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Caveat Task: Hacker Culture

Background:

Hacker culture built the internet and continues to be the most important cultural trend amongst programmers. According to wikipedia,

Hacker Culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems to achieve novel and clever outcomes.

The purpose of this assignment is to brainwash you into the hacker cult introduce you to this hacker culture. It will also help you pass the culture fit test in CS job interviews.

Task

You must earn 2**2 points by watching/reading the shows/books below. Each point should take at most 2 hours to complete, so you should be able to finish this task in under 2**3 hours.

Note: These points are distinct from the credit-bearing points you get for assignments, so earning more than 2**2 points does not get you extra credit. However, you can get 2**0 points of extra credit for completing 2**4 points in this caveat task.

Watching (non-fiction): (1 point each)

  1. RevolutionOS (2001), available on youtube. This documentary describes the evolution of Unix and open source software, with many interviews of the "founding fathers" of the movement.

  2. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014), available on youtube. This documentary describes how Aaron Swartz, the co-founder of Reddit and an important part of other great projects, sought to challenge academic paywalls and spread civic awareness.

  3. CitizenFour (2014) (available for free from the Internet Archive). This is a documentary about how and why Edward Snowden released the documents about the NSA and what those documents revealed. There's also a live-action movie called Snowden available on Amazon Prime. You can get credit for watching both of these.

  4. Zero Days - Security Leaks for Sale, available on youtube). This documentary describes how exploits are bought and sold on an open market by companies, governments, and criminal organizations.

Watching (fiction):

  1. (1 point) War Games, available on youtube or Amazon Prime. This is a classic hacker movie and was quite realistic for what hacking looked like when the movie was released (1983). The hacking technique war dialing were introduced by this movie.

  2. (2 points) Season 1 of Mr. Robot, available on Amazon Prime). This is the most accurate portrayal of hacking in any modern movie, see for example this article and this article. Each additional season is worth 1 point.

Reading (Non-Fiction): (1 point each)

  1. Peter Norvig's Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (not 21 days). Norvig is one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence and Director of Research at Google.

  2. Paul Graham's what to study in college. Graham is a founder of the the investment company https://www.ycombinator.com/, which started many famous companies like dropbox, airbnb, stripe, doordash, reddit, and twitch.

  3. Jeff Atwood's How To Become a Better Programmer by Not Programming. Atwood is the founder of https://stackoverflow.com. He's also a Microsoft fanboi (and so provides a bit of a different perspective than everyone else on this list).

  4. ESR's How to become a hacker. ESR is a famous hacker who started many open source projects.

  5. Any article on https://phrack.org counts as 1 point. Phrack is a famous hacker-zine that discusses both the philosophy of hacking and the practical aspects of "cracking." The most famous article is the hacker's manifesto.

  6. Each chapter of the following books count as one point:

    1. ESR's The Art of Unix Programming, available online at his webpage. This is the classic exposition of the Unix philosophy that underlies the technical aspects of hacker culture.

    2. ESR's The Cathedral and the Bazaar, available online at his webpage. This is the classic economic argument for why open source software is better than closed source software.

    3. Peter Seibel's Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming. Seibel interviews many famous hackers about their coding setups and how their philosophy of coding.

Submission

Reply to this github issue with a list of the tasks that you completed. For each task, you'll need to write a 1-2 sentence summary of what you learned/liked/disliked about the task.

NOTE:

You must do the reading/viewing during this semester in order for it to count. Thus, for example, students who have previously taken courses with me cannot just skip this assignment.