Week 12. Short opinion about the practical applicability of ideals from the text

 

 

Hackers can be referred to as a subculture of people who have a vast majority of knowledge in IT and programming that they can go far beyond the tasks of ordinary IT specialists. Hackers should have lots of different qualities, but what really unites them are their aims, ideals and ethics. Those ideals have been changing through time and yet not everyone may say clearly what are the real hacker’s principles or goals. After reading the text I have found some qualities about hackers applicable to the reality of the third decade of 21-st century nevertheless, some of them may barely be taken into account.

First of all, considering the hacker ethic of the early days, I can point out that hackers have always been promoting mistrust of authorities for a very long time. Decentralisation is one of the most important ideas for hackers which has not changed for a long time and is still applicable to modern hackers. For example, a well known Anonymous group does not have a leader who decides the actions of the group or manages them nevertheless, the members follow ideas that they all know. 

But there is a point in hacker ethics of early days with which I cannot agree. It was said that computers can change your life for the better however, I do not think that reliance only on computers may lead to something good even for the hackers that know much about computers. I think that if there is an invention then there are always people who will misuse it. Misusing can also be understood as inventing something new. After all, someone has come up with an idea to use something the new way, although it is not oriented for good purposes. So the same works for hackers: if a hacker had misused something then there is a big possibility that another guy will come up with a newer idea on how to fix this issue or reveal the hacker's identity. Adding this to the utterly digital world that we are living in right now, we can say that there are so many issues for hackers to worry about. I do not think that abundance of technologies will help hackers to keep acting unnoticed or keep following their ideas. Sometimes restraint may be a good thing to have as an option. 

Considering the values of hacker ethics in the new century I can mostly agree with the statements. Those are the general qualities that describe the ideal of a modern hacker. Hackers indeed must have a passion to keep on doing their job. A real hacker must always know more about something than others know, so there must be a motivation for a hacker to keep on studying the subject, analyzing, finding issues and vulnerabilities. 

I also agree with the quality that hackers promote freedom of word and thought and resist censorship in all its forms. Since most of society browses the internet on a daily basis, governments are trying to gain more control of their people by setting more rules and censorship. Throughout history, such restrictions have not led to something good if they were not resisted by someone. Luckily we have got hackers that became the opposition to the censorship. I am sure that both sides know that they will never win completely but their opposition balances the situation preventing one side from taking over the Internet.