Beachhead - What's in a Name?

Sometimes it is to steal records or change data that will bring some type of financial benefit to the cracker. Sometimes it is to see what other people are doing or to change their software so people will inadvertently send the crackers information that will be useful to them over time. Sometimes it is just for the challenge of breaking in, for peer respect of having “done the deed”.

A friend of mine named Marcelo Marques in Sao Paulo, Brazil, had been talking to the Brazilian FBI. They had empirical information that 80% of computer crimes were being either initiated or helped by teenagers. The FBI spokesman expressed frustration to my friend, because he could not understand why these teenagers were doing these things. Marcelo talked with me about crackers and hackers, and after planning for a while, he and his partners from 4Linux, a consulting firm in Sao Paulo, started a program called Hackerteen (www.hackerteen.com.br), under the premise that if you gave training to young people in how to be a really good systems administrator, programmer and community member, you could turn potential crackers into hackers. So far, the program has been in existence for two years and has graduated its first class of “Black Belt” students.

Well, there were a lot of young people who dropped out of Hackerteen along the way. The Hackerteen program is not an easy one. It is made up of on-line work, study and even on-site visits where the students are given courses in ethics, entrepreneurship, computer security, networks, programming and collaboration. My personal experience tells me that not every person can do programming. I have taught for too many years to say that every person has the gifts to become a top hacker. Nevertheless, a course set up like this can have a very positive effect on young programmers, and some of these graduates now have jobs with companies. I met with the first class of graduates, and I could see what the class meant to both them and their parents.

Lots of hackers I know are self-taught. One of the things that I like about free and open-source software is that there is nothing hidden from those who wish to learn. You can see other people's code and learn from it. There are plenty of books on the library shelves, magazines to read, Internet mailing lists and news groups and even electronic books to learn from. Things are very different now than from when I learned to code.

But some people find it difficult to learn by reading books, and some really like to have a guide or mentor along the way. Some do best with classroom instruction, and some are held back by it. My experience has been that a more structured approach gives a more balanced person, but this does not mean that you have to take a course or go to a school, you just have to define a path for yourself and stick with it. Some people find that difficult.

Ethics are particularly difficult, for what may be ethical for one person may not be ethical for many others. Here is where a lot of people may make the wrong decisions without proper guidance. If people think that ethics in computers are easy, they should attend a session of the Ethics Working Group of the SAGE Executive Committee.

One of my favorite people of all time, one of the earliest programmers and one of the pioneers of the Cobol language was Rear Admiral Dr Grace Murray Hopper. Dr Hopper encouraged early programmers to share common segments of code, reducing duplication of effort and errors.

In Malaysia, more than 70% of the people in data processing are women, and not just in “menial” tasks, but with jobs of influence and power. At my job in Bell Laboratories, my supervisor was a very talented woman by the name of Bea Fink. My observations have been that there is no inherent differences between a man and a woman doing a job in the computer field. As a former board member of the USENIX Association (www.usenix.org), I was very proud of the work USENIX did with organizations encouraging women to enter the field and acknowledging the women who contributed to it. I also met many fine women who would indeed fit the definition of hacker through USENIX and organizations like the ACM and IEEE.

Some of the Linux community has recognized the need to encourage women to enter the computer science field and started groups like LinuxChix (www.LinuxChix.org); GNUrias (www.gnurias.org.br), a Brazilian/Portuguese organization; Debian Women (www.women.debian.org); and ChicasLinux (www.chicaslinux.org), a Spanish organization.