Thursday, July 1, 2010

Not a hacker... just... creative

As another week is winding down I read Yair's post and laughed because I feel the exact same way. However I tend to be the quiet type and try not to bring attention to myself. In highschool I got asked if I can "hack" this or "hack" that, and I would laugh and shake my head. Hacking isn't what is portrayed in the media, although nothing is how the media portrays it. As Yair said hacking isn't about being evil and controlling the internet, it's about learning what causes problems and using that knowledge to shape information assurance. However, even if we were to look at "black hat" hacking as portrayed on tv, its not even close. To hack a physical application you have to "decompile" a program into what is called assembly. This assembly is basically a text representation of binary.. Then you need to pour over thousands of lines of assembly code and find a problem in the logic, if any. That is why there aren't billions of people getting hacked everyday because it's not as easy (or hard) as people think, it's on a whole other level.

Anyway ending tangent.

This week I really got down to work and everyone thinks I'm a genius (insert evil laugh). I am migrating data into an online database, so that involved pouring over 250 lines in excel and matching dates and pdf's. Then I would have to write code to parse the excel data into xml files for uploading to the database. However after doing about 40 of these I got a better idea. I decided to write a program to parse PDF files to the xml data I need to make it simpler to upload to the database.
That's usually how my life goes.. I write software to do my work for me ;)..

So no, I don't consider myself a hacker... I'm not even close to that level. I'm just a security conscious, creative "code poet"

peace+love always.

1 comment:

  1. Matthew,
    You may have considered the tangent on hacking as something "off topic" but as someone not really familiar with the poetry that is code, I found it absolutely fascinating and very very cool.
    Best,
    Day
    www.DayinWashington.com

    ReplyDelete

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