Most of the things the hacker culture has built do their work out of sight, helping run factories and offices and universities without any obvious impact on how non-hackers live. The Web is the one big exception, the huge 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 doesnt just mean learning how to drive a browser (anyone can do that), but learning how to write HTML, the Webs markup language. If you dont know how to program, writing HTML will teach you some 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. (There are good beginner tutorials on the Web; heres one.) But just having a home page isnt anywhere near good enough to make you a hacker. The Web is full of home pages. Most of them are pointless, zero-content sludge — very snazzy-looking sludge, mind you, but sludge all the same (for more on this see The HTML Hell Page). To be worthwhile, your page must have content — it must be interesting and/or useful to other hackers. And that brings us to the next topic... 4. If you dont have functional English, learn it. As an American and native English-speaker myself, I have previously been reluctant to suggest this, lest it be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism. But several native speakers of other languages have urged me to point out that English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and that you will need to know it to function in the hacker community. Back around 1991 I learned that many hackers who have English as a second language use it in technical discussions even when they share a birth tongue; it was reported to me at the time that English has a richer technical vocabulary than any other language and is therefore simply a better tool for the job. For similar reasons, translations of technical books written in English are often unsatisfactory (when they get done at all). Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. Its an example worth following. Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, weve generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you cant yet write competently, learn to. Status in the Hacker Culture 1. Write open-source software 2. Help test and debug open-source software 3. Publish useful information 4. Help keep the infrastructure working 5. Serve the hacker culture itself Like most cultures without a money economy, hackerdom runs on reputation. Youre trying to solve interesting problems, but how interesting they are, and whether your solutions are really good, is something that only your technical peers or superiors are normally equipped to judge. Accordingly, when you play the hacker game, you learn to keep score primarily by what other hackers think of your skill (this is why you arent really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you one). This fact is obscured by the image of hacking as solitary work; also by a hacker-cultural taboo (gradually decaying since the late 1990s but still potent) against admitting that ego or external validation are involved in ones motivation at all. 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, nor by having things other people want, but rather by giving things away. Specifically, by giving away your time, your creativity, and the results of your skill. There are basically five kinds of things you can do to be respected by hackers: 1. Write open-source software The first (the most central and most traditional) is to write programs that other hackers think are fun or useful, and give the program sources away to the whole hacker culture to use. (We used to call these works “free software”, but this confused too many people who werent sure exactly what “free” was supposed to mean. Most of us now prefer the term “open-source” software). Hackerdoms most revered demigods are people who have written large, capable programs that met a widespread need and given them away, so that now everyone uses them. But theres a bit of a fine historical point here. While hackers have always looked up to the open-source developers among them as our communitys hardest core, before the mid-1990s most hackers most of the time worked on closed source. This was still true when I wrote the first version of this HOWTO in 1996; it took the mainstreaming of open-source software after 1997 to change things. Today, the hacker community and open-source developers are two descriptions for what is essentially the same culture and population — but it is worth remembering that this was not always so. (For more on this, see the section called “Historical Note: Hacking, Open Source, and Free Software”.) 2. Help test and debug open-source software They also serve who stand and debug open-source software. In this imperfect world, we will inevitably spend most of our software development time in the debugging phase. Thats why any open-source author whos thinking will tell you that good beta-testers (who know how to describe symptoms clearly, localize problems well, can tolerate bugs in a quickie release, and are willing to apply a few simple diagnostic routines) are worth their weight in rubies. Even one of these can make the difference between a debugging phase thats a protracted, exhausting nightmare and one thats merely a salutary nuisance. If youre a newbie, try to find a program under development that youre interested in and be a good beta-tester. Theres a natural progression from helping test programs to helping debug them to helping modify them. Youll learn a lot this way, and generate good karma with people who will help you later on. 3. Publish useful information Another good thing is to collect and filter useful and interesting information into web pages or documents like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) lists, and make those generally available. Maintainers of major technical FAQs get almost as much respect as open-source authors. 