The Hacker’s World : Gifted and Young, They Aren’t Afraid of Getting Emotionally Involved--With Their Computers
“I call this the Doug Schafer Multipurpose Controller,” Doug Schafer says, as he points to a brick-sized black box on his office table at Caltech.
He first built the device as a class project to dispense dog food for his pets when he was away for the weekend. But now he’s programming it to run a liquid-propane flame-thrower game for the coming Caltech carnival.
It’s too easy to hit the target if customers can fire the flame thrower in one long burst, “and besides, propane is expensive,” he explains. He then demonstrates that with his controller switching the gas in split-second bursts, the flame thrower sends out balls of fire and makes it difficult to burn up the cotton balls used as moving targets.
Defining a Hacker
The success of his tinkering clearly pleases Schafer, 24, a Caltech digital electronics student. He has wire-rim glasses and pink jowls and a keen interest in computers.
So what does he do with computers? Nothing in particular, he explains. “I’m caught up in computing for the sake of computing.”
Which is another way of saying Schafer is a hacker, one of the bright, talented and often creative people who can do incredible things with computers, not all of which are always completely legal.
Hackers usually range in age from mid-teens to mid-20s, are overwhelmingly male and have an obsessive love for computers, a general requirement to achieve full hacker status.
That status, at least to the general public, has lost a good deal of its luster of late. The problem has been a continuing series of computer break-ins, culminating in the last few weeks when a 23-year-old computer science student from Cornell University allegedly wrote a computer virus (a self-replicating computer program) that interrupted or shut down 6,000 research and defense computers nationwide.
As a result, many people now regard hackers as smart-aleck techno-nerds, pimply faced post-adolescents with primitive social skills and a startling indifference to personal hygiene who park at their computer keyboards for long periods to break into others’ systems to humiliate them and trash their files.
Not Ordinary People
Computer enthusiasts consider such a characterization terribly unfair. But even they admit that hackers are hardly ordinary people.
The best-known hacker of modern times, Apple II designer Stephen Wozniak, was an original of the first water.
For example, he spent months amusing himself by calculating the value of the mathematical constant e to 116,000 decimal places. Then, in an outburst of creativity, he did a year’s work in a single week.
Free-spirited to a fault, he once called the Vatican with an illegal blue box, told them he was Henry Kissinger and asked to speak to the Pope.
Too kindhearted to keep his pet mice in a cage, he gave them free run of the apartment.
For years, he ran a dial-a-joke service, featuring Polish jokes, from his home answering machine, sometimes getting more than 1,000 calls a day.
Met Wife on Computer
The first time he talked with the woman who was to become his wife, he told her, “I can hang up the phone faster than you can” and slammed down the receiver.
“Hackers are overly bright and underly socialized,” says John Carr, a Los Angeles science-fiction writer and computer enthusiast.
The classic hacker, says Jerry Pournelle, a Los Angeles science-fiction writer and computer columnist, often is “more comfortable dealing with other people through computers than directly,” which is probably a good thing because when he “blows his nose in a T-shirt” he doesn’t offend anyone.
This doesn’t mean that hackers have nothing to recommend them. For one thing, unlike most other fields of human endeavor, hackerdom is a true meritocracy. It’s what you know and can do that counts, not the way you look or dress.
And when tackling tasks that engage their intellect, hackers can be incredibly hard workers, often staying up days and nights on end, writing mountains of computer code and doing more than whole teams of ordinary programmers.
More Productive at Work
“When you have someone who is a hacker, he is many times more productive than the average person,” says Ellis Horowitz, a computer science professor at USC. “Every good software project needs one to get you over the rough spots.”
But hackers also can be loose cannons on deck. They don’t do grunt work and they don’t follow directions. “And if you have too many,” Horowitz says, “they go their own way and you lose control.”
Still, people with interesting problems that need to be solved don’t have to worry about motivating hackers. They “really have a love” of programming, Horowitz says, adding they are, “really emotionally involved” in their work.
