Hacker Perspective: XCM

Up until the age of ten, my curiosity would typically translate to destructive behavior towards any mechanical object or small electrical appliance I could find.  Of course, I would only experiment on things I felt nobody cared about.  My judgment over time turned out to be accurate within an acceptable degree.

Sometimes I even managed to put things back together.  When this occurred, they would mostly work again.

And then one day, out of the blue, it happened.  I was given a computer.

I don't remember how I felt initially.

Of course, the first thing I did was to press on the two metal levers on the side of the chassis and slide the metal cover open.

I had no idea what I was looking at, but it felt great.  It felt like an important milestone.

After a few moments considering whether I should proceed dismantling the thing, I decided against it.  At least for the moment.

I put the cover back on, pinched a finger in the process, and switched the power button on.  You know, a real, mechanical switch.

Of course, there was no need to re-apply power beforehand as I had not bothered with disconnecting the mains before opening the machine.

Now imagine Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss.  Got it?  Good.  The emotion conveyed by those notes describes quite accurately what I felt when the monitor slowly started throwing loads of text at me.

I could see things.  Lots of writing.  Arcane messages.  It felt as if the being was trying to communicate something to me but I was too inexperienced to understand.

It did not help that my knowledge of the English language was zero at the time.  Besides, had I been able to read that text, the whole experience would have taken a less mystical flavor.

When the creature finished saying what it had to say, it looked like it stopped, waiting for something from me.

And so my exhilarating journey through MS-DOS began.

I remember the sales representative who sold us the computer that morning handing me a plastic box with a bunch of what he called "floppy disks" inside.

Looking me in the eyes sternly, he declared: "Here you have one hundred games.  Now there is no need for you to go elsewhere and risk getting a virus."

I opened my hands, solemnly receiving that mysterious box and I could not help but thinking: "Wait a minute.  Is there an 'elsewhere?'  Is there a place where I can get things to put in my computer?  I absolutely must find this place."

This is how my 30 year quest for computer knowledge started.

Access to information was very limited at the time, especially technical.  The Internet was not mainstream yet and public libraries did not have much material on computers.

This left me with commercial bookstores and a meager budget.

After lengthy consideration between a bunch of video game magazines, sweets, and a book, I finally decided on a book on programming.

I read the whole thing from cover to cover.  After two days, I put the book down, typed EDIT at the command prompt, and started hammering away at the keyboard.

Of course, I also quickly went through the disks given to me by the generous computer sales guy.  Alas, soon I discovered with the utmost disappointment what foreign words such as "shareware" meant.  All of the games on those disks belonged to that category.

I then quickly discovered the joys of decompressing games with ARJ from floppy disks exchanged at school - some of which had the tendency of playing the dreaded sound of the damaged sector at around 90 percent of an eight-disk decompression process.

I believe this is how my informal exposure to the English language began.  I learned to guess the meaning of random words such as "missing," "failure," "bad," or similarly ominous terms.

An important milestone in my journey was when I decided to have a proper look at a couple of curious files I had noticed some time before: CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT.

There were a lot of sexy looking instructions in those lines with some intriguing values after each of them.

I spent some time messing with the numbers, thus enriching my vocabulary with new words that the computer started to uncooperatively bark at me - things like "abort," "incorrect," or "invalid."

Then one day, things started falling into place and I realized that I could reduce the computer boot time by disabling only the lines that did not completely break the boot process.

That led to a sizable reduction in time for a grand total of around five seconds.

I am sure that in the following months I just about got the time back that I invested in getting to that "optimization" to begin with.

After this major accomplishment, I discovered that by altering those files, I could also optimize some games and make things go smoother.

Once I ran out of options for software tweaking, I started looking at possibilities for hardware upgrade.  This was potentially a sore point as I definitely did not have the budget for expensive electronics.

All I could manage was a one megabyte bank of memory miraculously salvaged while rummaging through a pile of trash at a car boot sale.  Things looked brighter for a bit, but then it dawned on me that more RAM does not mean faster games.

It was then, with great excitement, that I learned one of the most promising words I had come across in a while: "overclocking" - the arcane art of squeezing extra CPU cycles by shorting some random pins on the motherboard.

Again, this was a totally trial-and-error process as there was no tutorial (and no Internet, to be precise).

However, after the occasional self-shutdown or freeze, I reached an acceptable balance by leaving the case permanently open with a small desk fan constantly blowing air at the dissipator.

So what are the most important lessons I have learned in all these years?

One aspect that I miss from my early computing experience is how intimate the relationship between human and machine was.  Well, at least for me.

Computers had mechanical switches.  Things made noise - they took time to "heat up," as a friend of mine innocently revealed to me.

