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For Facebook 'Hacker Way' is way of life (AP) : Technet |
- For Facebook 'Hacker Way' is way of life (AP)
- Hackers apparently hit Swedish government site (AP)
- Celebs suit up for DirecTV Beach Bowl (AP)
- Four of the Strangest New Video Game Controllers (ContributorNetwork)
- NFL Kicker! iPhone game gets you ready for the Super Bowl (Appolicious)
| For Facebook 'Hacker Way' is way of life (AP) Posted: 04 Feb 2012 08:12 AM PST NEW YORK – Facebook's billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls himself a hacker. For most people, that word means something malicious — shady criminals who listen in on private voicemails, or anonymous villains who cripple websites and break into email accounts. For Facebook, though, hacker means something different. It's an ideal that permeates the company's culture. It explains the push to try new ideas (even if they fail), and to promote new products quickly (even if they're imperfect). The hacker approach has made Facebook one of the world's most valuable Internet companies. Hackers "believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete," Zuckerberg explains. "They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it's impossible or are content with the status quo." Zuckerberg penned those words in a 479-word essay called "The Hacker Way", which he included in the document the company filed with government regulators about its plans for an initial public offering. The company is seeking $5 billion from investors in a deal that could value Facebook at as much as $100 billion. The 27-year-old, who has a $28.4 billion stake in the stock deal, uses the H-word 12 times in the essay; "shareholder" appears just once. Should Zuckerberg have left those references out of his IPO manifesto, knowing full-well it could scare off potential investors? He could easily have described Facebook as "nimble" or "agile" instead. "Symbolically, it doesn't bode well to Facebook and to potential investors," says Robert D'Ovidio, an associate professor of criminal justice at Drexel University in Philadelphia who studies computer crime. "I think it shows maybe an immaturity on his part. He should definitely know better." By using the word, Zuckerberg is also trying to reclaim it. To him, Steve Jobs and the founders of many of the world's biggest technology companies were hackers. "The word `hacker' has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers," Zuckerberg writes. "In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done." To be fair, the meaning has become complicated. Bad hackers destroy things with evil intentions. They break into the voicemails of crime victims and celebrities in search of a hot news story. They breach security systems to steal credit card data. Just this week, members of the loose-knit group Anonymous hacked into law enforcement websites around the world and gained access to information about government informants and other sensitive information. Good hackers break things, too, sometimes. But they do it in the name of innovation. They call themselves "white hat" hackers to counter the criminal "black hats." Often, they're hired to expose security vulnerabilities at big corporations. Kevin Mitnick, who was convicted and sent to prison in the 1990s for computer hacking, now works as a security consultant. It's the flip side of his past life, when he spent years stealing secrets from some of the world's largest corporations. "I break into computers to find holes before the bad guys do," he says. To Mitnick, Zuckerberg's "Hacker Way" is about finding clever ways to fix problems. It can also mean identifying a new use for something old. Nathan Hamblen, who works for the website Meetup.com, says the best hacks are those that do something unexpected, something surprising that no one else has thought of. The term "hacking" dates back more than half a century, when geeks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were tweaking telephone systems and computers. "MIT was the Mesopotamia of hacking. That's where hacking culture began," says Steven Levy, the Wired Magazine writer who authored the 1984 book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution." The small community of hackers in the 1950s and `60s judged one another on their creative and technical abilities, and wore the term as a badge of honor, says Levy, in much the same way that Zuckerberg does today. "They were the ones who did what you weren't supposed to do on a computer," Levy explains. Some were pranksters, too. In the 1970s, before they founded Apple, Steve Jobs and his buddy Steve Wozniak figured out how to break into telephone systems and make free phone calls. In one infamous prank, the two Steves dialed up the Vatican to find out who would pick up. "Wozniak pretended to be Henry Kissinger wanting to speak to the pope. `Ve are at de summit meeting in Moscow, and we need to talk to the pope,' Woz intoned. He was told that it was 5:30 a.m. and the pope was sleeping," writes