4. Help keep the infrastructure working The hacker culture (and the engineering development of the Internet, for that matter) is run by volunteers. Theres a lot of necessary but unglamorous work that needs done to keep it going — administering mailing lists, moderating newsgroups, maintaining large software archive sites, developing RFCs and other 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 playing with code. Doing them shows dedication. 5. Serve the hacker culture itself Finally, you can serve and propagate the culture itself (by, for example, writing an accurate primer on how to become a hacker :-)). This is not something youll be positioned to do until youve been around for while and become well-known for one of the first four things. The hacker culture doesnt have leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. When youve 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 modest and gracious about your status. The Hacker/Nerd Connection Contrary to popular myth, you dont 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 outcast helps you stay concentrated on the really important things, like thinking and hacking. For this reason, many hackers have adopted the label ‘geek’ as a badge of pride — its a way of declaring their independence from normal social expectations (as well as a fondness for other things like science fiction and strategy games that often go with being a hacker). The term nerd used to be used this way back in the 1990s, back when nerd was a mild pejorative and geek a rather harsher one; sometime after 2000 they switched places, at least in U.S. popular culture, and there is now even a significant geek-pride culture among people who arent techies. If you can manage to concentrate enough on hacking to be good at it and still have a life, thats fine. This is a lot easier today than it was when I was a newbie in the 1970s; mainstream culture is much friendlier to techno-nerds now. There are even growing numbers of people who realize that hackers are often high-quality lover and spouse material. If youre attracted to hacking because you dont have a life, thats OK too — at least you wont have trouble concentrating. Maybe youll get a life later on. Points For Style Again, to be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset. There are some things you can do when youre not at a computer that seem to help. Theyre not substitutes for hacking (nothing is) but many hackers do them, and feel that they connect in some basic way with the essence of hacking. Learn to write your native language well. Though its a common stereotype that programmers cant write, a surprising number of hackers (including all the most accomplished ones I know of) are very able writers. Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions (a good way to meet hackers and proto-hackers). Train in a martial-arts form. The kind of mental discipline required for martial arts seems to be similar in important ways to what hackers do. The most popular forms among hackers are definitely Asian empty-hand arts such as Tae Kwon Do, various forms of Karate, Kung Fu, Aikido, or Ju Jitsu. Western fencing and Asian sword arts also have visible followings. In places where its legal, pistol shooting has been rising in popularity since the late 1990s. The most hackerly martial arts are those which emphasize mental discipline, relaxed awareness, and control, rather than raw strength, athleticism, or physical toughness. Study an actual meditation discipline. The perennial favorite among hackers is Zen (importantly, it is possible to benefit from Zen without acquiring a religion or discarding one you already have). Other styles may work as well, but be careful to choose one that doesnt require you to believe crazy things. Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to appreciate peculiar kinds of music. Learn to play some musical instrument well, or how to sing. Develop your appreciation of puns and wordplay. The more of these things you already do, the more likely it is that you are natural hacker material. Why these things in particular is not completely clear, but theyre connected with a mix of left- and right-brain skills that seems to be important; hackers need to be able to both reason logically and step outside the apparent logic of a problem at a moments notice. Work as intensely as you play and play as intensely as you work. For true hackers, the boundaries between play, work, science and art all tend to disappear, or to merge into a high-level creative playfulness. Also, dont be content with a narrow range of skills. Though most hackers self-describe as programmers, they are very likely to be more than competent in several related skills — system administration, web design, and PC hardware troubleshooting are common ones. A hacker whos a system administrator, on the other