Hacking: how to become a Hacker

 

Hacker is a slang term for a computer enthusiast, i.e., a person who enjoys learning programming languages and computer systems and can often be considered an expert on the subject(s).
I often ask myself one question: How do I become a Hacker? After looking up lots of relative materials, I have to say it is a hard question to answer.


Eric Raymond, compiler of The New Hacker's Dictionary, lists five possible characteristics that qualify one as a hacker: enjoying learning programming language or system, enjoying doing the programming, appreciating someone else's hacking, picking up programming quickly, or expert in a particular programming language like "UNIX hacker".
According my experience, Hacker has to have the following 4 basic characteristics.

Super programming ability is the first one. To master programming, firstly, you must have learning objectives. The second step is to make a study plan. Having a right attitude is third step. Finally, Hacker has a strong self-learning ability.

Enjoying solving programming problems is the second one. This feature is the motivation and main reason to be a hacker.

The third one is enjoying high prestige among programmers. Hacker is kind of title from other programmers. There are many ways to build your prestige. You can write open source codes, debug open source codes and maintain some websites where other Hackers often browse.

The last one is to obey and maintain hacker culture. The hacker culture doesn't have leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. Freedom is one prominent feature of hacker culture. Finally, Hacker has a strong self-learning ability.
Before I end my article, I have to remind you: Be a Hacker not Cracker. Cracker is someone who attempts to crack someone else's system or otherwise uses programming or expert knowledge to act maliciously. If you want to know more about Cracker, you can browse website: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/hacker-vs-cracker/1400

Open source: free and unstable

Have you heard open-source software? Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available and licensed with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose(Wikipedia). The first open source software I used is Firefox. Later, some other open-source software as Latex, Linux and Eclipse are becoming my daily tools. In this post, I'd like to talk with you about their cost and stability.

So far, all OSS that I know are free. Lets have a look at the advantage via an example. It is well known that Windows Operating System is expensive. Compare with it, Linux is completely free. Maybe the price of operating system is not a big deal for working people. However, it is a question that students are thinking about. In some developing Countries like China, students like buying the computers with Linux rather than Windows. One of the most important reasons is that the computers with Linux are much cheaper than those with Windows.

The key feature of the open-source software is open source codes. Some people believe that open-source software have better security than closed source software since millions of eyes looking at and maintaining the software. I don't think so. All software engineers can access the source codes and change them including attackers. It is said that lots of funds are used to attack the open-source software. And, simply making source code available does not guarantee review. Marcus Ranum--an expert on security system design and implementation--released his first firewar toolkit, at one point in time, there were over 2000 sites using his toolkit, but only 10 people give him any feedback or patches.(The example comes from Wikipedia)

In sum, you don't need spend lots of money to buy closed source software because of free open source software. However, you have to keep eyes on its' stability. There is no rose without a thorn.

Agile: the application of Scrum in CS department E-Zine project

Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing software projects and product or application development.(Wikipedia)
I am one of the teams who are working on CS department E-Zine project. To be honest, I don't know anything about famous Agile Software Development until joining in the project. In the post, I will simply show you the application of Scrum in this project.

First step, We  formed a self-organized team.

Second step, in the first meeting, we and client(professor) together discussed the product (it is not final product.), made 5 SPRINTS for the whole project, and figured out the MUST tasks in each SPRINT.

Third step, after one week, we used some software  tools to make a memo to our client. That means out first SPRINT was done.

Now, we are working on our second SPRINT. To finish it successfully, our team split into  5 self-organized groups. Each group was given specific task like interviewing students, faculty perspective, etc.  These small groups use all kinds of ways to devote their attention to the given task, simultaneously at the same time, all members also care and help other groups.

Any way, SCRUM  is one of the leading agile software development processes. We are using it to design, code, test and document our project. From this project, I learned about product and sprint backlogs, sprint planning and sprint review meetings, and how to conduct a sprint retrospective. 

LinkedIn and branding: brand yourself

As the world's largest professional network with more than 80 million members worldwide, LinkedIn can help you brand yourself. Our knowledge is goods now.  Companies, schools or other organizations who can give us jobs are our customers. As sellers, what can we do to enhance our products' value? LinkedIn provides a platform for both us and our customers. We may use the platform to display ourselves to others. In the following parts, I will discuss how to use PROFILE to brand yourself.
First of all is LinkedIn photo.  The photo may tell people about you. You are the brand. Opinions are formed in a nanosecond. And that means the photo at the top may be the most important part of your LinkedIn profile. So the photo should be natural. It is best taken recently. I can understand some people like to post their photo which was edited by Photoshop. But I don't think that it is suitable. LinkedIn is a profession platform. The hirers are looking for the people who can qualify their job and get along with colleagues instead of beautiful ones. Looking natural yet polished is far better. It is a headshot with nice shirt or blouse in a solid color.