Walter Isaacson in his recent biography of Jobs. It wasn't until the 1980s and `90s that hacking took a bad turn. Some blame Robert Morris, a computer science student who discovered a vulnerability in the Internet's inner workings and unleashed the world's first computer worm in 1988. "He essentially brought the Internet to a grinding halt," says D'Ovidio, the criminal justice professor. Morris was the first person charged under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that had been enacted two years earlier. Then came movies like 1983's "War Games," which also fueled the public's fear of hacking. In the film, a hacker unwittingly comes close to starting the next World War, thinking it's all a computer game. "It happened because of Hollywood and because there was no other word out there," says Andrew Howard, 28, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. "Hacker is a cool word, right? It's a neat-sounding word." The `80s and `90s were also a time when computers spread from geek circles to office cubicles and home desktops. They were becoming mainstream. But they were still mysterious to most people. They wondered: "How do they work? Is someone going to break into them?" Zuckerberg's hacker manifesto is a nod to Levy, who codified "The Hacker Ethic" in his book about the subculture. Among the principles: "Hackers should be judged by their hacking" and "Always yield to the hands-on imperative." The hands-on imperative is important to Facebook. Zuckerberg still spends hours writing computer code, even though he has hired hundreds of engineers. That ethos helped Zuckerberg's social network to prosper. As the once mighty MySpace stopped innovating, its users flocked to the cleaner, crisper, always-changing Facebook. News Corp. gave up on MySpace and sold it for $35 million last June. Meanwhile, Facebook's user base ballooned to 845 million, even as the website has gone through changes and redesigns that have angered members and privacy advocates. Zuckerberg and others may yet be able to clean up the term. Meetup's Hamblen thinks it's already happening. "People aren't as afraid of technology, which was driving the fear of hackers," he says. "It was someone doing something with software that you don't understand. As people become more comfortable with technology in general, then hacking becomes a way of seeing it as using it in a clever way." Technology companies, from the tiniest startups to those such as Facebook and online game maker Zynga, take the hacker ethic to heart. They host regular "hackathons," where engineers pull caffeine-fueled all-nighters writing computer code, usually working together on projects that are not part of their day-to-day jobs. Some of Facebook's biggest features, including chat, video and the new Timeline, came out of these hackathons, as Zuckerberg explained in the filing. "Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people," he writes. This is the ethic that can lift fresh-faced college grads (or dropouts) to the highest echelons of the technology elite, or at least to a good job. Cadir Lee, the chief technology officer at Zynga, the company behind the biggest games on Facebook, says he "absolutely" refers to himself as a hacker. Lee says, at Zynga the hacker way means being agile. It's not the end of the world, say, if a game isn't perfect when players first see it, or if it has a bug that needs to be fixed. Think of it as live TV, Lee suggests. "The charm of `Saturday Night Live' is that every once in a while you see a boom mic, or they forget their lines or crack up," says Lee. "But it's better to get something out there and entertain than to not have any show." |
| Hackers apparently hit Swedish government site (AP) Posted: 04 Feb 2012 06:18 AM PST STOCKHOLM – A group linked to the hacker network Anonymous says it has attacked the Swedish government's website and shut it down by overloading it. CyberForce used Twitter to claim responsibility for Saturday's attack on the website, which all departments of Sweden's government use. Government spokesman Jacob Lagercranser confirmed the website had "experienced some problems," but he declined to give further details, saying the government never comments on security issues. CyberForce describes itself as part of the hacking collective Anonymous, which drew international attention by hacking onto a private conference call by the FBI and Britain's Scotland Yard, then publishing the roughly 15-minute-long recording of the call on the Internet on Friday. |
