The ethical hacking - by Mercè Molist

From the desk of Samy,

Mercè Molist gave us a speech a few days ago at UAB. It has been ages since the last time I attended a conference. Not against my will though, the problem is that there were not any one scheduled. However, thanks to z2.dotnetclubs.com (to which I belong), this problem has been sorted out, you can check all the conferences here. In this case, however, Mercè Molist was called by the Students Assembly.

First of all, I would like to stress the fact that this information is public in her website but I will copy and paste what was on her last slide (copyright and so on) just to make sure that you know about it before going through the reading.

Mercè Molist

Copyright 2010 Merce

Verbatim copying, translation and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any digital and no commercial medium, provide this notice is preserved.

http://ww2.grn.es/merce

We should start defining what ethic means. According to some dictionaries, ethic is a group of principles and moral rules which regulate the world. If we think it in a more engineering way, we could say that ethic is a protocol between people

And what is a hacker? Those bad guys who are looking forward to steal secret documents and share them with the world? No! This is a misconception: hackers are experts in some technological fields but just because they were curious about it and decided to investigate a bit. Others, define hacker as people who solve problems smartly. For more information, you can check the Jargon Fil e.

When did hackers appear? It is commonly accepted that the first ones appeared with the TX-0 because they were the first computers ever reachable by students. Until then, just a few had the licence to manipulate or access computers.

At the beginning, all the software developed had a community purpose (not like now that whoever writes code, has a clear economical purpose).

The first ethical hacking was defined as showed below (more or less):

The possibility to access the computer and all the information about it must be total and limitless
All the information must be free
You have to promote the decentralisation
Hackers must be judged by their hacking (acts) and not by their racial origins, etc
Software is smart (¿?)
Hacker should change your life into a better one

Merce told us a anecdote: In USA, there was a way to has free calls. In that moment, when you put enough coins to call there was a special tone in the phone for a few seconds and then, your call was produced. Captain Crunch discovered that a toy whistle packaged in boxes of Cap¡n Crunch cereal could emit a tone at precisely 2600 herz… The frequency needed to make a free call. In Spain, lots of hackers tried to imitate him but no one achieved his objective. It was not until a months/years later that was discovered which was the problem: Spain had a different frequency and therefore, the method was right but it was not 2600 hertz. In a few days hackers knew which was the right frequency. You can read more about wozniac (Steve Jobs mate) here.

Let’s go back to the main point. Mainly thanks to Bill Gates, piracy appeared, being a challenge for hackers as they always tried to use programs for free according to their ethics.

In the 80′s, the first community hackers appeared and also the typical words that are used nowadays: FYI, IMHO, FAW… So, we could say that we use such expressions thanks to hackers

In 1988, IRC saw the light and this was a revolutionary tool for them as it was a very good way to communicate between communities, people…

A very well-known sentence was “El código que corra” (I write this in Spanish because Merce did not told us the original sentence and I do not want to write a sentence different from the original).

As a matter of fact, the hacker movement was very wide and, probably surprising you, Tim Berners-Lee offered the worldwide web totally free, without copyright etc.! There was a very important premise that hackers had, or at least should, follow: give back to the net what it has give to you.

From the ethic to the nethic (more information here)

When we say nethic we are referring to network ethic. Being the network a new and very powerful tool, it was compulsory to agree in a few statements about it:

You are talking with humans. Respect other people
Share knowledge
Look for information before questioning
Do not answer to flames

This was necessary because of the belief that the ethic is the only way to auto regulate the net.

Another well-known sentence: you have to give as much articles/texts/etc as you receive.

Nevertheless, this was very pretty and ideal but quite impossible in practical terms. Years went by and hacker started meaning intromision (being this boosted by the media, trying to criminalise the word as it impact higher to the public). This new conception about hackers was reforced by some punctual cases that were the drop that made the vase overflow. Some example are the morris worm and Silicon Snake Oil. FBI got tired and decided that it was time to stop these. You can read the hacker crackdown, highly recommended. It is a book about how FBI discovered hackers and so on. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is set up.

Even if we have been talking mainly about USA hackers, they existed over the world. For instance, in Catalonia there was a very famous group called !hispahack (a new about this… from 1998!)

In the 90′s, the last change to the ethic because of the quick development (specially talking about nets) was that you must not hurt something intentionally and you must just change

those stuff totally necessary for avoid being tracked down. Also, you must not hack looking for revenge nor hack rich people who can go after you. And finally, be paranoid and hate telefonica… But do not do anything against it.

An annex was added: private information must remain private. However, private information concerning people must make known. And if you find out some bug, report the company about it so that they can fix it.

It is important to mention a very important figure in this world: Richard Stallman (I recommend you to read my article about him). In 1984, he had a problem with a printer and did not have access to the code so he could not fix it. He thought that every code in the world should be totally free… And here is when the free movement started.

Nowadays, the accepted ethic code can be kind of summarise as written below:

Share information is good and powerful
Thanks to the old rules, the net can work without controls (no policies, no judges, no…)

And in the new century (which we have already being here for almost a decade already) there are a lots of new challenges to face like copyleft, P2P…

I hope you have enjoyed the reading. I am not the one who did the conference so these are just a few notes I jotted down during it. Also, I haven’t write English for a while so I know that the vocabulary is a bit poor but well, I promise I’ll improve it in the next articles once I’m used to it again