Now the whole approach is different.  My MacBook is never really powered off.  There is no proper switch.  It's silent and its inner workings are mostly hidden behind a pretty user interface.

Even modern Linux distros feel somehow more abstracted, colder, distant.

One useful fact that I learned is related to my memory of when I bought my first book about coding, which I wrote about earlier.

Looking back, that was the most focused and productive learning effort in my whole life.  Surely, it was all new and exciting and my brain was nearly 30 years younger, making things easier.  But there is a specific element that made this possible: information scarcity.

While this might be counterintuitive at first, I am convinced that being in my room with that book, and that book only with no distractions, allowed me to focus 100 percent on my objective.

Imagine doing this today: you can get an online subscription to access thousands of digital books.  The Internet overflows with information on any topic you could desire.  And then, of course, we have smartphones to steal as many brain cycles as possible from us.

I don't know about you, but I still remember as a kid sitting on the toilet and reading the shampoo ingredients list, rather than a smartphone.  O.K., when I ran out of labels to read, I started taking books with me to the toilet, but that gives you the idea.

This cacophony of data, at least in my experience, results in an overabundance of stimuli that makes the process of focusing on a topic extremely difficult.  It creates what I believe is called "information overload," which for people who are thirsty for knowledge is a very insidious threat indeed.

And it can get addictive, too - up to the point where our brains cannot cope with this constant influx of data and we experience a sense of being overwhelmed that can manifest itself in various areas of our lives in the form of anxiety.

I know this concept is possibly complex to grasp by someone who is starting this fantastic journey today, but I believe there is a valuable suggestion here: resist the temptation to hoard more information than you can absorb.  It will not make you more knowledgeable.  It will just highlight your limitations as a human being.

Some people are O.K. with that.  I, however, reacted differently.  I experienced a dreadful fear of missing out.  Anything that I could not read was information that I would forever be ignorant about.

Also, this constant switching between books, articles, videos, and the like further reduced my attention span, as our brains are not made for multitasking, really.

And before anyone says: "women can multitask."  No.  Women cannot multitask any better than us men can.  Women just get shit done and do not complain.

Also, thinking about that period of my early life, I would define it as "boring" under today's standards.  Little access to information, limited sacrificial gear to experiment on, and a sense of loneliness as none of my friends at the time spent their afternoons in the company of screwdrivers, pliers, and an emergency one kilogram hammer.

Over time, I was constantly coming up with lots of questions and little answers.  All of these questions kept cramming in my little head with no outlet to direct my desire of knowledge to.

I am convinced, however, that being bored was a great catalyst to develop my imagination and aide experimentation.  Being bored forces you to find something to do with what you have - to repurpose things in unexpected ways to pass the time.  It forces you to become a hacker.

These things do not occur easily nowadays and similar opportunities are lost, due to the multiple distractions we are constantly surrounded by.

Another important lesson I learned over time is that whereas there might be shortcuts in life, they rarely bring the most favorable outcome.  Most of the time, the hard way is the best way.  Cliché as this might be, I believe it really is a valid point to remember in life.

One additional advantage of those initial experiences is that I feel a lot more confident about learning.  I see so many people, at different stages of their lives, who dread having to learn new things.  And this is a real shame as, in a way, knowledge still is power.  The moment we stop learning, we really become at risk.  Not only professionally, but we also lose so much potential as human beings.

I always say to people who are daunted by learning that acquiring information is easy.  I confidently tell them that they can learn anything, given the right dedication.

I am often met with a look of disbelief.  They do not appreciate the simple fact that we are all born ignorant and inept.  Those people all have one thing in common: they were never given the opportunity of a safe environment where failure was acceptable.  They never broke things to see how they worked.  Therefore, they were never in a position where they could fix what they had broken.

In few words, they lack self confidence.

This is what hacking is about.  Constant excursions outside of our comfort zone because of actions we willingly took, most of the times completely oblivious of the consequences.

And every time we learn from our actions, every time we fix what we ourselves have broken, we feel we have reentered our comfort zone.

What we don't realize, at times, is that what really happened is that our comfort zone has just expanded.  This will only happen when we push the boundaries hard and often enough.

I am so glad that I was given the chance to go through this process.  It is one of the most fundamental steps in my formation and I am striving to offer the same opportunity to my children.

I really hope it will be valuable for them as it was for me.

XCM can be found consulting for various organizations on designing and implementing certain cyber security solutions.  In his free time, he loves reading classics and challenging his kids to think critically about the reality they are exposed to.  When the youngsters challenge his beliefs, he realizes he must be doing something right in life.