Modern hacking, ethics and statistics

Agerund and an infinitive walk in to the Linux kernel. They were hacking to learn. An awful adaptation of a (drinking to forget) joke, but a reasonable opener. An incredibly useful maxim from long ago hacker lore is “don’t learn to hack, hack to learn”. It’s worth taking some time to marinate on this message.

For example, if you search Google for “how to hack” or worse “how to hack gmail”, we can pretty much guarantee you won’t find any useful information. Indeed, you’ll probably find all sorts of spam and phishing links that we wouldn’t recommend touching, even with JavaScript turned off. This isn’t because search engines are producing increasingly bad search results, but because hackers and advertisers know the kinds of intellects who are searching for these terms. And unfortunately they know how