Hackers

This week substituting for Tim MacWilliam, Dominik tells Stash Kirkbride everything about hackers. Most importantly:

• Hackers are not necessarily evil and often they make the e-world go round (see Wikipedia entry on hackers)
• There is a difference between White hat and Black hat hackers
• Hackers are not antisocial and they regularly gather at conferences; the one mentioned was What the Hack
• You can hack more than just your computer: see Lifehacker.com and Parenthacks.com; there is even palate hacking...
• As for hackers penetrating even the strongest security, quite a bit of it is done through what is called Social Engineering.
• You can become a hacker by adopting the hacker mind set of being interested in how things work and how to make them do other things
• One of the simplest and most important hacks that everybody can and should learn is URL hacking. A fun little URL hack on Google is adding the &imgtype=face at the end of the URL that comes back from an image search on Google. Compare the two results: http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=norwich&hl=en vs. http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=norwich&hl=en&imgtype=face. Another useful hack is to shorten the long URL that comes from Amazon searches when emailing it your friends: e.g. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cognitive-Linguistics-Critical-Discourse-Analysis/dp/1847182275 instead of http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cognitive-Linguistics-Critical-Discourse-Analysis/ dp/1847182275/ref=sr_1_1/202-1838462-5575848?ie=UTF8&s=books& qid=1193065714&sr=8-1.
• And in the middle of it we played Code Monkey, a song by Jonathan Coulton, and talked a bit about distribution of music online. Thanks to its Creative Commons license we were even able include this particular song in the podcast.