| Celebs suit up for DirecTV Beach Bowl (AP) Posted: 04 Feb 2012 01:11 PM PST INDIANAPOLIS – Deion Sanders said he wasn't worried. Joe Montana went in with his game face on and Jordin Sparks just hoped sand did not end up in her eyes. Athletes and celebrities had different strategies as they prepared to play in the sixth annual DirectTV Celebrity Beach Bowl. The event teams up stars with former and current professional athletes for a flag football game on the sand. Assistant coach Neil Patrick Harris admitted he didn't know much about the game, so he was going to rely on his teammates to make the calls. "I really am not competitive at all. I quite frankly don't know what is going to happen or what we are playing," the actor said with a smile. "I know it is football of some sort, but it might be flag football, touch, two-handed touch. I don't know." Lucky for him, legend Joe Montana was on his team. "I hate to lose," Montana said ahead of the game. "I am not very good at losing. You try to go into this as it's going to be a fun game, but as soon as you get involved ... if they score, you go, `OK.' You have got to at least keep it competitive. I can't just go through the motions. I want to win." Sparks arrived with her dad, Phillippi Sparks, a former New York Giant. The former "American Idol" champ says she wasn't expecting intense action. "I know it is not tackle. They are just grabbing the flag, but who knows, we could get tripped up and stuff, so I am glad there is sand," she said. "I am nervous about it getting in my eyes if I fall but other than that, it is going to be a lot of fun. I am excited. " As for the other big game in Indianapolis, Sanders said he would not pick the New England Patriots or the New York Giants to win on Sunday. "I am a former player. I am not rooting for anybody. I just want a good quality game. I just want the fans to be entertained for three and a half hours. I want Madonna to come out and do the doggone thing like she can do it," he said of her halftime performance. Other big names at the event included Peyton Manning, Chace Crawford, Cam Newton, Terrell Owens and David Arquette, who said he's been having a great time in Indianapolis. "What I really like about Super Bowl in general is that it introduces you to another city," he said. "Indianapolis is a beautiful city a lot of people might not know about or have not visited. To come here and to meet the people and see the city, that is my favorite part actually." ___ Online: www.directtv.com ___ Alicia Quarles is the AP's Global Entertainment and Lifestyles Editor. Follow her online at http://www.twitter.com/aliciaquarles |
| Four of the Strangest New Video Game Controllers (ContributorNetwork) Posted: 04 Feb 2012 10:12 AM PST Contribute content like this. Start here. Back when home video games were still new, every new console's controller was an experiment. And before people settled on things like the Atari 2600's joystick and the Nintendo Entertainment System's gamepad, which influenced everything that came after them, they tried out some ... unusual form factors. Like the Fairchild Channel F's hybrid paddle-joystick, or the Mattel Intellivision's disc-and-touchpad arrangement. Even today, though, some game controllers still manage to turn heads on account of how unusual they are. Like these four! Just remember, being strange isn't necessarily a bad thing ... just ask the Nintendo Wii or DS. For only $99, you too can have your own EEG headset for your home computer. No laboratory gel or electrodes required; it looks more like a Bluetooth voice headset. Ten "apps" are included, and it can run for 10 hours on one AAA battery. It can sense when you blink, as well as when you're being attentive or meditative -- and presumably a bit more than that as well. A game called Mind Labyrinth, for Linux, Windows, and Mac, can optionally use the MindWave to control your character. (According to Joey Sneddon of OMG! Ubuntu!, it's extremely easy, and not at all fun, if you just use the mouse.) Putting yourself into a meditative state even heals your character. Presumably pronounced "Zapper," the Xappr Gun is an attachment for your iPhone, Android phone, or Windows Phone 7 device. Basically, it's an NES light gun-style controller, except that instead of shooting at your TV with it you attach your smartphone like a scope. Then you use the Xappr to essentially play Laser Tag with people, using Augmented Reality games like AR Invaders which are designed to work with it. As of right now, only four games are compatible with the Xappr, and not all of them are available on all the platforms that it supports. More, however, are "Coming Soon," according to its website. The Sony PlayStation Vita and the Nintendo Wii U's controller If the PlayStation Portable was a pocket-sized PlayStation 2, the PlayStation Vita is basically a (somewhat less pocket-sized) PlayStation 3. The dual analog sticks on the face bring it closer to the PS3's Dual Shock controller, and the capacitive touch screen is par for the course for a mobile device today. The touch pad on the back is what makes it unusual, though, and Sony has featured a lot of tech demos to show it off. Meanwhile, the Wii U's controller is a cross between a large game controller and a small touch screen tablet, complete with a webcam and a resistive stylus. Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008. |
| NFL Kicker! iPhone game gets you ready for the Super Bowl (Appolicious) Posted: 04 Feb 2012 01:00 PM PST |
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