Second is about SKILLS and EXPERIENCE. The hirers usually use keywords to search targets. Almost all the keywords are relative to skills and experience. So when you brand the two items, accurate keywords are necessary. To increase the interviews chance, you also need provide as many keywords as possible about your skills and experience. However, independent work experience should not be added. For example, if you want to find a software engineer position, the experience you worked as a waiter/waitress need not be put here.

Finally, your courses are also important. As new graduates, most people don't have work experience. In order to let the employers believe you are the person who they are looking for, you can show them what you learned.

In sum, branding yourself is the most important and difficult step before you go to job market. Besides the three sides above, we also have other things to do. Hopefully you can best use Linkedin to show you to hires.

QR codes: why you should use them

What are QR codes? Look at the funny-looking square picture on the left which is my blog's QR code. QR codes are more and more popular because of many reasons. In the following paragraphs, I will show you 3 reasons: easy to use, free, modern.

First, QR codes are easy to use. Nowadays,  more and more people are using smartphones.  It is said that today more than half Americans are smartphone users. Smartphones can be used as a QR-code scanner, displaying the code and converting it to some useful form such as a standard URL, thereby obviating the need for a user to type it manually into a web browser.

Second, QR codes are free. You can use some websites(such as goQR.me and the-qrcode-generator.com) to create your QR codes easily, and the activity is completely free.What you need do is just to go to the websites and input your information like Text, URLS, CALL ,etc. And then to download it. Now your QR codes are finished. 

Finally, QR codes make you modern. It is information society. Everyday, our life is filled with all kinds of information. If we could catch these information, we can talk them with our friends and use them to help our life easy and amazing. QR codes are one of them. You can scan other people's or companies' QR codes to get the information that you want and give your QR codes to them to let them know about you well. When the people around you are talking and using the QR codes, if you don't have one, you are backward.

In sum, QR codes don't spend your money and they make you walk along with modern world, the most an amazing aspect is that they are easy to use. So, to know about QR codes and use them as soon as possible.

Social network security or lack of when promoting your brand is an issue of utmost importance

Social network is gradually becoming absolutely necessary when companies promote their brands. In fact, it is a two-edge knife. On one hand, companies can use social media platforms to obtain immediate feedback from current/potential customers and communicate with their audience(http://sjsucs100wcs200w.blogspot.com/).  On the other hand,  many important information of companies can leak through social networks.  In the following paragraphs, I will show you that social networks' importance to promote the companies' brands and if the social network lacks the security, it will produce very bad influence to the development of businesses.


First, Social network has became the necessary way to promote the growth in the corporate sector of the economy. Companies can track information about them by some sites like www.google.com/alerts and www.hootsuite.com. Compare to traditional survey, social network has many obvious advantages. For example, it is easy and quick to get feedback. Using this feedback, companies can modify and make their blueprint of development.  Since more and more people like to use social network to transmit information, and commonly people even more like to buy the brands which their friends recommend, the brands can be known widely and quickly which effect is much better than they get from expensive ads.If things continue in this way, the company will gain huge development.

However, hackers  and rivals alike can take advantage of social media platform to get similar information . Hackers may use the information to attack the company. As rivals, they can make advantageous measures for themselves according to the information they gained about the company from social network which possibly is very bad to the development of the company.   In some cases, the leaders of one company can discuss their products with their loyal customers,these kind of conversation possibly influence this company's maker' decisions. Yet if the conversation is gotten and used by the rivals, it is possible that the future of the company will be very hard， even the life and death of the company can be affected.

In sum, social network can both promote the brand of one company also ruin the development of one company.  In order to better use it, one of the key works is to improve its' security. Many social network companies like Facebook and Google are working on it. The following video is talking about this issue.

Welcome

 Hi,

Welcome to LiMiaoCS200W. My major is Computer Science. I am a Grad student. Actually, I am holding master degree in Mathematics.  Changing major has many reasons.The most important one is that I like coding and want to use programming to implement my idea. And, everyone knows the relation between Mathematics and Computer Science is close. In the future, I will apply my mathematics knowledge to help make algorithms,  and use computer to show them to people.

Computer Science as one of the most popular academic subjects has lots of amazing characteristics. Abstraction is one of them. The following English definition helps to understand how this term applies to Computer Science. Abstraction - a concept or idea not associated with any specific instance(www.Thefreedictionary.com). From the beginning of the computer science, all scientists and programmers work around converting. To convert concrete situations to abstract computer science concepts or knowledge, then to convert abstraction to concreteness are the process of dealing with all kinds of questions. If you want to know about computer science, or be a programmer, you need begin with enjoying its' abstraction.

 As a computer science Grad student, I will gradually share my views about the beauty in computer science with you in this blog. Hopefully you come here often and get what you want.

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