hand, is likely to be quite skilled at script programming and web design. Hackers dont do things by halves; if they invest in a skill at all, they tend to get very good at it. Finally, a few things not to do. Dont use a silly, grandiose user ID or screen name. Dont get in flame wars on Usenet (or anywhere else). Dont call yourself a ‘cyberpunk’, and dont waste your time on anybody who does. Dont post or email writing thats full of spelling errors and bad grammar. The only reputation youll make doing any of these things is as a twit. Hackers have long memories — it could take you years to live your early blunders down enough to be accepted. The problem with screen names or handles deserves some amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers dont do this; theyre proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser. Historical Note: Hacking, Open Source, and Free Software When I originally wrote this how-to in late 1996, some of the conditions around it were very different from the way they look today. A few words about these changes may help clarify matters for people who are confused about the relationship of open source, free software, and Linux to the hacker community. If you are not curious about this, you can skip straight to the FAQ and bibliography from here. The hacker ethos and community as I have described it here long predates the emergence of Linux after 1990; I first became involved with it around 1976, and, its roots are readily traceable back to the early 1960s. But before Linux, most hacking was done on either proprietary operating systems or a handful of quasi-experimental homegrown systems like MITs ITS that were never deployed outside of their original academic niches. While there had been some earlier (pre-Linux) attempts to change this situation, their impact was at best very marginal and confined to communities of dedicated true believers which were tiny minorities even within the hacker community, let alone with respect to the larger world of software in general. What is now called open source goes back as far as the hacker community does, but until 1985 it was an unnamed folk practice rather than a conscious movement with theories and manifestos attached to it. This prehistory ended when, in 1985, arch-hacker Richard Stallman (RMS) tried to give it a name — free software. But his act of naming was also an act of claiming; he attached ideological baggage to the free software label which much of the existing hacker community never accepted. As a result, the free software label was loudly rejected by a substantial minority of the hacker community (especially among those associated with BSD Unix), and used with serious but silent reservations by a majority of the remainder (including myself). Despite these reservations, RMSs claim to define and lead the hacker community under the free software banner broadly held until the mid-1990s. It was seriously challenged only by the rise of Linux. Linux gave open-source development a natural home. Many projects issued under terms we would now call open-source migrated from proprietary Unixes to Linux. The community around Linux grew explosively, becoming far larger and more heterogenous than the pre-Linux hacker culture. RMS determinedly attempted to co-opt all this activity into his free software movement, but was thwarted by both the exploding diversity of the Linux community and the public skepticism of its founder, Linus Torvalds. Torvalds continued to use the term free software for lack of any alternative, but publicly rejected RMSs ideological baggage. Many younger hackers followed suit. In 1996, when I first published this Hacker HOWTO, the hacker community was rapidly reorganizing around Linux and a handful of other open-source operating systems (notably those descended from BSD Unix). Community memory of the fact that most of us had spent decades developing closed-source software on closed-source operating systems had not yet begun to fade, but that fact was already beginning to seem like part of a dead past; hackers were, increasingly, defining themselves as hackers by their attachments to open-source projects such as Linux or Apache. The term open source, however, had not yet emerged; it would not do so until early 1998. When it did, most of the hacker community adopted it within the following six months; the exceptions were a minority ideologically attached to the term free software. Since 1998, and especially after about 2003, the identification of hacking with open-source (and free software) development has become extremely close. Today there is little point in attempting to distinguish between these categories, and it seems unlikely that will change in the future. It is worth remembering, however, that this was not always so. Other Resources Paul Graham has written an essay called Great Hackers, and another on Undergraduation, in which he speaks much wisdom. There is a document called How To Be A Programmer that is an excellent complement to this one. It has valuable advice not just about coding and skillsets, but about how to function on a programming team. I have also written A Brief History Of Hackerdom. I have written a paper, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which explains a lot about how the Linux and open-source cultures work. I have addressed this topic even more