Hacking To Learn.

Publicated on : 1182436694
I found this link when I looked into my logs just a minute ago. It is a forum that talks about hacking and other stuff. One forum post attracted my attention because one member said something that many of us sometimes forget:

"You don't learn to hack, You hack to learn."

And this is so true. For me it is all about the fun factor of learning. That's why I think it's a good time to reflect upon it some more, it gets a bit personal. I never liked learning stuff I was supposed to learn, like teachers wanted me to learn. I really loath any form of authority telling me what to do. I rather go astray and walk my own path, finding out how stuff works on my own by hacking it. As far I can remember -and I was told by my parents- I hacked since the day I was born. When I turned three years old my dad gave me a metal Tonka truck to play with. Tonka trucks where supposed to be very strong and they described it as: "Tonka toys have become synonymous with solid construction and incredible durability. Made of pressed steel " It only took me a few days to disassemble the Tonka truck. I even made doors into it, which where not present when he bought it for me. These kind of stories continue throughout my whole life, reverse engineering everything I could get my hands on, or that had wires, resistors or transistors in it.

I've been into electronics my whole life and build many circuits, and repairing stuff for everyone. Just for the sake of learning what I want to learn. Trying to circumvent rules, bending rules to make the product fit your needs. I can remember one time I did get a $19.95 keyboard when I was 9 years old. The sounds where so limited. It only had a few sound banks to play with and around 8 instruments. I didn't had money to buy a synthesizer so I just unscrewed the case and start toying with the capacitors, next thing I knew I built a switchboard with extra dials into it to adjust the frequency of the capacitors and modulation of the sound. I do know that scarcity fuels imagination, and it has been ever since.

Next up was the computer which changed my whole life. Fallen in love with processors, coding and hacking it, to do what I want. And of course it lead me to where I am now: web application security. Web application hacking is so much fun. You don't have to fiddle with firewall rules or other impractical stuff, you just take a browser and mess around.

This is why I love it so much, there is so much to learn, so much information, plenty of intellectual challenges, and so much rules to bend. For me, it is pure fun.