What does it mean to be a hacker? If you’re like me, a physics graduate student or any other person struggling to meet your programming demands and expand your programming skills, you might agree with my opinion that it just means you don’t have formal training and get the job done any way you can. It means being clever and direct. More sophisticated hackers exploit weaknesses and deficiencies in the code that others write. On any given day I’ll code some mathematics and then get three different pieces of lab equipment working together. I build, but I certainly consider myself a hacker. I get what I need done, ideally in the simplest way possible. I’ve been at it for a while and I’d like to expand these skills. Here’s a few links I got today from my daily CodeProject email that are very interesting, especially for young technicians in the post-Arab Spring world.
First, “Books Every Self-taught Computer Scientist Should Read” Do you know what ‘software engineering’ means? It’s enticing and even knowing a few principles has proved useful for me. Concepts such as repeatability, generalization, and not solving the same problem twice can be found in what seems like one of the sacred readings in software engineering, Design Patterns. The first link reminds me that I should study some Latin as well as C so I get all my languages in order.
Second, “From encryption to darknets: As governments snoop, activists fight back” This is further evidence that us who are technically inclined in any field need to wake up to the cosmic vibrations come to shake world society.
Finally, we are reminded that technology is man made and fallible. The New York Times reports on recently published findings, acquired through relatively unsophisticated methods, that showed a widely-trusted encryption algorithm was vulnerable to eavesdropping .2% of the time. Although some consider this acceptable, the authors point out that this still means 2 out of every 1000 transactions are unsecure, which sounds much worse. “Flaw Found in an Online Encryption Method”