directly in its sequel Homesteading the Noosphere. Rick Moen has written an excellent document on how to run a Linux user group. Rick Moen and I have collaborated on another document on How To Ask Smart Questions. This will help you seek assistance in a way that makes it more likely that you will actually get it. If you need instruction in the basics of how personal computers, Unix, and the Internet work, see The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO. When you release software or write patches for software, try to follow the guidelines in the Software Release Practice HOWTO. If you enjoyed the Zen poem, you might also like Rootless Root: The Unix Koans of Master Foo. Frequently Asked Questions Q: How do I tell if I am already a hacker? Q: Will you teach me how to hack? Q: How can I get started, then? Q: When do you have to start? Is it too late for me to learn? Q: How long will it take me to learn to hack? Q: Is Visual Basic a good language to start with? Q: Would you help me to crack a system, or teach me how to crack? Q: How can I get the password for someone elses account? Q: How can I break into/read/monitor someone elses email? Q: How can I steal channel op privileges on IRC? Q: Ive been cracked. Will you help me fend off further attacks? Q: Im having problems with my Windows software. Will you help me? Q: Where can I find some real hackers to talk with? Q: Can you recommend useful books about hacking-related subjects? Q: Do I need to be good at math to become a hacker? Q: What language should I learn first? Q: What kind of hardware do I need? Q: I want to contribute. Can you help me pick a problem to work on? Q: Do I need to hate and bash Microsoft? Q: But wont open-source software leave programmers unable to make a living? Q: Where can I get a free Unix? Q: How do I tell if I am already a hacker? A: Ask yourself the following three questions: Do you speak code, fluently? Do you identify with the goals and values of the hacker community? Has a well-established member of the hacker community ever called you a hacker? If you can answer yes to all three of these questions, you are already a hacker. No two alone are sufficient. The first test is about skills. You probably pass it if you have the minimum technical skills described earlier in this document. You blow right through it if you have had a substantial amount of code accepted by an open-source development project. The second test is about attitude. If the five principles of the hacker mindset seemed obvious to you, more like a description of the way you already live than anything novel, you are already halfway to passing it. Thats the inward half; the other, outward half is the degree to which you identify with the hacker communitys long-term projects. Here is an incomplete but indicative list of some of those projects: Does it matter to you that Linux improve and spread? Are you passionate about software freedom? Hostile to monopolies? Do you act on the belief that computers can be instruments of empowerment that make the world a richer and more humane place? But a note of caution is in order here. The hacker community has some specific, primarily defensive political interests — two of them are defending free-speech rights and fending off intellectual-property power grabs that would make open source illegal. Some of those long-term projects are civil-liberties organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the outward attitude properly includes support of them. But beyond that, most hackers view attempts to systematize the hacker attitude into an explicit political program with suspicion; weve learned, the hard way, that these attempts are divisive and distracting. If someone tries to recruit you to march on your capitol in the name of the hacker attitude, theyve missed the point. The right response is probably “Shut up and show them the code.” The third test has a tricky element of recursiveness about it. I observed in the section called “What Is a Hacker?” that being a hacker is partly a matter of belonging to a particular subculture or social network with a shared history, an inside and an outside. In the far past, hackers were a much less cohesive and self-aware group than they are today. But the importance of the social-network aspect has increased over the last thirty years as the Internet has made connections with the core of the hacker subculture easier to develop and maintain. One easy behavioral index of the change is that, in this century, we have our own T-shirts. Sociologists, who study networks like those of the hacker culture under the general rubric of invisible colleges, have noted that one characteristic of such networks is that they have gatekeepers — core members with the social authority to endorse new members into the network. Because the invisible college that is hacker culture is a loose and informal one, the role of gatekeeper is informal too. But one thing that all hackers understand in their bones is that not every hacker is a gatekeeper. Gatekeepers have to have a certain degree of seniority and accomplishment before they can bestow the title. How much is hard to quantify, but every hacker knows it when they see it. Q: Will you teach me how to hack? A: Since first publishing this page, Ive gotten several requests a week (often several a day) from people to teach me