Hackers In The Ecosystem Of Sw Engineering

[tansqrx 0]

A question by my wife got me started to think about how hackers both take away from and add to the fairly complex software engineering ecosystem. We were both home from work over lunch today and we were watching Fox News. We started talking about the stock market and the subject of Microsoft came up. Shortly the question was asked, what keeps Microsoft from literly taking aver the world with their software by adding a back door of some sort. She cited the movie "The Net" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/ where a security company put a back door in their software and started to mess with fairly high level political decisions and the such.

 

A little about my wife. She is far from being computer savy. She uses the standard Microsoft programs at work (XP, Office, Publisher, etc) and is fairly internet savy. She can perform many of the basic tasks required at work and home and can usually figure out how to do relitivity simple tasks that are new to her, such as using a new CD burning program. She knows next to nothing about how computers really work and really doesn't want to. Her knowledge of the darker side of computers are pretty much limited to our random discussions where I get going on a tangent and any papers that she helps me write.

 

But she made a good point at lunch. What does keep a big corporation such as Microsoft from taking over "the world" and who keeps them in control. My initial response to her was that hackers do this work.

 

Just as the natural ecosystem needs certain at first unsightly critters, so does the computer ecosystem. My first thought on this was the lamprey fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamprey These critters are for a lack of a better word, parisites. They attach to other fish such as sharks and suck on the host's blood. At first this seems like a creature that should not exist at all, it should be eraticated from the face of the earth. But where whould the shard be with out it's parasite? Does the shark actually need lampreys to survive? The same is true with mosquitoes. How many of us wish they never existed? But they are there are a reason. How would the larger ecosystem fare if the mosquitoe no longer existed.

 

My thoughts have brought me to the conclusion that hackers are the same in the computer engineering ecosystem. At first they may be seen as a total parisite and should be destroyed but they do hold value to even the most anti-hacker personality.

 

Without hackers who would keep certain big company in control? If a back door directly connected to Redmon was ever detected who would find it? Lawyers, Law-enforcment or hackers? Of course it would be the hackers. By constantly probing, scanning, and trying to defeat security measures, they are makeing the software scene better. By finding backdoors or simply picking off the weakest of the heard, hackers have evolved to fit a certain role and are needed in the greater ecosystem.

 

Tell me what you think and if there are other areas that hackers help the greater ecosystem.

[miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG 0]

That's a brilliant example and an even greater line of thoughts, I must say. Hacker's not only fit in the role of the so called Lamprey - there's a different creed of people without whom we'd be forced to accept whatever commercial software - good or bad - that came our way (the situation that might arise out of "Software Patents"). Aside from the dark activities they indulge into - a considerable part of them work on any given software and put them through severe stress tests. In fact most of the time they are the one's who bring out the potential security flaws & threats in software - as well as other non-security related bugs. Imagine a world without such people - where we'd be so gullible that we'd have to digest all the crap that comes our way. In a way, they serve as the Voice of the People against buggy flawed software too - and in many cases forces the publishing company to go back and change considerable parts of their design. While this isn't a good thing from THEIR business point of view - the whole act safeguards the interests of the common mass in a big way. Not all of us are knowledgeable enough to figure out what, where & why a software is malfunctioning or not living upto its mark. Once again, not encouraging the darker side of the whole issue, I think the most appropriate way of describing their CAUSE would be - "Vox populi, vox Dei"

[qwijibow 0]

Very interesting point.Hackers wrote Unix., BSD, Linux, Hurd and GNU.Hackers reverse engineer windows only device drivers, making them available for other OS's.Hackers discover MS mistakes, i suppose if MS delibratly put a backdoor into there software, it would be un-missable to the hacker community.Its just the small percentage of script kiddies, who are mis-labeled as hackers by the media who give them such a bad name.Not too long ago, a vunerability poped un in Open Office's MS.doc format reader that would allow code execution. A ahcker discovered it, submitted a patch, and fixed it. The hacker who discovered it must have know much about buffer overflows, and how to us them to write virii, yet no virus was written, no evil done. knioledge of evil used for good :DThe computer enthusiasts ready do have a lot more control over the market than most people would guess.and the work of these enthusiats is becomming very mainstream, take firefox for example.It used to be considered trendy (in computer nerd circles) to use Linux.now thats pretty average, and to still be trendy you need to use BSD, or a more hard-core cool distro of linux, like slackware, gentoo, or Linux-From-Scratch.the nerds shall inherit the earth lol

[tansqrx 0]

Here is another point to ponder with reguard to hackers. National security. Now I know not all in this forum are from the same background as myself, American. I have no intention of starting a flame war but I do have an observation to make and it requires my own view point.For may years it has been know that Chineese hackers have been training to infiltrate the US information network if so needed. It has been recently shown the the Chineese governemt even holds training camps for this activity, akin to military A-school for hackers. Now as for Americans or any other country for that matter, what keeps us save from these types of attacks? Hackers of course. If the hackers can find the security holes before another governemt can then it makes us safer all around.P.S. How do you get the usage statistics for your site on the botom of your posts?

[miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG 0]

P.S. How do you get the usage statistics for your site on the botom of your posts?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Are you referring to my signature that shows all my system specs & stats ? If you want that simply goto http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ and signup for their signature system. It's free and it creates these stats on the fly. They have a client which u have to install - this client keeps updating their server with your system specs data and BW usage - and that gets transformed into a JPEG/PNG file which you can embed in your forum signature...

 

If you're NOT talking about my signature and want to display some sort of stats in your signature, refer to the tutorials on generating dynamic signature, posted by signatureimage. Just search this board for his posts and you'll get to it.

 

Regards,

m^e

[tansqrx 0]

Are you referring to my signature that shows all my system specs & stats ? If you want that simply goto http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ and signup for their signature system. It's free and it creates these stats on the fly. They have a client which u have to install - this client keeps updating their server with your system specs data and BW usage - and that gets transformed into a JPEG/PNG file which you can embed in your forum signature...

 

If you're NOT talking about my signature and want to display some sort of stats in your signature, refer to the tutorials on generating dynamic signature, posted by signatureimage. Just search this board for his posts and you'll get to it.

 

Regards,

m^e

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Nope that's it thanks!