For hackers, computers become an extension of their personalities. For them, exploring and exploiting the full potential of computers is one of the most satisfying experiences life can offer.
This is the beauty and danger of computers, says Geoffrey Fox, associate provost of computing at Caltech. Because computers are such powerful machines, those who truly understand them get so obsessed with the exhilaration of it all that they neglect their other studies and even their personalities, which, if the truth be known, were never all that tightly wrapped to begin with.
‘Easy to Exploit’
“I am wary of hiring undergraduate (hackers),” Fox says, noting they are too easy to exploit. “Sometimes they disappear into a black hole of programming and never come out again.”
As to the motivation of hackers, it’s straightforward: power, recognition, exploration of the unknown, love of efficiency and the satisfaction of solving a pristine puzzle.
For this last type of hacker (sometimes called crackers because they break into other people’s security systems), gaining access to someone else’s computer is a challenge, not unlike climbing a mountain--one does it because it is there.
Further, as hackers see it, there’s nothing wrong with this. Many hackers, Horowitz says, share an ethic that programs should be free. As a result, they have written thousands of utility programs that usually are just posted on computer bulletin boards for anyone to use. For hackers, Horowitz says, “it was their way of achieving immortality.”
But hackers, in turn, feel that people with computer systems ought to share them too. And while this has not been a problem with mature hackers, who are fastidious about not harming other people’s data, the nature of hacking is such that it can be learned by a bright, talented teen-ager in just a few weeks; some of them, unfortunately, don’t have a sense of responsibility commensurate with their skills.
It is this possibility, Fox says, that scares him. The Cornell virus temporarily shut down a computer research network, “the whole backbone of the information age.”
Break-Ins Are Rare
The only consolation to that, Pournelle says, is that break-ins in which data has been destroyed are rare. Why? He notes that hackers’ primary motivation has been their peers’ admiration and respect. Because destruction of data is so universally frowned on in the computer community, they can’t tell anyone. “How can you be admired,” Pournelle asks, “if everyone is looking for you with tar and feathers?”
He says many of the destructive break-ins of the past weren’t so much perpetrated by a true hacker as teen-age novices. In the early days, he notes, many systems had minimal protection and outsiders could access data such as hospital patient records with startling ease. But even then, he says, few people were destructive and if “they trashed records, it wasn’t because they were trying to but because they didn’t know what they were doing.”
By hacker standards, such break-ins are as much the fault of the system operators as they are of hackers. “If someone buys a system they don’t completely understand,” and thereby inadvertently opens up his system for hackers to exploit, it’s the system operator who is to blame for the problem, not the hacker who exploits the flaw, says Schafer of Caltech.
“It is like having a public water fountain in your front yard and then complaining when people use it,” he says.
This is not to say that hackers approve of destroying other people’s files. To Schafer, there’s a marked difference between breaking into a system to see if it can be done and breaking in to vandalize the system.
Vandals Are ‘Garbage’
Destructive hackers--Schafer calls them “garbage”--are like vandals who break into a house and spray-paint the walls: “Stupid you for letting me in.”
Schafer, however, notes he has nothing but admiration for the computer science student who invented the now infamous Cornell virus: “That was one prime bit of hacking. He had super-user access on all the machines.” He could have wiped out every file on every machine if he had wanted to. He could have corrupted data. “He could have done horrible things.”
Instead, Pournelle notes, “this guy was careful not to let the virus go write on the hard disk. All his files started with an X, which made them easy to find. He didn’t really go to great lengths to conceal what he was doing. He wanted people to admire him. He had no idea it would get out of hand as much as it did. He thought he was doing a terrific hack.”
It is true the virus forced computer systems to temporarily shut down, an irritation and annoyance.
“Nobody,” Pournelle says, “likes to be kept up until 3 a.m. trying to keep his system from crashing. But it ain’t like it don’t happen anyway. Nobody was put to more trouble than they often are through the normal vicissitudes of life.”
“It was,” Schafer concludes, “an amazing display of computer mastery.”