all about hacking. Unfortunately, I dont have the time or energy to do this; my own hacking projects, and working as an open-source advocate, take up 110% of my time. Even if I did, hacking is an attitude and skill you basically have to teach yourself. Youll find that while real hackers want to help you, they wont respect you if you beg to be spoon-fed everything they know. Learn a few things first. Show that youre trying, that youre capable of learning on your own. Then go to the hackers you meet with specific questions. If you do email a hacker asking for advice, here are two things to know up front. First, weve found that people who are lazy or careless in their writing are usually too lazy and careless in their thinking to make good hackers — so take care to spell correctly, and use good grammar and punctuation, otherwise youll probably be ignored. Secondly, dont dare ask for a reply to an ISP account thats different from the account youre sending from; we find people who do that are usually thieves using stolen accounts, and we have no interest in rewarding or assisting thievery. Q: How can I get started, then? A: The best way for you to get started would probably be to go to a LUG (Linux user group) meeting. You can find such groups on the LDP General Linux Information Page; there is probably one near you, possibly associated with a college or university. LUG members will probably give you a Linux if you ask, and will certainly help you install one and get started. Your next step (and your first step if you cant find a LUG nearby) should be to find an open-source project that interests you. Start reading code and reviewing bugs. Learn to contribute, and work your way in. The only way in is by working to improve your skills. If you ask me personally for advice on how to get started, I will tell you these exact same things, because I dont have any magic shortcuts for you. I will also mentally write you off as a probable loser - because if you lacked the stamina to read this FAQ and the intelligence to understand from it that the only way in is by working to improve your skills, youre hopeless. Q: When do you have to start? Is it too late for me to learn? A: Any age at which you are motivated to start is a good age. Most people seem to get interested between ages 15 and 20, but I know of exceptions in both directions. Q: How long will it take me to learn to hack? A: That depends on how talented you are and how hard you work at it. Most people who try can acquire a respectable skill set in eighteen months to two years, if they concentrate. Dont think it ends there, though; in hacking (as in many other fields) it takes about ten years to achieve mastery. And if you are a real hacker, you will spend the rest of your life learning and perfecting your craft. Q: Is Visual Basic a good language to start with? A: If youre asking this question, it almost certainly means youre thinking about trying to hack under Microsoft Windows. This is a bad idea in itself. When I compared trying to learn to hack under Windows to trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast, I wasnt kidding. Dont go there. Its ugly, and it never stops being ugly. There is a specific problem with Visual Basic; mainly that its not portable. Though there is a prototype open-source implementations of Visual Basic, the applicable ECMA standards dont cover more than a small set of its programming interfaces. On Windows most of its library support is proprietary to a single vendor (Microsoft); if you arent extremely careful about which features you use — more careful than any newbie is really capable of being — youll end up locked into only those platforms Microsoft chooses to support. If youre starting on a Unix, much better languages with better libraries are available. Python, for example. Also, like other Basics, Visual Basic is a poorly-designed language that will teach you bad programming habits. No, dont ask me to describe them in detail; that explanation would fill a book. Learn a well-designed language instead. One of those bad habits is becoming dependent on a single vendors libraries, widgets, and development tools. In general, any language that isnt fully supported under at least Linux or one of the BSDs, and/or at least three different vendors operating systems, is a poor one to learn to hack in. Q: Would you help me to crack a system, or teach me how to crack? A: No. Anyone who can still ask such a question after reading this FAQ is too stupid to be educable even if I had the time for tutoring. Any emailed requests of this kind that I get will be ignored or answered with extreme rudeness. Q: How can I get the password for someone elses account? A: This is cracking. Go away, idiot. Q: How can I break into/read/monitor someone elses email? A: This is cracking. Get lost, moron. Q: How can I steal channel op privileges on IRC? A: This is cracking. Begone, cretin. Q: Ive been cracked. Will you help me fend off further attacks? A: No. Every time Ive been asked this question so far, its been from some poor sap running Microsoft Windows. It is not possible to effectively secure Windows systems against crack attacks; the code and architecture simply have too many flaws, which makes securing Windows like trying to bail out a boat with a sieve. The only reliable prevention starts with switching to Linux or