In today’s technological age, where harldy anything can be considered safe, it has become far easier to break into someone’s personal zone. By personal, we do
not just mean the social media. The world wide web which has become the hub of storing and restoring information, considered to be
the safest vault, is a mere toy in the hands of a few computer geniuses. Hackers, Black Hat Hackers, villains, crackers,
cyber-criminals, cyber pirates as they are well-known, throw a malicious software or virus at a system to gain access to the
desired information. Piqued by curiosity, they may perhaps break into your system too!
From once being the realm of curious teenagers to becoming a mysterious entangle of the arena of government spies, professional thieves and soldiers of fortune, computer hacking has come a long way in the past four decades or so. To put it in the simplest way possible, hacking is about understanding how things work, breaking them into smaller pieces, fixing their flaws, adjusting them in accordance to your needs or improving them and finally reassembling them back to their form and the person engaged in it is called a hacker.
Here is a compilation of a few hackers (or the whiz kids) who put the world in awe with their dexterity.
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John Draper, the original whistle blower.
A legendary figure within the computer programming world and the hacker and security community, John Draper is the king of what they called phone phreaking back in the 1970s.
While playing with a plastic whistle from a cereal box, Draper and a friend noticed that it sounded a lot like the tone of AT&T’s routing switches for phone calls! Out of that simple discovery came the infamous “blue boxes” which Draper designed and sold from his home; the boxes allowed you to make as many long distance calls as you liked, free of charge. Without this odd innovation, who’s to say that we wouldn’tbe paying $3.77 per minute for a call overseas?
Bob Gudgel, Jay Dee Pritchard, and John “Captain Crunch” Draper with a bluebox.
Draper went on to link up with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (who brought his friend Steve Jobs along), and he taught the two everything he knew about phone phreaking, which lead to the first business collaboration of Wozniak and Jobs. Draper served 5 years probation once he was finally caught, but he sort of changed the world, don’t you think?
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Alan Turing, the first hacker ever?
A pioneer in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation to the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer, Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. Turing believed there was a better way to archive vast databases of information without needing to employ hundreds of workers to sit and do the math all day, crafting quite an innovative idea in back in the 1930’s, devising the idea of modern computing before it even existed!
Statue of Alan Turing at the Bletchley Park Museum, poring over an Enigma machine.
During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for speeding up the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing developed quite an innovative machine, known as The Turing Machine, which was responsible for cracking the Nazi encryption system known as enigma, saving more British lives in World War 2 than any single person. Essentially Turing hacked the Nazi’s, winning Britain the war!
The Bombe was an electromechanical device used by Turing (and later British cryptologists in general) to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages.
A person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data is Google’s definition of a hacker. That’s precisely what Turing did and by this definition, he could be classified as the very first hacker!
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Gary Thuerk, The Father Of Spam!
Gary Thuerk — a marketer working for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), an early computer manufacturer, invented spam. Yes, you read the right. On May 3rd 1978, 26 years ago this week, Thuerk composed an email marketing campaign promoting DEC’s newest computers and sent it to nearly 400 email users on ARPANET — at one time.
The first ever spam mail.
Thuerk, however, prefers the term E-marketing to spam and claims there’s a difference. While it’s true that Thuerk’s spam which was essentially a targeted e-mail sent to a specific mailing list, 600 users with a single click, isn’t exactly the spam we know and hate today, he is still the one who had the brilliant idea. He was the first to see a huge opportunity in online marketing and grabbed it with both hands. A rather unique way to hack the world indeed!
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Aaron Swartz, Internet’s Own Boy.
You will be incredibly inspired by the genius and the drive of Aaron Swartz, humbled by his inner moral code that never wavered, the courage he had to fight the established corporate machine, and saddened by the loss of a brilliant, gentle soul who had already had a profoundly positive impact on our lives, yet less than it should have been.
Once I realised there were real, serious problems, fundamental problems that I could do something to address, I didn’t see a way to forget that. -Aaron Swartz.
Aaron Swartz – ‘The internets own boy’ was a computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer and Internet hacktivist. He either founded or was instrumental in Reddit, Creative Commons, the RSS Feed and so much more.
Aaron was driven by a strong moral code of right and wrong and realized very early in his life that he could make a difference and that if he could, then he should. One of his defining features was his curiosity – more than just curiosity – his inner sense to always question and challenge everything.
Aaron Swartz is a hacker that truly changed the world and helped sculpt the culture of the Internet as we know it today!