The title of hacker, are you one?

[SmellyPirateMonkey]

Funny thing my sister believes I'm able to hack into her phone because I have hacked game systems. I tried to explain the end user thing to her and she still believes I'm some elite hacker lol.

But no I am not a hacker. I hope to be someday but for now I am just an end user peasant/enthusiast

 

[CeeDee]

Does ROM hacking count?

 

[Sketchy1]

What bothers me the most is when you have users coming to these forums, follow some instructions to install homebrew and they think they "hacked" their systems let alone have the title of hacker. To the end users we are just modders who modify our systems to behave in a way that was not manufacturer intended. To me a hacker is someone who has the knowledge of 2-3 programming languages and uses them to break into the file system permissions in order to run their own scripts. A hacker has an understanding how a system actually works so that they can gain control and do what they will with it.

There are many modders on this site but very few are actual hackers. My two cents.

Well technically about a good 45% percent of GBA temp are nothing but script kiddies. As long as they get their free games, which is all they care about, they won't care how it works :/

 

[TeamScriptKiddies]

Hacker is an extremely vague term to be honest and therefore, can have many different meanings, to many different people. The truth of the matter, is it doesn't really matter, its just a label, with a weak definition.

I can code, and I've done some level of reverse engineering in the past and I have a pretty good grasp on how a lot of exploits work. Am I an expert? Absolutely not, and I don't claim to be, by I personally identify as an ethical hacker. That's just me....

 

[FAST6191]

Curious. I don't think I have seen the term ethical hacker gain any traction before now. The concept is well enough established, traditionally some kind of hat colour being used, but the only place I saw ethical hacking be a term is in academia.

 

[Pleng]

I would say most self-titled "hackers" around here, are as much a hacker as someone "cooking" some frozen pizza in their oven is a "chef".

This is pretty much what I was going to say.

Basically... if you have followed the 3DS guide to install CF then congratulations, you have hack[n]ed[/b] your 3DS. This doesn't make you a hacker.
Last year I ran a 5Km run, but that doesn't make me a runner, neither does smoking a single cigar every Christmas make me a smoker.

 

[TeamScriptKiddies]

Curious. I don't think I have seen the term ethical hacker gain any traction before now. The concept is well enough established, traditionally some kind of hat colour being used, but the only place I saw ethical hacking be a term is in academia.

Ya, I hack things to add features to them (such as game consoles and other devices, like many of us here do), and do hardware modifications to all sorts of different devices for fun, but don't do anything malicious. Hence why I consider myself an "ethical" hacker or "White Hat Hacker." Of course there is a wide spectrum for ethical hacking, people who professionally hack for their own government/military are classified as white hat/ethical hackers regardless of the intentions (such as spying on the enemy or whatever). I'm not even remotely close to that good, nor would I want to even do that even though it pays very well. There are other white hat hackers that work in the private sector too. Various companies will hire them to break the companies own security intentionally, to find the vulnerabilities before the "bad guys" do so they can be addressed before its too late. I wouldn't mind working in the private sector doing something along those lines some day, but still I'm not skilled enough for that just yet. Still working on those engineering degrees anyways . My program is focused mostly on hardware anyways, with some computer science/coding along the way, so I don't know if I'd ever be good enough for that . I <3 hardware and coding though, so the degrees I'm working on are perfect for me.

 

[FAST6191]

I dare say you might have a somewhat romanticised view of professional hacking. A lot of it, and while I have not knocked about with the military types yet if it is anything like the rest of the military professions and the government types it will be broadly similar, is fairly codified. Back when all the leaks were happening the other year a wonderful phrase I saw somewhere, probably from https://www.schneier.com/ when doing some stuff to dissuade the magic hacker notion, was "Metasploit with a budget".

If you wanted a 9 to 5 thing you could get in and do it now.

 

[TeamScriptKiddies]

I dare say you might have a somewhat romanticised view of professional hacking. A lot of it, and while I have not knocked about with the military types yet if it is anything like the rest of the military professions and the government types it will be broadly similar, is fairly codified. Back when all the leaks were happening the other year a wonderful phrase I saw somewhere, probably from https://www.schneier.com/ when doing some stuff to dissuade the magic hacker notion, was "Metasploit with a budget".

If you wanted a 9 to 5 thing you could get in and do it now.

If I had the time to do so, sure, but I need to finish my studies which I still have a long way to go. Education is my first priority

 

[Deleted User]

What bothers me the most is when you have users coming to these forums, follow some instructions to install homebrew and they think they "hacked" their systems let alone have the title of hacker. To the end users we are just modders who modify our systems to behave in a way that was not manufacturer intended. To me a hacker is someone who has the knowledge of 2-3 programming languages and uses them to break into the file system permissions in order to run their own scripts. A hacker has an understanding how a system actually works so that they can gain control and do what they will with it.

There are many modders on this site but very few are actual hackers. My two cents.

Wow, that's actually very true, I guess I should consider myself a modder.