Essay on hackers - Grade: 16 PDF

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Essay on : "Restoring confidence in the hacker community in your country/culture."...

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Restoring confidence in the hacker community in your country/culture. On October 23 2017, it was revealed in The New-York Post website that some hackers were threatening UK's royal family to release proofs that part of them had plastic surgery. Even though that information in itself seems irrelevant and so not important, it is in some way a clear demonstration of the way hackers are seen in our western societies -as there is no specific way of considering hackers in my country, France: skilled computer experts using those abilities to break into people and factories' computer systems so that they can enrich themselves. This stereotype, widely spread by mainstream press and media, generalizes a definition that excludes many aspects of what a hacker can be. Hackers then can extensively be characterized as skillful computer programmers or users. Gathered as a community, hackers form a subculture composed of people motivated by the idea of overcoming limitations of software systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes. And even though they are getting vital to our societies' survival, hackers are currently, more than ever, feared by the common people because of their terrible reputation. The main point is then to ask ourselves: what is it in our western culture that makes it so difficult to populations to trust hacker community, and how to restore that confidence, if it has ever existed? I – A matter of representation a – managing a shift in hackers' cultural incarnation First of all, something really is striking when we look at the way our mainstream culture deals with the case of hackers. Hollywood and else keep re-introducing the exact same codes to represent them, making them look like weird teens, not socially adapted and completely not relatable as a person that would just be trying to have fun by making evil. Even in the case of “nice hackers” that we can more and more see on our screens, these keep being strange looking grownups, whose work is actually never realistically explained as actors most of the time fail faking reality, just randomly typing on their keyboards. This leads to a need to make the mainstream media's representations change so that our casual view on this community changes. How could the common people actually trust someone who they only think is a childish nerd that could at any moment break into their system and download any file? The hacker community should be dealt with as each community should be in the media, showing all of its diversity, but should also be more realistic and down to earth. This way, populations could at least tend to understand what a hacker can be, and how profitable the existence of hackers is to the common good. The recent creation of the TV show Mr. Robot has shown a real change and impact of mainstream culture on people's state of mind, as it has made “cooler” and more understandable to some people that hackers could be our future's activists: hacktivists. b – a new relationship with politics Hacker Community's bad reputation also seems to be due to the way politics and politicians mention their case. I looked for some quotes from french politicians on hackers and was really disappointed to discover that they never seem to mention them if it's not to react to some hacks and condemn them, such as François Hollande announcing that “nothing will remain unanswered” after the huge hack of Macron's campaign during the presidential run.” It really shows us how most of the time, politics only consider hackers as foreign threats -in western countries, especially from Russia and China. According to this point of view, hackers are condemned to the status of war weapons. And it's not that this is not true, but we must recall that confidence can't be restored in the hacker community if we just reduce them to mass destruction bombs or people able to instantly paralyze human armies. On that aspect, politicians make us think that hackers and politics are incompatible, that hackers can't do no good to support our national politics. As hackers have always been in people's

mind enemies to the common good due to their enormous power that seems unstoppable, politicians could never proudly claim that they work hand by hand with them to improve their security against some other hackers that are a threat to cybersecurity. The word “hacker” is then rarely used, as politicians would prefer “engineers”, or “computer scientist” to make it look much more politically acceptable. This shift in the use of the politicians' vocabulary seems to be one of the numerous keys to improve confidence in the hacker community. It could play a huge role in people's way of seeing them and education. II – Education as the easiest way a - Improving people's knowledge about the internet and especially hackers More than ever, improving people's knowledge about the internet and especially hackers seems to be the most sensed idea. As we have seen before, the way we pursue the hacker community is largely due to the mainstream media and the way politicians talk about it: we have a general representation of it, but we are most of the time incapable of giving a clear definition of what a hacker is. And if so, we will only think of hackers as persons who use computers to gain unauthorized access to data. The more general definition of the word “hacker” is unknown and should be learnt to youngsters like elders so that we gain confidence in this community. But how to do so? It surely should be by the bias of education, which is to me the best way to make societies evolve. Education to the internet and its complexity is the key to our future. Then, it could definitely operate a huge move towards confidence in the hacker community. People could understand that the internet is clearly not manichaean, and then fully grasp the essential role played by hackers in developing our security and technologies. b – A necessary societal change? We have reached a point at which the internet has come to be such a big issue in our daily lives and that understanding the keys of it was one of the most important issues for future generations. Then, coding has started to be learnt in the public school system in some western countries like mine, France, with the same idea of giving children every single way of living the most comfortable life ever. And even if the means used to put this idea in place are usually inefficient, whatsoever it seems to correspond to a societal need: build a society of hackers. We surely know that untrust and unacceptance resides in not understanding each other. The fact that people can't trust hackers comes from the fact that they seem to have an enormous power compared to us, just as most people can't trust politicians because they know things that we don't and do everything so that we don't get to know every single rule from the game we play. Then, wouldn't be essential to learn to everyone how to hack and how to master and understand technological tools? The hacker community would then be truly democratic, corresponding to its ideal of free information for everyone, and making it trust-worthy, even though there would be then no need for it to be trusted as everyone would be part of it. As a conclusion, we have asked ourselves how to explain the lack of confidence in the hacker community in our western culture, and how to make it change so that this confidence is restored. First of all, we have seen that we needed to change the way we culturally and politically talk and represent hackers so that people tend to trust them. Then, we have deduced that education should give people enough means to understand what a hacker is by nature, but also that, finally, complete trust in the hacker community could only exist in a society of hackers....