How a Young Turk Spared Hackerdom From Respectability
Just when it was in danger of becoming entirely respectable, the word "hacker" was reclaimed over the weekend on behalf of all of the old-fashioned hackers of the world. It happened at the Yahoo Hack Day, and we have a Yahoo rival, indirectly, to thank.
For several years, Yahoo has been holding Hack Days for its engineers. The idea is to give engineers a day off to come up with an idea, develop a quick and dirty working version of it, and then show it to colleagues. The point, says Yahoo, isn't so much to get finished products but to encourage outside-the-box collaboration.
This past weekend, Yahoo held the first Hack Day open to the public, and hundreds of programmers made their way to the company's Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters to take part.
For its troubles, Yahoo gets to look at some smart programmers it might want to hire. It also gets to tell a recruiting-department-brochure version of life at Yahoo -- one full of beer, barbecue and Beck (the musician gave a free concert Friday night), and a place where the only limits to what programmers can work on are their imaginations and their tolerance for Red Bull. All this is opposed to, say, having to slog away in the salt mines of search monetization, which might well be what they would end up doing if they ever really got hired.
Hacker, of course, used to mean "computer-connected bad guy." That's still how the word is used on TV. In tech circles, however, it has shed its nefarious undertones and now stands for "computer enthusiast." (Although, in more rarified programming circles, it has come full circle and is pejorative once more; here a hacker has only a superficial knowledge of programming and gravitates toward quick but impermanent solutions. Think duct tape.)
The pro-hacker aesthetic is now so ascendant that the mere whim of hacker is valued more than even the most studied plan of someone else, such as a marketing dweeb. Indeed, the organizers of Yahoo Hack Day said participants weren't even supposed to decide before they arrived what their hack project was going to be.
That clearly didn't happen. A number of Hack Day participants used the opportunity to strut their existing Web sites ("flipmeat," in the lexicon of the current Web 2.0 business bubble) in front of potential Yahoo acquirers.
Saturday afternoon, after 24 hours of hacking, about 50 projects were presented in two-minute segments to a panel of judges. The majority were mix-and-match combinations of Yahoo offerings: programs to show users when their favorite bands would be playing in town, to allow people looking at a Web site together to blog about it, and to let people uploading photos to attach audio files to them.
Then, in the middle of things, a programmer named Jordan Sissel stepped on stage. For his hack, Mr. Sissel said, he figured out how to store large files -- pictures, MP3s, even whole computer programs -- on Yahoo's Del.icio.us Web site.
Del.icio.us is a hot site among the technorati that hasn't really caught on in the rest of the world. It lets users bookmark Web pages, then see what pages other people have linked to. What was remarkable about Mr. Sissel's announcement was that it wasn't a place to store files.
At least not before he got his hands on it. In his allotted two minutes, the 23-year old showed how he managed to fool the Del.icio.us system into storing a multimegabyte photograph of the San Francisco skyline.
Up until now, everything that hackers had been showing was entirely polite. But Mr. Sissel's hack was not polite. In fact, it was very naughty -- not criminal or unethical, just naughty -- in that cool, old-fashioned hacker way. For one thing, it could place an enormous load on the Del.icio.us computers.
But, like any great hack, the program was clever and funny. His hacker forefathers -- a lineage that includes Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who before selling the Apple I computer sold "blue boxes" that allowed you to make free phone calls -- would have been proud.
The audience roared its approval, and several came up to congratulate him. "Dude, that was a great hack," one said.
Mr. Sissel's project didn't win the "best hack" award. That honor went to something more polite: a small digital camera that would automatically upload photos to Yahoo's Flickr site.
Later, Mr. Sissel told me he planned his hack Friday morning. Usually, he explained, the URLs that Del.icio.us users send to the site are just a dozen or so characters long. But they can be as long as 65,535 characters. Mr. Sissel thus split up his big file, sent each chunk to Del.icio.us as a URL, then hacked a way to recombine them.
That's not quite how founders of the site planned on it being used. But doing something someone didn't plan on is pretty much what hackers are all about.
For the conspiracy buffs among you, Mr. Sissel's employer is Google. Mr. Sissel says he has worked there four months, in technical support. He insisted he wasn't acting as some Google agent trying to embarrass Yahoo on its big day.
I couldn't help but believe him; he had too much geeky insouciance to be lying. No, this guy wasn't any sort of spy or saboteur. He was a hacker!
