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Hackers –The Good Guys

July 18th, 2008

The weekly technology column from those good people at Plymouth’s
Orange Crate

If you have read our article from last week, you may be left thinking that hackers are all cyber-criminals waiting for the chance to steal your credit card details, hack into your office networks, and bring down national security. Although it is true that the media has hyped the existence of these individuals and their nefarious activities, there is another less frightening side to the story.

‘White hat’ hackers are, if you will, the superheroes of the IT universe. There are two types of white hat - those who use a clearly defined code of ethics to break into security systems in order to improve them, and those who work to create open source, free codes for improving and developing software and operating systems. Both kinds have been very valuable to the evolution of computing, but it is the second group whose names are often revered in online communities to this day.

One such individual is Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. Most people these days have heard of Linux – an open-source operating system which has been developing in various forms for almost two decades now Torvalds claims: “I just want to have fun making the best damn operating system I can.” And it seems that many agree with him. Thousands of people contribute to Linux today, and 17 years after he began, Torvalds is still responsible for 2 per cent of the programming and most of the coordination (trust me – that’s a lot). Often seen as the ‘good guy’ in the battle against the ‘evil Microsoft corporation’, he even has an asteroid named after him!

It could be argued that you wouldn’t be reading this article if it wasn’t for this next guy. While studying at Oxford University, and after soldering together his first pc, Tim Berners-Lee was caught hacking a friend and banned from all university computers. Unsurprisingly his exploits didn’t end there – while developing an internal sharing and coordination system at the CERN research laboratories in Switzerland, he had the great idea of combining existing ideas with his own system to create… the World Wide Web! He has since founded the World Wide Web consortium to distribute ideas and standards freely, without patents and royalties. What a great guy!

Although many other great names exist in the field of free source programming (Richard Stallman and Steve Wozniak to name just two), what about the other kind of white hat hackers? Last week I wrote about the much publicized police case which led to the arrest of ‘computer outlaw’ Kevin Mitnick. What I didn’t mention was that it took another hacker to catch him.

Tsutomu Shimomura had his home security system hacked by Mitnick, then promptly threw all of his efforts into digitally tracking him down and bringing him to justice. With the aid of journalist John Markoff, they eventually succeeded in aiding the FBI in Mitnick’s capture and testified at his trial (the movie ‘Takedown’ charts this side of the story if you’re interested…). However that is only one side of the story. A self-proclaimed hacker himself, it has often been argued that Shimomura’s ethics were as hazy, possibly even moreso than Mitnick’s. The evidence for this claim culminates with the fact that he openly hacked his own mobile phone in front of a full court in order to monitor phone calls outside the court room.

He was never investigated himself though – I guess his gall, coupled with the fact that he turned up to court wearing surfing shorts and a t-shirt, stunned everyone into submission…
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