Life Hacking

Jumping in and getting your hands dirty. Editing .ini's, operating from the command line, this is where it starts. Before long you're nosing around in someone else's system, finding their security holes and alerting them. Or just leaving your mark and letting them figure out how you did it. I call it diving, but most call it hacking. Or they used to.

Before the net was around, hackers had to hack something. So they hacked buildings. It's ancient history by now, but apparently it started at MIT. The twinkies wanted to know their world, so they crawled the tunnels, climbed the roofs, and saw. And they called it hacking. They left their marks, most often on top of the great dome. They showed the world that they knew the campus, and they were smarter than the security, and they were ingenious. Most of their hacks could also be called installation art. In unusual places.

Maybe you've realized that the physical world is an ugly place, an impersonal place, a corporate place. In cyberspace, your voice is determined by the number of people who hear you, through word of mouth. Anyone can go anywhere in an instant, to find their favorite content. In the physical world, the people with the most money get to shout the loudest, because they can pay for bigger ads, bigger buildings, stronger radio signals. Hacking is even more important in the physical world, because it may be the only voice you have.

You need an idea. It needs to get people's attention, and it needs to be clever. The peds who see it need to know that you put a lot of effort into it, so they'll pay more attention to it. Anyone can ignore spray paint on concrete in an alley. When you put it somewhere hard to get to, say thirty feet in the air, they know you must care about it. Or when your hack is clever, they have to think about it. Peds don't think enough anyway, so give them something to think about. And don't use spray paint unless you've got a damn good reason. Just like in cyberspace, 3d gets a lot more attention than 2d. If you've got a message, don't just shout it out, that's too easy to forget. You've got make them think about so it stays in their mind. You've got a voice now, but people can ignore you in real space just like they can ignore you in cyberspace, if they don't care about what you're saying.

Later maybe I'll give you some practical tips on the getting the message out, instead of just telling you what to say. If you can't figure out what to say on your own, just shut up.

Are You Generic?

[M]ass production might be the most efficient way to make things in the physical world, but it makes them all the same.  Face it, punks, sameness is lameness.  Why would you want to be just like everyone else?  Why would you want your stuff to be just like everyone else's stuff?  Since it gets made that way cause it's cheaper, the obvious solution is. . . mod it.  What's to stop you from drawing on your iPod with a marker?  Or scratching your name into the finish on your laptop?  But you don't have to stop there.

PC modders upgrade their hardware, but they also add visuals like glowing case fans.  Some even reduild their cases into functional art.  There's a good community of casemodders here. 

Going a step farther you get into physical hacking, but I'll write about that later.  I'm jacking out now.  I've got to get back to the physical world.

If you wanna stay free, stay small-time. You can get away with anything as long as no one notices you, so the trick to not getting caught is to not get noticed. If you copy a track onto a com's player, nobody cares. If you host thousands of tracks from your server and charge pats to download them, you're going to get busted.

If nobody notices you, it doesn't matter how many laws you break. Once people start noticing you, you've got to work harder to keep the laws. Once you get famous, you have to hire a lawyer to tell you how not to break the law. If you had just stayed small, you could have been free.

In for a moment

I'm just jacking in for a while to get some basics done.  Cran, I've been out too long.  So long it feels rigid getting back in, like I don't know my way around.  Surfing is not the same as diving, and I've just been surfing lately.  Blame it on summer.  What'd Regina say about summer?  I been staying up drinking in late-night establishments.  On to content:

The spread of free wi-fi is a good thing.  But it's unencrypted, punks!  Any black-hat in your physical vicinity can just grab your data out of the air and manipulate your jack.  It's your job to encrypt in-machine.  You could VPN, but it's more straightforward to encrypt your data directly.  You'll probably have to pay someone to do this for you.  I can't recommend anyone except my own services, but they'll cost you.