是谁唤起了黑客的传统意义？
就在“电脑黑客”几乎要成为可敬的褒义词时，它终于有机会以全球老派黑客的名义重新为自己正名。那是发生在“雅虎黑客日”(Yahoo Hack Day)上的事，为此我们还得感谢雅虎的竞争对手呢。
在过去几年来，雅虎一直为公司的工程师们举办“雅虎黑客日”的活动。在这一天里，工程师们放松心情不用工作，而是将各种奇思怪想用程序体现出来，并向同事们展示。雅虎表示，举办黑客日的目的并不想要工程师们拿出成熟的产品，而是鼓励大家合作创新。
前不久的一个周末，雅虎首次向公众开放“黑客日”。有数百名电脑程序员来到雅虎位于加利福尼亚州Sunnyvale的总部，参加这一活动。
而雅虎则要费心从他们之中挑选些聪明能干的人，招至麾下。雅虎还要向大家展示宣传广告般的公司生活－－有啤酒、户外烧烤和Beck的免费演出，并且要让大家知道，在这里，程序员感到有限的只会是自己的想象力、以及对红牛饮料的忍耐力。所有这些都与在网络搜索行业艰苦的工作有着天壤之别，不过一旦程序员真的进入了雅虎，情况也许真就如此了。
当然，黑客一词过去意味着“电脑界的坏蛋”。时至今日，电视上依然还是这样用的。不过在技术圈里，它早已没了这层贬义，而是指“电脑的超级爱好者”。（不过在更小的程序员圈子内，黑客一词的意思又转了回来，重新成了贬义词，专指那些对程序设计一知半解，只求能找到暂时解决问题的权宜之计的人。）
如今，黑客倍受大家的推崇，人们只要一想到黑客，就认为他们随随便便的一个想法都会比他人精心筹划的方案更有价值，比如那些营销人员。这不，“雅虎黑客日”的组织者们也表示，参加活动的程序员们在来之前甚至不必决定自己的黑客程序要做什么。
当然，事实并非如此。一些参加活动的人利用这个机会，在雅虎这个潜在的收购者面前展示自己的网站。
在“雅虎黑客日”的下午，经过24小时绞尽脑汁的黑客程序开发，有50个项目出炉，每个项目要在两分钟内向评判小组进行陈述，其中大多数都与雅虎提供的各种服务有关，设计出来的程序能告诉用户他们喜爱的乐队什么时候会来此地演出，能让用户在浏览相关网站的同时在博客上发表评论；此外，有些程序还能让用户在上传照片时附上音频文件。
在活动进行过程中还杀出个程咬金，一个名叫约旦?西塞尔(Jordan Sissel)的程序员登场了。他表示，自己琢磨出了如何在雅虎的Del.icio.us的网站上存储图片、MP3音乐、甚至整个电脑程序等大容量文件的黑客程序。
虽然外界知之甚少，但Del.icio.us在技术界内可是赫赫有名。它能让用户将自己收藏的网页都放到这个网站上，同时还能看到其他人的收藏。西塞尔语出惊人之处就在于，他在这个并非存储网站的地方存储了文件。
在两分钟的展示时间里，现年23岁的西塞尔演示了自己是如何成功地愚弄了Del.icio.us的系统，把一个数兆的旧金山景色照片存到这个网站上的。
在此之前，黑客们所展示的所有程序都非常礼貌客气。与此相比，西塞尔的程序就显得有些无礼了。实际上，他的程序很顽皮－－既不犯法，也不缺德，仅仅是顽皮而已，而且是以传统黑客酷酷的方式。不管怎么说，这个程序可能会让Del.icio.us的电脑网站容量承受巨大的压力。
然而，正如任何了不起的黑客程序一样，它显得那么聪明有趣，一定会令西塞尔的前辈们也为之倍感骄傲。这些前辈们包括史蒂夫?乔布斯(Steve Jobs)和史蒂夫?沃尼克(Steve Wozniak)，两人在销售苹果电脑之前就曾卖过一种“蓝盒子”，能让用户免费打电话。
这个程序博得了观众们的阵阵喝彩，有几位还上前向他表示祝贺。“好小子，真有你的，”，一位观众说。
但西塞尔的程序并没有赢得“最佳黑客程序奖”。该奖项颁给了一个比较礼貌的程序：一个能自动把照片上传至雅虎Flickr网站的小型数码照相机。
事后，西塞尔告诉我，他是在周五上午计划编写这个程序的。他解释说，用户通常向Del.icio.us网站发送的URL地址只有十几个字符的长度。其实，字符可以长达65,535个。于是，西塞尔将要存储的文件分成几部份，每个部份以一个URL地址单独发送给Del.icio.us，然后想办法将它们再合并起来。
Del.icio.us的创建者们当初可不打算让该网站派上这个用场。但是，做别人没想到的事情不正是黑客们要做的吗。
告诉大家一个秘密，西塞尔目前在谷歌(Google)工作。他说自己已经在那工作了四个月，从事技术支持。他坚称，自己并非受Google的指使来让雅虎在这个大好日子里蒙羞的。
我不能不相信西塞尔，因为他实在太洒脱随意了，哪像撒谎的样子啊。不，这个家伙绝不可能是什么间谍或捣蛋鬼。他就是一个不折不扣的黑客！
Lee Gomes