some other operating system that is designed to at least be capable of security. Q: Im having problems with my Windows software. Will you help me? A: Yes. Go to a DOS prompt and type format c:. Any problems you are experiencing will cease within a few minutes. Q: Where can I find some real hackers to talk with? A: The best way is to find a Unix or Linux users group local to you and go to their meetings (you can find links to several lists of user groups on the LDP site at ibiblio). (I used to say here that you wouldnt find any real hackers on IRC, but Im given to understand this is changing. Apparently some real hacker communities, attached to things like GIMP and Perl, have IRC channels now.) Q: Can you recommend useful books about hacking-related subjects? A: I maintain a Linux Reading List HOWTO that you may find helpful. The Loginataka may also be interesting. For an introduction to Python, see the tutorial on the Python site. Q: Do I need to be good at math to become a hacker? A: No. Hacking uses very little formal mathematics or arithmetic. In particular, you wont usually need trigonometry, calculus or analysis (there are exceptions to this in a handful of specific application areas like 3-D computer graphics). Knowing some formal logic and Boolean algebra is good. Some grounding in finite mathematics (including finite-set theory, combinatorics, and graph theory) can be helpful. Much more importantly: you need to be able to think logically and follow chains of exact reasoning, the way mathematicians do. While the content of most mathematics wont help you, you will need the discipline and intelligence to handle mathematics. If you lack the intelligence, there is little hope for you as a hacker; if you lack the discipline, youd better grow it. I think a good way to find out if you have what it takes is to pick up a copy of Raymond Smullyans book What Is The Name Of This Book?. Smullyans playful logical conundrums are very much in the hacker spirit. Being able to solve them is a good sign; enjoying solving them is an even better one. Q: What language should I learn first? A: XHTML (the latest dialect of HTML) if you dont already know it. There are a lot of glossy, hype-intensive bad HTML books out there, and distressingly few good ones. The one I like best is HTML: The Definitive Guide. But HTML is not a full programming language. When youre ready to start programming, I would recommend starting with Python. You will hear a lot of people recommending Perl, but its harder to learn and (in my opinion) less well designed. C is really important, but its also much more difficult than either Python or Perl. Dont try to learn it first. Windows users, do not settle for Visual Basic. It will teach you bad habits, and its not portable off Windows. Avoid. Q: What kind of hardware do I need? A: It used to be that personal computers were rather underpowered and memory-poor, enough so that they placed artificial limits on a hackers learning process. This stopped being true in the mid-1990s; any machine from an Intel 486DX50 up is more than powerful enough for development work, X, and Internet communications, and the smallest disks you can buy today are plenty big enough. The important thing in choosing a machine on which to learn is whether its hardware is Linux-compatible (or BSD-compatible, should you choose to go that route). Again, this will be true for almost all modern machines. The only really sticky areas are modems and wireless cards; some machines have Windows-specific hardware that wont work with Linux. Theres a FAQ on hardware compatibility; the latest version is here. Q: I want to contribute. Can you help me pick a problem to work on? A: No, because I dont know your talents or interests. You have to be self-motivated or you wont stick, which is why having other people choose your direction almost never works. Try this. Watch the project announcements scroll by on Freshmeat for a few days. When you see one that makes you think Cool! Id like to work on that!, join it. Q: Do I need to hate and bash Microsoft? A: No, you dont. Not that Microsoft isnt loathsome, but there was a hacker culture long before Microsoft and there will still be one long after Microsoft is history. Any energy you spend hating Microsoft would be better spent on loving your craft. Write good code — that will bash Microsoft quite sufficiently without polluting your karma. Q: But wont open-source software leave programmers unable to make a living? A: This seems unlikely — so far, the open-source software industry seems to be creating jobs rather than taking them away. If having a program written is a net economic gain over not having it written, a programmer will get paid whether or not the program is going to be open-source after its done. And, no matter how much free software gets written, there always seems to be more demand for new and customized applications. Ive written more about this at the Open Source pages. Q: Where can I get a free Unix? A: If you dont have a Unix installed on your machine yet, elsewhere on this page I include pointers to where to get the most commonly used free Unix. To be a hacker you need motivation and initiative and the ability to educate yourself. Start now...
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 08:20:22 +0000
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